Haven’t even started and I’m already lost!
So… I don’t know what to do, and am looking for some advice from the LD community. My original plan was to compete this weekend using a little SDL-based framework I’d been working on… it still needs some work to get things like sound going, though, and is a little clunky. After looking at what a few other people were using, though, I found out about SFML and got really excited about using it instead of SDL, and went ahead and re-wrote most of my framework using SFML… only to realize that I was using an obsolete version (1.6), which doesn’t support a couple key things I want to be able to do. I’ve tried for several days now to get cmake to run on my machine to be able to instal SFML 2.0, but it hasn’t worked for me at all, and I’m completely burned out on it: I wanted to spend this week coding and warming up for the LD, but instead I wasted it on trying to install a dang library! Now I don’t know what to do at all… I feel tired of dealing with these libraries… I could go back to my old framework, but I still haven’t added sound support to it, and at this point will probably not have time to do so. Are there any other good options that I am just missing? Is there an easier way to get SGML2 working? Is there another C++ library I could quickly adapt to? Or is Pygame simple enough that I can pick it up on the fly? Any ideas are welcome!
If you don’t mind using C#, I’d suggest FlatRedBall. http://www.flatredball.com/
I went into my first LD (19) with this relatively unprepared, but came through fine with 3 hours to spare, even though I had to look up a few things on the wiki. Use Glue (Tutorials are on the wiki), it’s a huge time saver.
Try ‘allegro’. It’s nice and simple, and lets you focus on the gameplay stuff without worrying too much about the details.
Treat LD48 as a prototyping challenge, not as “create real game”.
I just updated to SFML 2.0 yesterday, are you using GCC on Windows? If so, here are my binaries: http://www.mrwonko.de/files/temp/SFML.7z
Mr. Wonko, you are my hero.