TINS competition entrant logs

Log by Yubi

Thu, 28 May 2026 01:36:47 +0000

? tins

Log by amarillion

Mon, 25 May 2026 13:49:06 +0000

First post! I'm still deciding which programming language I'm going to use this year. C++, D or TypeScript are all on the table. I already created a git repo, so once I make my decision you'll be able to see it there!

Log by MarkOates

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 18:51:37 +0000

My belated apology card for my secret santa recipient - Mokkan!

Log by archdark

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 15:10:18 +0000

Hey guys Added a Windows .EXE static build. the source code on zip are outdated can find the new code here: https://bitbucket.org/ryonagana/flathero/commits/branch/master Download Here: https://tins.amarillion.org/entry/357/

Log by amarillion

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 14:32:11 +0000

Postscript Happy New Year to Elias! Yes, now that Christmas has passed, and I don't have to worry about spoilers, I can explain a bit more about what I've been doing in the past weeks. P.E.N.G.U.Ï.N. is my gift to Elias. Here was his wish list:

- story: I'd like to be entertained by some actual story, maybe the entire game is a text adventure, or at least the intro or readme should have a bit of story about what is happening in the game - antarctica: just saw two movies about it, one was about a research station there, sitting on the endless ice, the other about two hikers ascending Mount Vinson, which is an ice mountain 4892m/16050ft high and quite hard to reach - penguins: I like them!

So I decided to make a text adventure, with a story set in Antarctica. I briefly considered using an LLM as the basis for a text adventure. I did some experimenting with Ollama and local models. Below is a test prompt I tried:

You are a pre-processor for a text adventure game. Your goal is to translate free-form user commands into a fixed grammar that is understood by the game engine. The game engine only understands the following commands: GO [DIRECTION] (where DIRECTION is one of NORTH, EAST, SOUTH, WEST) DESCRIBE|GET|USE|DROP [OBJECT] (where [OBJECT] can be one of: SMALL_KEY, SWORD, CHEST) TALK [NPC] (where [NPC] can be one of: WIZARD, PARROT) The user's input was: "go to the light" For context, this was on the screen when the user entered their command: "This is part of a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. There is light coming from the east. You carry a small key." What is the corresponding command to the game engine? GO EAST

Unfortunately, I couldn't get consistent results with local models, so it would have required a lot of fine-tuning. Perhaps something for another time. Instead, I decided to expand on a working template. I made one text adventure in the past named B.U.N. (Bunny's Unbelievable Narrative), which was a lot of fun to do. What could I add this time? What sort of interesting tech could I add to the game engine? A simple game is much easier to distribute via the web. I know most here have no problems running binaries and even re-compiling if necessary. But that's not the case for everyone. I set the requirement for myself that I still wanted to use Allegro, if only so that I could re-use the game engine from B.U.N. But at the same time, I wanted to make game distribution easier. That meant compiling for the web. I spent the first two weeks tuning an Emscripten build pipeline, as you can see back in the logs. After that it was time to focus on the story. Knowing Elias has a fondness for orchids, mosses, ferns and other botanical oddities, I looked into what actually grows on Antarctica - quite a few things it turns out. Enough to build a fetch quest around it. There is one other thing that I know about Antarctica. I used Casey Research station as an example for Puzzle 19 of i18n-puzzles.com, I even spoke at several conferences on the subject. So naturally Casey is the ideal setting for the story. What makes Casey stand out, is the fact that they are a recurring subject on tz-announce@iana.org, the announcement list of time zone database changes. They have changed between UTC+11 and UTC+8 several times in the past years, as far as I know the only place in the world that has changed by more than one hour. What if these changes had effects that went beyond just the software? Casey is a research station, and with my personal background in science I tried to imagine what a small, remote community of researchers would feel like. So that's it. That's the story behind my entry. I'm still making some improvements. Since Christmas, I updated the online version on github, so that all the links are now actually clickable.

Log by GullRaDriel

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 18:31:49 +0000

Sources and precompiled binaries are also available here: https://github.com/gullradriel/TrueTypeFont-Escapade

Log by GullRaDriel

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 18:30:18 +0000

Updated entry here: https://tins.amarillion.org/upload//krampu25/2025_12_01-KrampusHack-TrueTypeFont_Escapade_X7N2bxl.7z Updated WASM online playable entry here: https://www.nilorea.net/Games/TrueTypeFont_Escapade/ Also added a top view screenshot from the game :-)

Log by GullRaDriel

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 18:27:54 +0000

Updating one last time so levels are not reloaded from zero when just restarting them after losing.

Log by SiegeLord

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 20:33:19 +0000

And here's the Windows binary, woohoo! https://siegelord.net/files/Krampus2025/Setup%20MegaHulk%20v0.1.0.exe

Log by SiegeLord

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 18:30:30 +0000

Merry Christmas archdark! It was such a mad dash to submit what I did, that I didn't even have time to write a proper README. Firstly, let me admit that I misunderstood your wish! You wished for some 90's shareware of dubious quality, but what I read was "90's shareware" and I thought of things like Doom and, in the case of my entry, Descent. It's only after I watched a recent video by LGR that I realized what you actually meant, and remembered what the "dubious quality 90's shareware" was! Oh well! I intended to have a nice order screen with a cool fake 1-555-BUY-HULK number to call and buy the full version for $50, but it was cut in the mad triage. The competition ended at 4AM local time for me. At around midnight I started making the one singular level (I was planning to have 3, I composed 3 soundtracks in preparation!), and not only was that not enough time, but my tools (Blender etc) kept crashing! In my tired state I also caused some data loss, and after lots of hours of hacking my fingers could barely type anything. At around 3:15, I miraculously finished the level, but my game had no sounds! I knew that in a game about punching robots you needed a punch sound so I spent a lot of time finding a good one, leaving no time for the rest. I made a quick decision to reuse many sounds from my game "Krampus GT". At 3:57 AM I started to try to upload the entry. I hit the upload button, and I couldn't find my zip file... I was like "WTF", and dragged it in manually. Then, the website complained that it couldn't be above 1 MB. I was like, "oh silly Amarillion with his silly website again..." but then I realized: I was trying to upload my source as the image! With seconds literally counting down on screen I scrambled to find the right button, fill all the required forms and I hit submit. It accepted it, but damn, it was a quantum finish! Anyway, this submission is not up to my usual standards. I will make a windows binary for it as is today, but I will make an updated version with the intended menu sequence and custom sounds in the next few days.

Log by archdark

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 17:17:22 +0000

I would like to apologize to my gift recipient. I made a module with polygons that supports loading files and creating, but I got confused when I needed to render because of the vertex coordinates. Only today did I remember the native transformations, and it turned out that the polygonal objects do not render correctly in the game, as you can see from those yellow blurs. I focused on other things and it got left behind. I wrote from absolute zero, starting at int main(), just like in the old days. I learned many new things and managed to get out of the liballegro's comfort zone a little. The ex_polygon.c example helped me a lot, and I managed to write a lot of code with a little reengineering, so I was able to finish it at least. I used LLM to generate the title and that's it. The rest was done using ASEprite. I'm a terrible pixel artist. The source its in the submitted ZIP But you can see my progress in my repo: https://bitbucket.org/ryonagana/flathero/src/master/

Log by dlharmon911

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 14:37:20 +0000

Merry Christmas awergh! Sorry, but not able to finish this year. If you'd like, you can check out the sources. There game not playable. It does show title, instructions, and map screen with a generate map. However, no gameplay. Also contains a parser I wrote that converted the BASIC binary file into the text BASIC file. I needed that to better understand the game. I copied the maze generator from the code. https://github.com/dlharmon911/SultansMaze

Log by elias

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 13:07:45 +0000

In a mad dash to the finish line, I spent Christmas Eve to add some rudimentary tile rules and zip up the sources. I'm apparently still a few minutes or hours past the deadline as it only let me upload a post-competition entry. It's now possible to send landing parties onto planets, explore different solar systems, and battle enemy ships. There is no feedback when you do something wrong, so it's easy to end up in a losing situation and have to restart. There also is no winning condition yet.

Log by madarao

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 07:22:16 +0000

Well, the lack of sleep is starting to get to me, so I think I'm going to throw in the towel for now. I still intend to finish my submission because I've like what I've made so far, but there's just no way it'll be ready in time if I want to release something of quality. Life happens. There's always next time

Log by M2tias

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 02:29:31 +0000

I'm finished now. I got nowhere close to what I envisioned. TBH, I overscoped the most I've ever overscoped. To get this where I want it would take another month at least. When the AI car was driving from one loot to another I thought it was the hardest part. There's so much to tweak and figure out in the enemy logic. Also the map is fairly empty at the moment. Making it look nice and work well would take a long while as well. Oh well, it's possible to win and lose in the game. I think it's fine as it is but the enemies are broken. I learned a lot and that's really the reason I do this. Thanks everyone for joining!

Log by archdark

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 01:34:23 +0000

What a wonderful day for Windows to stop working. Now I can't compile binaries for Windows. I think Windows got jealous because the last time I started it was months ago. Sorry, folks, no win32 binaries :( But I'm using CMake, so I think it will make the job easier.

Log by Mokkan

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 23:32:41 +0000

I ended up having very little time to work on my entry, but I did manage to complete a simple twist on a Flappy Bird clone that meets a couple of the criteria on the wishlist I received. I had fun with it! Looking forward to the next go around!

Log by madarao

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 23:23:34 +0000

OK - I have all the absolute basics down. Need to write a function for Newton's third law of motion (mythos engine doesn't provide normal vectors on collisions, by design), structure damage, finish the upgrade menu, and a good enemy spawn algorithm that isn't broken or boring. Don't think I will nail it the first time but I can fix flaws later. Final 12 hours. Let's do this.

Log by Emily_TTG

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 20:44:23 +0000

Finally I'm happy to say that I'm done; everything is uploaded and my final balance pass left it feeling mostly fun to play! Looking forward to see how the recipient likes it come tomorrow :D.

Log by awergh

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 19:26:36 +0000

And done, not everything was fixed but enough and I want to get to bed now. I will give a proper explanation later.

Log by amarillion

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 15:50:48 +0000

I can't say I've finished exactly... But I've wrapped up everything I have. I was really short on time this season. At least there is something playable. I've uploaded my sources, you can also play online: https://amarillion.github.io/krampus25/

Log by GullRaDriel

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 06:57:43 +0000

Finally a nice fix for that collision problem. Entry is up to date.

Log by Yubi

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 04:42:27 +0000

https://tins.amarillion.org/entry/348/ Okay, I've uploaded. I'm so happy that I can now rest! Ah, so sorry! Usually, making a game is how I rest. But this Christmas season has been the roughest in memory, and I only had the energy for a tenth of the game I would have liked to make. I hope my efforts make players smile though. And I will be overjoyed if somebody beats my score! Oh shoot, I still need to make Windows executable. Maybe tomorrow. Looking forward to playing all your games!

Log by M2tias

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 00:56:48 +0000

My days have been pretty middling for development. Most work I've done before lunch and after 12am... But now Unity wheel collider based AI cars can drive around and pickup loot! Faster than I can... I need to make them slower. Also they don't know how to brake so they drive off the cliff to their death. In Finland the Christmas eve is usually the most important part of Christmas. Such things are not *that* important to me but I didn't expect to be this far from finished just before eve. I'm thankful for the late submission date though.

Log by awergh

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 00:01:18 +0000

One day left and probably not much sleep finishing something. The plan for the actual game is a bit like scrabble except instead of letters and words you have elements and chemical formula that you are making. Hopefully it works as a game, but I rather have a lot to do to have something that is semiplayable and not just a tech demo. My list of things I have to do is this: - generate proper deck content - move tiles around on the board - victory\loss - scoring on placing tiles - validate formula My aspirations are larger but I can't see those happening.

Log by amarillion

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 21:37:12 +0000

All that remains, is writing a good story. As you can see here, I'm not above recycling old memes.

Log by GullRaDriel

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 20:13:18 +0000

Time for one more packaging, we never know.

Log by GullRaDriel

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 20:12:51 +0000

Well. Shaders are messing up the whole thing. Maybe I'll ask for some help after the compo with someone better at them than me. Still, I added the final piece of gameplay I wanted. May be a bit buggy, but working :-)

Log by GullRaDriel

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 19:41:39 +0000

I finally decided to add a few more things as remaining time allowed me to do it. I need to add one more sound, and then I'll package. If there is still some time, I'll try to add some shader light effect, thought I'm not sure I will be able to do that part.

Log by elias

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 18:01:19 +0000

I made very slow progress. Everything renders in Blender 5.0 now, I have a user interface, and a stars background. Next step is the four game screens and different backgrounds. There will not be much of a game - maybe I can add the gameplay during TINS if rules fit? https://tins.amarillion.org/upload//krampu25/images/screen2.jpg

Log by SiegeLord

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 10:18:56 +0000

Here's two component names in my game that I particularly enjoy:


TimeToDie

This one is in probably every single one of my games, it causes an entity to die at a certain time.

Bob

Bob.

Log by awergh

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 07:32:14 +0000

Here are two clients connected, there is a 3 second delay between game state updates but the screen is recorded at 1FPS.

Log by awergh

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 07:31:31 +0000

I feel that I am making good progress in that I can interact with the grid and see the changes reflected on the other game clients. However, I also thing I have made some questionable design decisions which is making my life harder than it needs to be. I don't think it will prevent me from reaching my goal (or at least close enough to the goal that time permits) but the implementation feels a bit fragile and naive. The result will definitely be don't touch or it might break but that is really the sort of code that is expected.

Log by Bugsquasher

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 21:35:20 +0000

I'm starting to think OOP stands for singular OOPS. So much boilerplate. I miss programming non OOP stuff. It's engrained in me and I can't shake it. In other news I may have a playable prototype by tomorrow. I got a delayed start and I have been taking care of and seeing my mom in the hospital. She's currently in rehab but is doing okay. I didn't think it would take this long to create an reusable expandable proper OOP example of an old pc game. I'm convinced I could have been done in 3 days if I had programmed functionally.

Log by Yubi

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 19:01:10 +0000

Now in colour! The colours need adjustment. I like the reddish orange, but the others do not play so well together. I think I'll be ready to submit my entry soon. It only remains to polish the win/lose state, maybe hack together a quick difficulty selector that makes the game play a bit faster!

Log by awergh

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 02:32:33 +0000

Not much to see here but this is the game board which will have different tiles that each player can play onto the board.

Log by awergh

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 02:29:44 +0000

Not as fast progress as I would like but I have a multiplayer lobby screen. I'm sure the game will be easy now I've done the important stuff. I briefly broke the build for other platforms, but I fixed it today so its cross platform again. I even tested and I can join up to four clients to the server. At the moment I have a dedicated server rather than letting you host from within the game. In theory I will add this, in reality I will probably run out of time and won't get to it. I can now focus on doing some gameplay things but there is still plenty of networking to go.

Log by GullRaDriel

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 20:28:40 +0000

This is a test

Log by SiegeLord

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 10:58:10 +0000

I got animated textures on my meshes now! I also just realized that I completely misunderstood the wish of my secret santa, lol. Whoops! https://files.catbox.moe/5xdiyt.mp4

Log by amarillion

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 21:28:04 +0000

What is the most complicated way possible to show a link on a webpage? Step 1: Hack together a parser to parse rich text with html-like markup. Step 2: Use the Allegro text drawing system to display said rich text, leveraging a lightly tweaked version of `do_multiline_ustr` with a custom callback. Step 3: Hack together a click handler for links in rich text. Step 4: Write a cross-platform function to open links in the default browser. Include support for Windows, Mac, Linux, as well as Emscripten through the Emscripten HTML5 API bindings. Step 5: Compile the entire thing to WASM using a Dockerized Emscripten toolchain. Step 6: Publish the resulting static files to github pages. TADA! WE CREATED A WEBPAGE WITH LINKS! Try for yourself: https://amarillion.github.io/krampus25/ Oh, and I also have some plans to turn this into a game actually.

Log by SiegeLord

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 11:37:48 +0000

Today I did more work on the map. The new algorithm is similar to how shadows work: 1. Render the level + any visibility blockers (like closed doors) a low-res (for speed) depth map from the player's perspective 2. Render the level geometry using a special shader that "bakes" the polygons to the "lightmap" (called the exploration map). This step checks if the level geometry is visible using the depth map from step (1) 3. Query that exploration map to light up parts of the level map geometry as they come into view It took forever and it still doesn't work properly. Step (2) is very fragile as we need to compare two depth values, one computed in step (1) and one in step (2). I also couldn't get doors to be properly revealed... oh well, something to fix tomorrow. Hopefully this is the last truly complex part of the game and I can start making rapid progress on the content + gameplay afterward.

Log by GullRaDriel

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 08:51:04 +0000

I uploaded my entry, since Christmas is coming and I may not have any more time to put into it. I hope it will be a good gift :-)

Log by GullRaDriel

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 09:22:19 +0000

I have to see if I'm able to add a few lights and some other thing to make the game more spicy. Maybe, maybe not.

Log by SiegeLord

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 09:22:16 +0000

Today I made a 3D map that fills out as you progress through the level. Right now it's done using distance to the level parts, but it just occurred to me that I could use a 3D picking algorithm and render the polygon/vertex indices at some low resolution and fill the map out based on that: bonus points is that this enables doors to actually occlude the level geometry, and block the map completion.

Log by GullRaDriel

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 09:18:53 +0000

As I'm not going to have that much time until Christmas, I'll have to make the packages with what I already have. I hope it'll be enough for my recipient to be happy.

Log by MarkOates

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 22:57:13 +0000

There's a couple of things I find fascinting about my work so far. The codebase that I'm starting from has already been developed so much, it's very opinionated, and I find most things that I want to do either already exist (and thus I have to recall how to use the system), or I have to add the feature (and thus recall how the system works in order to properly add the extension). For example, entities have the capacity to have axis-aligned bounding boxes, just `.attach_aabb3d(entity_id)`. The AABB3D component is already integrated into several collision detection systems, entity<->entity, player<->entity, camera_view->entity (to detect if the player is looking at something), and some environmental collision checks (depending on the type of collision environment being used). The collision system can detect entering, exiting, staying in, etc. These are all done by flagging the entity to be included in the appropriate system. So, that's already done! However, for some entities, I wanted to have a *circular* collision volume to represent a ranged attack radius. For this, I extended the system, and created a new AACylinder3D class, which is axis-aligned, cylindrical shaped, with radius and height. With Gemini, I had it write the intersection math to detect AABB3D <-> AACylinder3D collisions. It would be fun to do the math myself, but, maybe I'm getting older and am more interested in keeping the momentum going. To integrate this new cylinder, I also had to modify the higher level collision systems by adding a constraint so that an entity can *only* have one or the other of those collision volume types, not both. Also, if the entity is to be registered into the "batch" collision system - two groups of entities, for example, player 1's troops and player 2's troops - it needs to have a collidable shape.

Log by Yubi

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 07:45:22 +0000

Okay so headed home tonight I was super pumped to just work on the game and upload some rudimentary v0.1 that combines the simple placeholder I finished the first week with these animal sprites I've been making the second week. But guess I accidentally created some kind of zygote and ended up chatting all the nursery furniture I might build out of duct tape or I dunno, it somehow segued into subscribing to online anime streaming, eating an entire pumpkin pie and then rolling platonic solids with numbers on them. This whole month is one confused pistachio swirl. Did you hear there's a massive pistachio recall because of salmonella? Okay, deep breath. There's still 8 days left. Not gonna lie, I'm a lot more anxious about this game than countless other things I should be worried about haha. I may have accomplished nothing substantial this day, but not wanting to end it empty handed, I've whipped up a distracting walk cycle gif that kind of looks like a little jig, look at the north facing bunny's butt wiggle

Log by MarkOates

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 06:24:25 +0000

The game now has a win and lose state, and all the inputs are in. Extremely rudimentary gameplay, and there's no visual flair or variety, it's "skinless". But, the foundation is there so that I can 1) migrate the gameplay to an FPS view, 2) create visuals, 3) add varieties of enemies, 4) and integrate the gameplay screen into the game framework (title screens, credits, etc). I've attached a screenshot (photoshop of two screenshots), with the "game lost" state on the left and the "game won" state on the right. Not a bad spot to be after about half a days work. It all seems to work without error. I hope I can maintain a similar momentum through tomorrow.

Log by Emily_TTG

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:43:53 +0000

Running a bit behind but still gonna get *something* done. Trying to do more perf testing and found out this is my bottleneck [alongside draw buffer construction what a shocker] -- it's a bit unwieldy but unfortunately I'm not up to hand rolling AVX code to speed it up. Gameplay-wise I think I have something that feels pretty satisfying so far so that's good! Just got to make it make sense to play now ;p.

Log by madarao

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 23:41:53 +0000

Working on a co-op Asteroids clone Not much to show yet, I've been using this opportunity to finish polishing all the APIs for my game engine so that has taken the majority of my time. In the mean time I have whipped up the soundtrack I will be using: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xxoDiP2zBM I have also been creating some voicelines using the Software Automatic Mouth. I think the settings I used sound a little harsh but I can probably make them work.