Aug. 18, 2008

GameJam0808 was awesome fun, which is really what games are all about. In the end I got a crapload of code written, much of which I will be able to re-use again in the future, just as I used quite a bit of old code for my engine. I refined a lot of my existing code, made it more modular, and more re-useable than it was before. I now have a load of generic game code that has been separated from the underlying engine I use, PyGame. It should be easier to switch engines to Pyglet, or something else if I want to in the future.

Huge thanks go to Simon Wittber who organised GameJam, and wrote the entire GameJam site in time for the competition. He also did the awesome procedural audio ambience for my game, and on top of that, he did the most incredibly annoying bit of making a game for me: the deployment.

Contact Agent zipfile

Contact Agent screenshot

I didn't finish the game, so it's just one level, and all you can do is run and jump and explore. I can't even really call it an art game because I feel like that would be selling other, really awesome art games short. The vector graphics engine I wrote is massively slow because I didn't have time to optimise anything, which had the side effect of making you fall through floors and stuff on any computer that isn't massively fast. I shouldn't have multiplied all vectors by frame-elapsed time since that number gets really large on those slower computers. Oh well. Good lessons for next time!

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