I’ve just slept about seven hours longer than I intended to, and have awoken with the beginnings of a migraine, so shan’t be finishing my entry any time near the time limit. I’ll still finish it though.

Update 1:

I decided to go for option 1, the ultra-simple 3d modeller.

The other options didn’t set my “ooh shiny!” reflex ablaze, although they are probably significantly more doable in the time frame.

In the same vein as Ludum Dare I have given it a Latin name - Carpe Lutum (Seize the Clay).

I have put all the woes I had with Flex in LD12 behind me - i had so much trouble because I was trying to treat it like normal Flash, and it will resist you every step of the way if you try that. Use it like an app platform and it purrs like a kitten.

Here is a screenshot of my interface as of hour 5:

As LD12 was my first entry and I started with no tools or pre-conceptions (and failed quite spectacularly!) I have several smaller ideas which I can play about with instead of aiming for one big one.

Ideas:

- Ultra-ultra simple 3D Modeller for very low-poly models

- Asset Management and loader (Graphics, sound, models)

- Maths libraries (I suck at maths though)

- Multiplayer server? (already written the main guts of this in PHP, just need to get it finished and working)

- Tile/map editor for my RetroRemakes entry.

I too was waiting until after seeing the final results before I would post my post-mortem.

First I’d like to say well done to everyone who took part and completed a game within the time limit, and thank you to everyone for giving me honest reviews. I had great fun taking part and learned an awful lot about game development during and after the contest.

(post mortem continues after the break) (more…)

As per my earlier post, here is the link to the hastily created TowerAssault0, which has absolutely nothing in common with my original plan apart from the name….

Look at the .fla at your own peril. This was written between the hours of 3:00am and 4:30am.

Play Online (Cursor keys to affect trajectory and power, space to fire. You need to refresh the page to try again :>)

Download ZIP containing source and gameinfo

(Entry edited for repackaging and changed host)

Well, I gave it my best shot. Day 1 was entirely taken up by my fighting the losing battle with Flex.

At about hour 34 I completely restarted my project in Flash8, but writing everything from scratch in 14 hours for my main, complex idea, became obviously beyond me, so about 2 and a half hours from the end I started again with an uber-simple game that I could pass off as a submission. I started the code at around hour 47 for this.

I will upload the finished game when I get a chance, but at the deadline it wasn’t finished, so here is a screenshot instead.

Over six hours there I struggled with a completely intractable problem. The free Flex SDK, it seems, is about as user friendly as a kick in the nadgers. For over six hours I fought with an invisible error that wasn’t even triggering any events when it was supposed to.

I got a friend to run it through his copy of flex builder, et voila

SecurityError: Error #2148: SWF file file:///C|/www/flash/towerassault/towerassault.swf cannot access local resource file:///C|/www/flash/towerassault/res/assets.xml. Only local-with-filesystem and trusted local SWF files may access local resources.

In other words, because flash is running in the browser it presumed it didnt have access to local files, so refused to open them. The instant I uploaded the xml files to the server in the other room, worked first time.

I am not a happy boy.

I should really REALLY have spent some time with Flex before attempting something of this scale with it.

Still, I’ve (only just) got the thing started now, and now I can maybe turn my mock-ups into something resembling a game, although nearing the 25% mark and with nothing to show for it is not encouraging…

I think I shall try my hand at this LD48. I remember back to when it all started but unfortunately free time and inspiration have never seemed to coincide - until now. Convalescence after a bad road accident has it’s own reward

I will be using the free Flex 3 SDK developing for the Flash 10 player. All other libraries for the game will be written by me during the 48 hours.