The last time I participated in LD was around like LD4/5 or thereabouts. Back then I was still in college, and I used Python/pygame This time around…I’m in commercial gamedev now, as a designer. My first shipped title is a License: The Game, and I used some pitifully underdeveloped level editing and scripting technology to create gameplay for it. My view of commercial game design from this experience: your role model is MacGuyver, as you often have so little to work with.

But as for LD… as a hobby project I’ve been developing some technology for Flash 9 that uses both Flex mxmlc and haXe. It’s not quite as done as I would like…also I’ve had a mystery illness(first tiredness, diarrhea, vomiting – later, mild fever and dizziness) that I might not be recovered from….I left work early yesterday and when I got home I slept for about 12 hours.

Either way, I feel now that LD is not really about making a good game in the time period – rather it’s about going from no game to the beginnings of one. That makes it a good test-case for the tech I’ve been working on. Especially since the ultimate goal of this tech is: “A game per week, every week.” Once-per-week – at a good quality – will probably become possible only after I’ve done a few games with it, though, and I have some ready-made gameplay/menus/etc. to work off of.

For LD I’m only starting from my graphics work. Since I do not use the Flash IDE it is easier to generate pixel art — and I feel that it is also easier to make pixel art look good, if you keep the resolution low. Hence I’m using a 348×276 resolution with 12×12 tiles. I’ve already set up a pipeline for tiled maps using the program Tile Studio. And I have a pipeline for bitmapped fonts using Angelcode Bitmap Font Generator. The challenge will be in the actual gameplay.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 8th, 2008 at 6:22 am and is filed under LD #12 - The Tower - 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.