I sort of finished something! Now I can relax.

I didn’t have time for much polish; no sounds or gameplay tweaks, so it’s pretty rough, but it closely approximates the initial idea I had, at least.

I also didn’t have time to build a windows executable but I’ll get on that very soon.

Just give me about another week and I’ll have nailed it.

Not a whole lot has changed, visually, but a few key gameplay elements have been added:

You can now scan the alien ships to find out whether they’re hostile. This in turn allows you to decide whether they should get a face full of missile or if they’re just popping by to drop off a basket of fruit.

I’m going to power through a couple more features then throw in some sound effects and get the thing submitted.

Randomly generated aliens. What the HELL was I thinking?! Well I got it working eventually, anyway. It picks random bits of image to stich together along with randomly coloured middle segments to help give more unique designs and aid memorability.

Just got the game to do, now!

Here’s a screenshot of my game so far:

The idea is it’s going to be a kind of defense game but with a twist – you have weapons and science at your disposal! For each incoming alien ship you have to decide whether to scan them or blow them up. Or something. The idea is still in flux at the moment.

Just got started on my entry in he last hour or so. I’m jamming in meatspace this time, at the Manchester Game Jam, UK.

Nice theme! Thank the gods it wasn’t exploration again. I came up with an idea on the way here which involves, predictably, a small planet. It also involves aliens and guns.

I was thinking of playing around with HTML5 this time – something I’ve been wanting to try for a while now – but I was too lazy to do any research beforehand. So instead I’m sticking to what I know: Pygame. I just about managed to squeeze GIMP onto my tiny netbook, so there may even be graphics.

Good luck everyone. Bye for now!

Got my windows build submitted.

I think I’m going to try and finish my game properly tomorrow for the jam. I’d really like to see it rounded off.

I just submitted my totally unfinished text adventure. I just simply ran out of time to implement the story I had planned out. Bit of a pity.

My entry page

I’m currently working on the windows port.

I went to bed early and woke up late this morning, so not a great start to Sunday. I’ve started hurriedly putting my game’s content together now, after probably spending too much time getting utility functions in place. I just about have enough to show a screenshot now!

Now if you’ll excuse me I have about 6 hours work to catch up on!

Well after a lot of procrastinating I’ve sort of got a rough outline of a story written and I’ve got a bunch of functions in place ready to put the game together. I guess I should actually start adding content!

I’d show a screenshot at this stage, but there is literally nothing to show.

Hi fellow entrants

I’m feeling a little under the weather at the moment but that’s not going to stop me taking part! I have decided to go low-tech this time though, to make things a little easier for myself. So I’m planning to make a very simple command-line text adventure in plain old Python.

The theme is an awkward one, in my opinion, because it pretty much dictates a backstory rather than possible game mechanics, and all that springs to mind at first are artsy, depressing, story-based exploration affairs. I did manage to think further than that, so if like me you’re struggling for ideas a bit, how about these:

• Alone doesn’t necessarily mean physically alone (Nobody understands me! I’m the last of my people!)
• The aim might be to become alone (Hounded by papparazi? Defending your hermit cave? Looking for a quiet place to revert back to your gelatenous state?)

Anyway, my tools of choice are:

• Python
• Curses, maybe
• Nano
• Paper
• PyInstaller

My goal this weekend is just to finish something, even if it totally sucks.

Here’s my timelapse finally! I spliced the two days together.

Well while I wait for my timelapse to attempt to upload to Youtube for the 5th time, I might as well write a post-mortem for my game. Here’s a reminder of which one it was:

Awesome

So I pretty much managed to stick to my original plan this time. I chose the absolute simplest gameplay concept I could come up with, and avoided the temptation to try to make something fancy.

Avoiding falling stuff has to be the simplest action game imaginable; and in fact for a program I used to use called DIV Games Studio, it was the tutorial. A bit of a speed-up mechanic and some lava to escape from and I had my gameplay down. The code was messy, but never got to an unmanagable state.

I was then able to spend the second day working on the graphics, which I was pretty happy with in the end. I managed to submit a couple of hours before the deadline with Windows build complete, which is a first for me. It was nice to not have that sinking feeling about 5 hours before the deadline when you realise that you’re nowhere near to completing what you wanted to have done. And ever nicer to not be scurrying around trying to throw a build together with 10 minutes to go.

Pants

I still didn’t leave enough time to record some proper sounds and write some music like I’d hoped to. I ended up throwing together some sfxr noise, which is better than nothing, but does all start to sound the same after a while.

While the code went well, I found myself writing unnecessary bits of boilerplate code that I always seem to end up writing. Code that could and should really be abstracted into a library and reused.

In Closing

I think I took the right approach this time. No grandiose plans, no over-optimistic attempts at procedural generation, no attempts to invent new genres, and generally no biting off more than I could chew. I kept it simple and relaxed and while my entry isn’t going to win any prizes (there aren’t any anyway), the sense of accomplishment and closure was pretty satisfying.

Next time though, I’m going to be better prepared in terms of the libraries I use, and cut down some of the boilerplate to leave more time for gameplay code. Every extra minute I can save here and there gives me more chance to add polish, namely audio which always gets left until last and therefore neglected.

TL;DR: Happy but music next time

I got my entry submitted at about 2am BST, which makes a change from the 2-minutes-before that I usually end up doing. So here’s my entry, VOLCANOWNED!:

DOWNLOAD

I was pretty happy with how it turned out. It’s a very simple game but I think I did a decent job with the graphics. Next time I’ll leave that little bit extra time to record some proper sounds and music.

I’m going to put my timelapse together later and write a full post-mortem soon. And oh man I can’t wait to start playing all the other entries – I swear they just get better and better every time!

Excellent. I’ve replaced all my placeholder graphics now:

And it looks a damn sight prettier. I will now move on to sounds effects and then music. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to leave time for music during LD before, so this is a momentous occasion indeed. I’m going to hit sfxr for some placeholders and then see if I can record some sounds that don’t all sound like me hitting the mic on the desk…

Thank goodness the site’s back up – I was starting to get worried there. Well done and thanks to all involved!

Well towards the end of yesterday I was starting to lose momentum, but I did get a placeholder title screen and end sequence in place, making it more or less complete in terms of gameplay.

Today I can focus on polish: graphics, sound, music and so on. I’m off for a morning walk and then down to business!

I have walls to hit and lava and fireballs now. The player gets faster as time goes on but slows down if they hit something. If they go too slow, they are consumed by hot magma and in all likelyhood probably die!

I’m reasonably happy with the progress so far. It’s not much to look at but I’ve been tweaking values all over the place to get it to feel right. And that feels much more productive than worrying about whether my code is tidy enough or my graphics pretty enough, at this stage.

I’m going to put in proper win and lose logic, throw together a title and menu, and then it should be complete, gameplay-wise. Hopefully by the end of today I’ll have met my target of having a functioning game by the end of day 1.

Well about an hour in and I’ve got a main loop running with a guy moving around. I wasn’t kidding when I said I’d spend next to no time on graphics:

Oddly enough, the guy has the same expression as I do when I look at this game.

Woken up, checked the theme, been out of a walk to get the ideas flowing.

I think I have a rough idea of a suitably simple, if not particularly interesting, game to shoot for. Time to get stuck in to code!

I’m totally in and ready to rock hard this time.

I will be using:

• Python
• Myrmidon
• Nano
• Graphics Gale
• GIMP
• Audacity
• Rosegarden
• Sfxr
• Scrot
• Also a kazoo may be involved

I will attempt to abide by the following self-imposed rules:

1. Get all my tools and libraries ready to avoid wasting time on setting things up ready to code
2. Have some game ideas in my head before the theme is announced. Have one last look at the theme list and come up with an idea for each
3. Keep it astonishlingly dizzyingly simple to the point where I scoff at my own game idea because it could be thrown together by a visually-impaired amoeba in a timescale measured in planck time
4. Put absolutely no effort into graphics until the game is working. So throw together placeholder graphics that look like scribbles at best
5. Spend zero time making the code “nice”. If the code isn’t repulsive to look at, I’m doing it wrong. It should be the most hacked together piece of crap I’ve ever written. If it runs, it’s good enough.
6. Have the game playable by the end of day 1. So the core gameplay should be in place, and ideally the levels done too (depending on what time of game it is. The concept of “levels” may be more complex than I’m aiming for here)
7. Don’t get hung up on bugs if they’re not total show-stoppers – they can be squashed in the cleanup phase
8. Spend day 2 polishing the thing to a shine, including sounds and music!

I have a feeling this is going to be the greatest Ludum Dare E V E R.

Best of luck, everybody!

Ok, time for me to write about what went well and what didn’t go so well for my LD20 entry.

My Idea
Even before the theme was announced, I’d decided that I was going to make a game with a tank in it. When I saw the theme, I immediately had the idea of driving a tank through a hyrule-like land, pwning stuff. I discarded the idea of doing this from a side view, because I decided it would need some decent 2D physics to really do that justice. So instead I had the idea of doing a top-down scrolling shooter with lots of monsters and shooting and dodging bullets. So I had 2 ideas to combine: 1) rampaging through Hyrule destroying everything in sight with ease and 2) having massive firefights with lots of incoming bullets and big monsters. The trouble was, I realised as time went on that these two ideas weren’t really that compatible. How could the environment being raged through resemble the Zelda overworld if it was full of giant bullet-spewing enemies? It was at the point when I added rupees to collect, with no reason to collect them, that I finally thought “where on earth am I going with this?”. As the deadline loomed, I threw in a boss for something to fight against, but this still left the rest of the level as a pretty useless killing spree. Next time I’ll think my idea through more carefully before I start.

Graphics
I was pretty happy with how my graphics turned out, considering the timescale. I think I’m getting better at using GIMP with each LD I do. That said, I think I could have sacrificed some of the graphics time to work on the gameplay more.

Sticking to the Plan
My original plan was to pick a dizzyingly simple idea, bash it out in half a day and then spend the rest of the time polishing it to a shine. Needless to say, it didn’t turn out like that. I didn’t have anything even remotely playable after half a day, so I just had to soldier on until I did. I think my idea was more do-able than for previous LDs, though, so it was a step in the right direction. I just need to scale down my ideas even more next time. I think my problem with the clashing ideas was partly to blame here. In future, I’ll pick an idea that’s more well-defined and not leave any holes to be invented around later. Trying to implement the idea is hard enough once you start coding, without having to finish working out the half-baked idea at the same time!

What Suffered
Because I didn’t get the tweaking and polishing time that I’d intended, I didn’t end up with something fun like I’d hoped. And sound and music didn’t make it into the game this time either, which was a shame. I was looking forward to throwing together a tune that was rpg adventure-ish, with a bit of Ride of the Valkyries mixed in. Next time, gadget!

The Jam
I’d originally intended to keep working on my game on the Monday and submit it as a jam entry as well as a competition entry, seeing as I had the day off work. But I wasn’t happy enough with where the game was going, and felt way too sleep-deprived to do any more work on it, even for one day. Plus, I had major issues getting py2exe to build my Windows version and that ended up taking me half the day anyway. Soooo I decided to just be lazy instead.

Right – that’s that off my chest, now to start playing all the awesome-looking entries I’ve been getting incredibly jealous about. Seriously, there are so many interesting entries this time – I can’t wait!