n3wt0n!

I’ve set up a subdomain for Generic 2D Platformer. This is a first-phase exercise for motivating me to stop reading about everyone else making games (my RSS reader is full of indie-game blogs) and finally get around to my own projects. Stick-men puzzle solving and platform-jumping coming soon!

And if you haven’t checked it out, I can’t tell you enough how much Spelunky simply rocks. It’s a pinch of Nethack and a dash of Castlevania all rolled into Indiana Jones.

Game Dev g2dp, games, platformer

I propose, in the fashion of Jonathan Coulton and his “Thing a week” challenge, that I take up a challenge of my own. Now is the perfect opportunity. Effective June 30th, I’m laid off from my job.

I’m young. I’ll bounce back. In the meantime, I want to get creative. How am I suggesting I get creative?

1. Write a haiku every day for a month*.
2. Write a 50 word story every day for a month.
3. Draw a creature/character every day for a month.

My mind will reap the benefits. This blog will reap the benefits. Your eyes may reap a benefit or two, I’m really not sure how that works.

July 13. I get back from a trip the day before, so I’ll start July 13 and go straight through to August 13 (and beyond).

*Every day for a month means Monday through Friday and the occasional weekend as a bonus.

Uncategorized

It has been a busy month for me and a slow month in regard to posting any sort of update here. I’ve been reading a whole whack of stuff. A giant whack.

Speaking of reading stuff, why not check out http://books.1889.ca/ for some excellent reading material. Follow the author on Twitter, while you’re at it. I’m not being paid to promote 1889 books, it is just good stuff.

Back to the topic at hand, I want to share a tidbit of information. If you’re like me, you use Ubuntu. And recently, a new version of Ubuntu became available. So if you’re like me, you upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 from Ubuntu 8.10. Then stuff broke. Because, like me, you use an ATI video card and ATI decided to not update last year’s model of video cards to work with the new version of X (the window system) in Ubuntu 9.04.

That’s a side rant, and possibly unrelated. My main problem was that the game(s) I’ve been writing would no longer compile, or run, with Ubuntu 9.04. Wait, it was Ubuntu’s fault? No. Something broke somewhere along the way and LWJGL was b0rken just a little bit (b0rken… look it up).

I fixed it. And you can, too. Grab the nightly build and replace your native libraries.

Now Slick (which uses LWJGL) and Eclipse and Ubuntu 9.04 all play nice together. Development of Generic 2D Platformer (and Pixahl) commence.

Right, I may be called on the name change to Piksahl. Piksahl was the Perl version, but that was just silly. Who programs a game in Perl? I started to, because I could. Now I’m doing it in Slick/Java. That makes more sense. Thus, the name change.

Game Dev eclipse, lwjgl, Piksahl, pixahl, slick, ubuntu

“Ubuntu 8.10″ you say? Yep, I’m still rocking the Intrepid Ibex. Ubuntu 9.04 doesn’t work as well as I’d have hoped and I’ve got my Ubuntu 8.10 partition all configured and useful.

I’m getting off topic, though. I’ve been playing with the Slick game library (which is an extension of the LWJGL for Java game programming). And with any video game, you need sound effects. Lots of sound effects. And when you don’t know how to make sound effects, what better way to make them than… randomly!? Yes, by using a “random sound effect” generator. Particularly, DrPetter’s SFXR.

Download SFXR from DrPetter’s page first, but if that fails you can grab it locally here.

The install is the standard linux make/make install, but it requires libsdl1.2-dev and libgtk2.0-dev installed first. (Thanks to cecil for pointing out the gtk2 requirement).

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install libsdl1.2-dev libgtk2.0-dev

Then run the make and install for SFXR (from within the SFXR directory)

make
sudo make install

Now you’re all set. You can run SFXR from the command line simply by typing sfxr.

Game Dev effect, install, Linux, make, sfxr, sound, ubuntu