This Ludum Dare went much better than the last. I finished this year with hours to spare, last year, I was very close to the deadline. I think it was because I was more experienced this time. Now about this Ludum Dare:

The Good Bits:

• The idea worked well
• No major blocking bugs
• Random level generation saved me a lot of time
• The orange graphics for obstacles. This was inspired by mirrors edge and I think the bright colour in my otherwise quite dark, grey game really worked.
• Visual Studio 11. Once I got it fixed, it was a dream to work with. The intellisense is so much better now. Besides that I’ve always liked how Visual Studio has worked, it’s clean and very usable.
• SFML. As before I used SFML for my game. This means, theoretically, it will also compile under Linux and OS X. Alongside that it made development easy and handled much of the boilerplate code for me.

• No soundtrack, I’m not good with music
• Albeit random generation saved me time it makes it very hard to control the difficult. So much so that currently, I believe there are still certain times when a move is impossible.
• Mixed graphical style. About half way through day 1 I completely redid the graphics however some things from the old style remain. Things such as the scaled low resolution graphics and also the basic stick-figure player sprite.

• Chronolapse, or more specifically mencoder. Turns out mencoder doesn’t like 2560×1024 graphics. I ended up spending about an hour on the first day finding this out just so I could post the timelapse.
• Getting addicted to your own game. I ended up playing my game more on the second day than developing it. Although I didn’t have anything major to have there were things I could have added.

I found my piece of paper which I drew my first idea on late at night. The next morning I drew much the same on paint. I thought you might want to see them.

Much shorter timelapse for today, I had much less to do. My finished game can be found in the entry section titled “Freerunner”.

I’m finally happy with the graphics. I deem my game finished unless there is some unforeseen bug hence why I haven’t uploaded it yet. Until then, enjoy these screenshots.

Pasta today, the cupboards are empty, all that I could find was milk, spaghetti, flour and cheese, oh well.

I also have a lack of ideas, that sucks too. I’ve finished all the mechanics and music scares me.

Timelapse for day 1. Time for sleep now. A day of music and polish tomorrow. It’s nearly done!

Here’s a few more hours work. I’m really liking how this is turning out, I hope you all enjoy it to. Please report any missing dependencies below, it’s getting hard to keep track of since I have some installed myself.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11197643/ld22p3.zip

From lack of ideas I added a small Easter egg, I’ll leave you guessing as to what it is. If you watch my time-lapse after it should give you an idea though.

Dinner Health is of no concern over Ludum Dare, that’d be boring, right? Ribs and rice are nice anyway.

Woot, I have sound effects…now…musics…hnnng. Also in my “I’m in” post I made a derp, I said I was using sfxr when I’m actually using bfxr.

Om nom, cheese and biscuits.

So my game is playable, it has menus and text and graphics and controls. I’d go far to say this is the best game I’ve made yet. I’m really pleased with how it has come out. Now this means it’s time for, audio. I plan on using sfxr and lmms, let’s see how this works. Until then, have fun playing it sans audio.

You can download it at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11197643/ld22p2.zip .

I also have a version from three hours ago at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11197643/ld22p1.zip .

Enjoy.

I’ve got my game to a playable state. That doesn’t mean perfect or polished but you can play. You don’t die yet, you just get told in the console that it also displays. The theme is a bit loose, but your “alone” in the game, I think that’s good enough.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11197643/ld22p1.zip

After a shakey start with my visual studio installation crapping out I’ve finally got something. Ok, there is no input…or physics…or collision….BUT IT’S SOMETHING!

Pasty for lunch, om nom nom.

So, from the past 3 years using quadratic interpolation we should get ~1026 entrants. 1024 would be a nice number though, don’t you think?

So last time was my first and I was a bit late to the party, never did all this before. So I hear it’s a good idea to. I plan on recording a timelapse of making the game, any suggestions for software and also intervals. Other than that,

C++ in Visual Studio 11,
I’ll be using SFML for graphics, if I require a gui I’ll use GWEN and if for some reason I need video recording I’ll use holly,
LMMS, if I get far enough to need music, chances are I won’t,
Photoshop, can’t live without,
sfxr for sound effects, I’ll try and be a bit more careful with choice this time.

My minimal base code can be found at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11197643/LD22.zip, my generic small skeleton. I’ll also try to make full use of any C++11 features if it makes sense. I’ll try to keep the code portable so that it SHOULD compile under gcc.

So today’s my last day of coding and I have lots to do. I have currently got my basic game working, I can load maps, print messages, move and collide with the world. Today is story day I think. I need to actually make it an escape game. Why does this scare me? I should probly be coding not blabbering here so I’ll just post a quick preview screenshot.