I’m going to try out Unity this year. I have no experience doing any kind of 3d modeling but I’ve got access to Maya at school, and I’ve never used Unity before but I see people suggesting it everywhere for newbies, so I’m going to give it a whirl. What’s the worst that could happen?

Really I’m just here to play all of YOUR awesome games though.

Here’s a quick timelapse of my development process during LD18. Timelapse Video, LD18 Recycle Defense

It’s finished! No music this time around, my creative juices have dried up it seems. I tried the wolfram tones thing, but didn’t come up with anything I liked. So here it is, bugs and musicless and all.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=preview&uid=1823

Let me know if you have any problems! Thanks guys! Looking forward to playing yours!

Thank you sfxr!! DrPetter, you are my hero.

All of the gameplay code is done! The art is still pretty programmery but that’s probably not going to change. In my remaining time I’m going to work on music and sound effects for this thing.

Such a satisfying feeling! Come on guys, come feel it with me!

My body’s cranky from missed gym time and eating poorly, but I can fix that 14 hours from now. My brain is energized, and I had some pretty weird dreams relating to the compo… but lets not get into those.

This morning I’m reevaluating what I can get done. I think I was (once again) slightly optimistic with my feature set, so I’m going to cut a few things that wouldn’t add much to gameplay but would be heavy in development time, leaving me more time to work on graphics/sound/music for the rest.

DON’T GIVE UP!

You still have 14 hours! Even starting from scratch you can still produce something for the compo! If you really need more time, just submit to the jam instead, problem solved! You’ve still got time to make something awesome, take advantage of it!

Well, it doesn’t feel like I’ve gotten a lot accomplished, but when I look at my todo list it seems to be getting checked off pretty well. I guess it’s just perception.

I’ve implemented 3 out of the 5 weapon types, and partially implemented all 5 aliens that serve as various types of ammo. The levels transition, but there’s nothing to indicate you cleared the level and are proceeding to the next. No menu or game over screens either. I may drop one of the weapons to save time. Implementing the upgrades should be faster than weapons, so I’ll definitely try to squeeze that in. The graphics are crap, but I’m not an artist so I don’t really mind. Music and sound goes at the end, as usual, and may get cut if I run out of time.

With a little cleanup I could submit it now, the gameplay is functional, it’s just not as polished and featureful as I’d prefer. Here’s hoping the next 24 hours will be productive!

Home stretch! Lets finish this together!

New screenshot! Yay!

As you can see, I’ve got the selection pallet at the bottom working (sort of, there’s only one choice right now), I’ve got text up in the HUD at the top that’s actually real (mostly), score and funds work, enemies walk around, cannons shoot them, and the timer counts down. Finally starting to look like a game. Too bad the art sucks, hopefully I’ll get a chance to improve it some tomorrow. I’ve been humbled by all the awesome art you guys are posting, great work! I hope they’re as fun as they are beautiful! The voting’s going to be more fun than making my game I think.

I’ve been seeing posts of people thinking about giving up or dropping out.

DONT DO IT!!

We’re not even half-way through the time yet. Don’t like your game premise? Look at other people posting about their games to get ideas. Original idea too complicated to implement? Too many bugs? Throw away the broken stuff you’ve built so far, simplify your idea so it fits in the remaining time, and get to work! A false start is no reason to give up! Stick it out! You’ll be glad you did.

Eating some oreos while I write a quick update. I’m now 750 lines of code into my game. Pathfinding for the invading aliens works beautifully; There’s never going to be more than a hundred or so on screen at once and the board is pretty small, so I’m just running DFS for each alien on each game update. If that becomes a performance issue later, I’ll rewrite it as Kruskal’s from the endpoint and reverse all the paths as needed, but hopefully this will be good enough for LD18. The “Spud Cannon” is also up and running, grabbing an adjacent alien as it marches by and firing him as a projectile at another alien, causing damage to both. Progress since last screenshot isn’t really visible, so I won’t bother for now.

Next up on my list of things to do is to have actual player input, rather than just hard coding everything like I’m doing now for testing. After that, deal with levels, timer, budget/cost/score. Then weapon upgrades. Then game overs. Then build the other 4 weapon and 4 alien types. Then music and sound. So much to do! Time to get back to work.

Hey guys, just wanted to show you some character art I’ve been working on:

Wow, everyone seems to be way ahead of me! Your games are all looking awesome! Here’s a shot of what I’ve got so far, just some art:

Mmm sugary goodness!

Doughnuts and milk

Taking the long view, I’m going to actually spend some time thinking and planning how I want to approach this theme. Last time I made a platformer, and that was fun, I’d never done it before. This time around, I’m thinking tower defense. I’m snapshotting my desktop once a minute for the timelapse. Good luck everyone!

Okay guys, just lost one of the hard drives in my server. I have a spare one lying around but I don’t want to be doing a raid resync during the compo, so I’m just going to leave it in the precarious failed state until Sunday. Here’s hoping it survives that long! I don’t think this will affect my entry except for a little extra stress, but you gotta love the timing.

For those interested in doing timelapse stuff in Linux, I’ve found cron + imagemagick’s import utility to work pretty well for getting the source material. My example:

* * * * * DISPLAY=:0 /usr/bin/import -window root /home/jakkarth/src/ld18/timelapse/”`date`”.png

Afterwards, just pipe it through ffmpeg or mplayer or something to convert to video format. Works even with compiz enabled!

I’m going to be using Ubuntu Lucid as my primary development platform, coding C++ with SDL in emacs, and using make to handle builds. For graphics I’ll be using gimp and possibly my crappy iPhone camera. For sound and music, I’ve got some instruments lying around that I’ll pipe straight into audacity, though I do have a copy of adobe audition that I may use for mixing depending on how temperamental audacity is feeling. And of course, sfxr. I may use garage band to record from my midi drum kit if the built-in synths don’t sound good enough.

Pictures of my work environment, including my mac and the laptop I’ll be testing windows builds on:

I’m going to be developing on Linux with SDL. Last time around, lots of people wanted me to port my game to OSX and especially Windows. I’ll be coding in C/C++. Anyone have any tips or guides on how to A) write portable code and B) on porting portable code to those platforms?

Hi there, everyone! This will be my second Ludum Dare competition. My first time around, I misread the rules and disqualified myself. The new rules and guide page is awesome, thanks to everyone who was involved in that! It’s much clearer this way!

Anyway, I look forward to playing all of your games!