Rubyweekend #2 and Blood Frontier

Ruby

Early Monday. Pioneer rays of light touched my face like golden hair. It was then that the second Ruby weekend game programming competition came to an end.

The results are not impressive, but much more than I had anticipated. The previous Rubyweekend took place only 1.5 months ago, and the weather motivates to spend time outside the reach of game-creation-suitable input devices. Also my humble opinion is that the topic "opposites" was way too liberal.

Many games weren't finished, though are playable to some degree. Two of the submitted games had incorrect-case directories/filenames!!!! /me rages !!!!11!! Well, let's blame the weather, shall we? :D

Me and kiba wanted to create a simple rts called Playground Wars and we failed. No problem, lesson learned (don't try to make an rts in little time.) No regrets but if I'm to participate in a game creation compo this summer again, I will work for it at night so I can sleep in the sun at daytime!

I like Opposite Islands [video]. Here are all the games. You can take a look at the videos of the other contesting games. You can vote too.

DungeonFarmer is pretty freaky because it has to do with farming in a dungeon! O_o Super StarHawks Gaiden is awesomely neo-retro [video], but was submitted too late. o_O

Regarding other short-time game programming challenges: The next Ludum Dare will happen in 2 weeks and 2 days. It's more than a month until PyWeek #7.

I can't find any official PyDay site any more :(

In other news: I recorded another video of TORCS (slightly better synchronized), after finding out that there is at least one map that looks rather pretty (by my standards.)

Blood Frontier recently started interesting me very much, because it is fun to play. It has great maps and a fine, small weapon selection and it's movement style is definitely something fresh. Give the new alpha a try, it's worth it! [video] The fact that most maps are not just very, but too dark, is something I consider a problem for deathmatch games.

I'm currently reading Learn to Program, it teaches via Ruby. I like it because it takes me by the hand without making me feel stupid. Next up will be the Lua Reference Manual. When I'm done with that, hopefully Python 3000 will be ready for use and learning.

I just checked if I covered in this post everything I have to share and realized that this is about 10%. Next post soon I guess.