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Ludum Dare 24: Update 1

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Gamejam
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The AUCS meetup is continuing and everyone is making progress. When I arrived at 12pm, everyone was already in Room 205 and busy working on their games.

Progress seems to have stalled at the moment as people are hitting blocks and tricky to solve problems now their basics are in. Tom Jones was having touble with “font rondering” (sic) but has now fixed this by not rendering fonts.

I have made good progress with my Pizza game’s UI and basic logic, although the bulk of the logic is yet to be written.

            \
 +---------- \--------+              You have <OO> outstanding orders.
 |                   1|              You have missed <DD> deadlines.
 |                   2|
 |                   3|
 |          P         |
 |                    |
 |p                   |
 |c                   |
 |t                   |   You are currently holding:
 |g                   |
 |d                  n|
 |                   t|     PIZZA BASE
 |                    |     GARLIC SAUCE
 |                    |     CHEESE
 +----------\ --------+
             \

The idea is to have a high learning curve so that they player must “evolve” in order to play the game well. The difficulty of the game itself remains constant. There are no hints to key combinations that are used, although all key combinations are single key presses so shouldn’t take too long for a player to work out.

It is currently possible to prepare pizzas and cook them, but not deliver them. I’ve been working on a method of randomly generating names for people that have ordered pizzas and came up with this bash snippet that uses /usr/share/dict/words as a source of names. It filters for only proper nouns where a possesive apostrophe is used as these are likely to make good names:

while true ; do echo "Mr. `cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep -e \
    "^[A-Z][a-z][a-z][a-z][a-z]*'s$" | sed "s/^\(.*\)'s$/\1/" | \
    shuf -n 1` has ordered a pizza." ; sleep 2 ; done

As I’m writing this in pure C with ncurses, data structures all have to be created by hand. There are no “ArrayLists” or “HashSets” here. Working out how to store orders will be interesting.

I’ll also need to learn how to use ncurses windows as so far I’ve only been using the default screen.

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