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If you’re happy and you know it…
… create a game in 48 hours!
I recently reduced my fulltime position to a part-time job, to start my try as a somewhat more serious game dev. This is 4 months ago. Now, after releasing my first game for android and several prototypes (I whish I was able to finish more of them to a game!) I feel like I have enough routine to take part in ludum dare for the first time.
I will be using the great Entity-System-Framework Artemis (if you haven’t thought about Entity-System-Frameworks for game development check out their references) and libgdx. This means I will work on a PC and an Android version. I might port everything to html5 next week. I haven’t used libgdxs HTML5 target yet, so I don’t know how much work it will be – but it would surely be a nice thing to have. Other tools I use will be Gimp2.8 (Much better since they have the one-window-mode) and inkscape and of course good old eclipse.
I am currently trying to figure out if I should manage my sleep (which is somewhat difficult given the starting time of 3AM here in Germany) or if I should just keep working until my sugar-free energy drinks run out.
However, I wish us all much fun and great games!
Thanks for the pointer to Artemis, looks interesting. I’ve looked into component based game entities (e.g. http://cowboyprogramming.com/2007/01/05/evolve-your-heirachy/ ) earlier, but somehow my attempts to implement them usually turn out a bit too over-generic and not adding that much value.
In the beginning, it really needs some rethinking if you are used to OOP. My first attempts using it always made me realize that I was back to OOP in the end. But once you get the twist it really shines through its simplicity and strict independence of code parts. I discovered it through component base game development too – that approach always made me struggle once the game got a little bit more complex
Wish you good luck and a lot of fun this time with LD!