So we’re about, what?  Six and a half hours into this thing… seems like about time for an update.  Python is going quite well!  I’m having no trouble picking up the syntax… and only a tiny bit of trouble remembering how to get my tabbing right.  Pygame, too, has been generally very intuitive.  I lost more than half an hour getting sound to work though… apparently Bxfr’s .wav exports cannot be directly pulled into pygame’s mixer, so I’ve got to run them through Audacity first.  It’s not a big deal at all… I just had to figure it out!

So right now, I’ve got a title screen and a sound effect… and a game idea!  Maybe that doesn’t seem like much, but I really feel like I’m moving along.  Let me stick a screenshot up of my title screen… it’s not impressive in any way:

And how does this game work?  What is my amazing idea?  Well… I’ll keep the details secret until I can show them visually, let’s just start by saying it’s a horizontal shooter (think R-Type), with an… interesting power-up system?  Yeah, that’ll have to do for now.  If you’re interested, keep tuned to my later updates!  HA!

Well, let me add myself to the giant list of new folks for the upcoming LD #20.  I dropped by the IRC room last night and got some nice advice on useful tools and whatnot… thanks everyone.  A snag though!  I realized this morning that I’m actually moving that weekend!  This might not be as big a deal as it initially seems, though, as I’m only moving to the other side of the same building I’m already in, and I’m already pretty well packed up; it just means some valuable time is going to be eaten up by lugging boxes.  I still plan to compete! 

I plan on using a SDL-based sprite framework that I’ve been working on lately… right now it’s in an unusable state though (being moved from using SDL blitting to sprites as textures in OpenGL).  Assuming it’s fixed in time for the competition, I’ll post the code somewhere for y’all so that I’m within the rules and whatnot.

Uuuhh… yup!  Nice to meet you all!  Let’s have us some fun!

EDIT:  Aaand… that SDL->OpenGL conversion I mentioned?  I think I’ gonna abort it and instead move to SFML.  I’ve been reading about it some today and it really seems like the way to go.  There’re benefits to working with SDL and learning how things like blitting work, of course, but if the API for SFML is as much better than SDL as people are making it seem, it would really speed things up for me… in addition to saving me from having to link in extra libraries for some of the stuff I’m doing.  I’m pretty sure this is one of the useful things someone told me about last night on IRC, but I never managed to get around to looking at it at the time because I was too busy playing with bfxr!  I should have listened to y’all better!  Belated thanks!