Sup Fellow Ludum Dare participants? This is your friendly neighborhood toaster reminding you all to make sure you’re really ready for the upcoming Ludum Dare. Here’s a few general purpose tips that you should take note of for not just Ludum Dare, but just in general.

Backup your work always, often
Whether you just work out of dropbox, or use source control, make sure you regularly back stuff up as you go along. You may get super tired along the way and may not make the best of judgement calls, power may go out at random, leading you to lose data, and precious hours of work. If not using source control, or something like Construct, Stencyl, Multimedia Fusion, or Gamemaker, try to save new revisions under different filenames to be safe, or if you need to revert. Do note that on the dropbox site you can revert to older versions of files, but trust me, in most cases, it won’t help you at all.

Eat decent food

TIME TO FEAST ON JUNK FOOD ALL DAY LIKE PROGRAMMERS IN THE MOVIES!  No. Eat well, treat yourself well, and you’ll have the right kind of energy and such to continue on and work effectively and happily. Not to say a cookie or three isn’t bad every now and then…

Destroy… Then Improve

If things aren’t working out, don’t be afraid to scrap parts of your game that just don’t work, no matter how much time you spent on it. Trying to shoehorn things into working may cost you more time than removing that extra feature that breaks everything, or even rewriting the feature entirely.

Use What you know

If you know C++ well, use it. If you know C# well, use it. Flixel, Flashpunk, Unity? Use it. If you know Gamemaker, Construct, Multimdia Fusion, Stencyl, GameSalad, Twine, etc. Just use it. There is no shame in a finished game. There is no shame in playing to your strengths. This round, I may consider the use of Construct 2 or similar tool, rather than SFML 2 and C++ (which I’m slowly getting better at) in order to focus on one of my weaker aspects (Art), and spend time on something I really love to do (music).  Super Crate Box and Spelunky were Gamemaker titles, so be awesome with whatever tools you use.

Who needs a map?

If you need help? Get some. Use the internet, check out if anyone isn’t too busy on irc for advice and such. Don’t be afraid to get a bit of help if you’re really stuck. But do be advised, most of the awesome people on the internet will be busy with their own Ludum Dare projects, so be patient if you ask on irc. It is advised that you make sure you know how to research problems and their solutions. Also make sure you check out the tools list on the Ludum Dare site if there’s anything you may need, be it pixel editors or music and audio tools. It’s a pretty good list of nice free stuff.

Well these are a few tips I’ll be trying to follow during the Ludum Dare. Hopefully these help someone out.

Good luck! Have fun, and I can’t wait to try as many games as I can!

Got things moving on screen. That’s good.. Maybe…

Crappy Sources are at https://github.com/edibletoaster/Kitty-Crusade-LD48–22  Builds apparently are making it up there too cause I’m lazy.

Livestream at :http://www.livestream.com/edibletoaster

Aside from my bottle of mexicoke that is!

Never posted the git where all this junk is going, so I’m gonna put it here: https://github.com/edibletoaster/Kitty-Crusade-LD48–22

This assumes though that I don’t wimp out and switch to using Construct last minute… Well, here goes nothing…

No kittens. Well, find this lonely kitten and get a prize… or something… I dunno… I make this up as I go along… 

Interesting theme… Interesting theme indeed. I think I may end up using Construct for this one, though if I get that done fairly quickly, I’ll start writing the XNA version of the game.

Mainly, there’s a lot of art and music I want for this game, and I really want that to shine more than anything else. Me being a terrible artist.. well… needs time…

Livestream will be at http://www.livestream.com/edibletoaster  

Yep, gonna do this for reals this time. Live from NY and its gonna be awesome. More details later, including where I’m streaming from, but here’s what I plan on using…

Programming: 

XNA or Construct. It will depend on the theme and how lazy I feel.

Audio:

FlStudio and EWQL Symphonic Orchestra Gold, and various soundfonts from “The Internets”

SFXR, and random sounds

Graphics:

MS Paint or something equally bad… (I suck at art usually @_@)

So excited! Can’t wait to see what all of you make this weekend!

After sleeping on the theme, an idea just popped up in my head. So I started coding away in XNA with a bit of my old broken game framework. While I have a partially busy day, I kept the idea simple enough that I should be able to finish it all up by tomorrow.

Sneak peek at… something…

YAY MS PAINT!