So I decided to participate in Ludum Dare this weekend.

Ludum Dare is an event that happens about 3 times per year. It challenges you to build a complete game, from scratch, in 48 hours. By ¨from scratch¨, I mean everything: design, code, image assets, sounds. A theme is picked and you have to follow this theme.

It is a great opportunity for game developers to show off, and for common folk to try and finally complete that pong reimplementation. Guess which category I´m in ;-)

To record my adventure, I decided to make a time-lapse video of my desktop: something I have never done before. Hey, if I can learn one thing, I can learn two at once, right? So my idea is to take a screenshot of my desktop every minute this week, and put all the images together into a video in the end.

The problems started there…

I found on the net a nice spell to take screenshots from the command line using xwd. Then I tried to put it on cron. Nothing happened. No error message either (if you don´t have a mailing agent installed, where does cron send its error messages in ubuntu??? :-( ). Since I only have 5 hours to the start of LD, and I have other important preparations to make (like writing this blog post), I decided to write an infinite loop script to do this for me, as a quick fix. Here it is, for the curious:

#/bin/bash

while true; do
i=`date +%d%H%M%S.png`
xwd -root | convert xwd:- -resize 800x800 $i
sleep 1m
done

I´ll post more about LD this weekend, stay tuned!