Duality

Duality, my main desktop PC at home, has been misbehaving, and I’ve had to take it to pieces, both virtually (tracing driver DLL calls – yum!) and physically (computer components littering the floor, etc.). It’s been two years since it’s last reformat/reinstall, which is a pretty long time for a Windows XP box treated the way I’ve treated it, so it’s definately time for a rebuild.

Shame I couldn’t have done it sooner/later, as it’s put a dent both in my NaNoWriMo writing and in my ability to investigate some code for a client I’m dealing with “on the side”. It’s going to be a busy little weekend.

In other news, I’ve been playing with Gosu, a sprite animation/drawing layer module for Ruby. Ruby’s execution speed (within an object-oriented paradigm) lends itself well to 2D animation and games. Here’s a Flash animation showing a recording of what I came up with:

Yes, that really is the sprite for Dan in the Dan & Alex comic.

If you’re really sad (and using Windows – I haven’t tested it under other operating systems and can’t be arsed packaging up the C-layer stuff for them, yet), you can actually have a play. Just install Ruby 1.8.2-15 For Windows (15MB) and the game itself (740K).

If I get really bored or suddenly find a lot more free time, I might actually finish making a game out of the engine I’ve put together.

Edit: The download link for the game has now been fixed. If you downloaded it and just got error messages when you tried to run it, try again now.