Bare cupboards have meant my first meal of Ludum Dare is the despicable Pizza Hut. It’ll do for now.

Hopefully have a game screenshot within a couple of hours. I have a seed of an idea and things are coming together.

My desktop philosophy is that you can never have too many screens

I am all the way in! Just gonna be jamming as I’m not into the competitive side of LD. None of my recent LDs got finished so this time it is going to happen. Gonna take my own advice from the keynote and make something super simple and flesh it out more if I’m done early.

My toolbox:
- Unity
- Photoshop
- SketchUp
- SublimeText
- Audacity

I met a man with several thighs…

An idea is forming…

As we begin to wage war upon game creation I look up at the purple tentacle and remember his inspiring words: “Try walking around with your legs tied together and glue on your shoes.”

Deep…

I know what you’re thinking, “what’s in the box?”. Well it only happens to contain all the best game ideas in the world EVER. Don’t worry I won’t be using them all. This weekend I’m only going to need one, the rest will stay in there… for now.

It’s not going to be an easy box to open so I’ll be using a specialist set of tools to make it reveal it’s treasures. These include:
- Unity
- Photoshop
- Audacity
- SketchUp
- Bacon Rolls

I’ll keep you guys updated on what I find in there.

P.S. I put my ear to the box earlier and I heard a voice inside whisper: “you will not use my secrets for the competition, you will jam”. I dare not defy it!

Meanwhile in Tokyo we’re calling it a night on Sunday. Its only 8pm but we’re still feeling pretty burnt out from yesterday’s marathon. The game is coming along really nicely.

Coding wise I spent a lot of time getting a nice point and click movement system working in Unity so that meant a morning wrestling with pathfinding. I also wrote a dialog system. The rest of the day was spent putting all the awesome art Melissa has been doing into the game.

I’d hoped to be a little further along today but since we were always going to be jamming it’s not the end of the world. Most of the game is in code wise, so mostly tomorrow is about getting the rest of the art done and putting it into the game. Along with final polish of course.

Here’s another tasty screenshot to end on for us tonight:

Day one is now done for our two person tokyo team. We worked and live streamed for around 11 hours and here’s an image to show that we mean business:

It’s not been easy. Running the live stream and developing at the same time on my laptop has taxed the CPU to the point where I’ve been muddling through unresponsiveness all day. My collaborator Melissa decided instead of eating she’d survive on Coffee, Red Bull and Cigarettes and spent most of her day agonising over the walk cycle.

We’re gonna chill now for the rest of the evening. We finally had some proper food and are now gonna watch some TV and play some games and hopefully get a good night’s sleep before we do it all again tomorrow.

To make our game idea work I’ve decide the theme is actually “Tiny Worlds” not just “Tiny World”. There’s two of us working on the game so that’s only fair anyways.

Here’s out first screenshot:

We’ve got the first world painted, basic movement, camera panning and zooming. It’s almost like a game. Almost…

With only 14 hours left on the clock we’re getting as prepared as we can to make sure we survive this Ludum Dare in one piece (well two I guess). We went down to the combini to make sure we had an appropriate supply of snacks and drinks:

On a more practical level Melissa decided it was time for a decent graphics tablet. She almost went with a Wacom Bamboo but the lure of the sleek black Intuos5 was too much. I’m presuming it costing double the price will mean our game will look EXTRA awesome:

Not done the last few Ludum Dares and not finished one in a while but that changes now. I’m on holiday in Tokyo and me and a friend are going to make a game together. So obviously we’re just aiming for the jam but that suits me anyways.

I’ll be doing the dev work using:
- Unity
- Google SketchUp
- Adobe Photoshop

My partner in crime will be doing artwork using:
- Corel Painter
- Adobe Photoshop

We’ve already got our (quite messy) workspace setup:

So here’s how my game is looking at the moment:

Still a lot of work to go. The ship hasn’t been fully textured yet (what’s there at the momoent is mostly temporary stuff) and the puzzle logic still not in either. However I think I’m on schedule as I always planned to do this as a 3 day jam game.

btw The game is essentially a 3D adventure game aboard a space ship.

Got a basic white box of my game environment working, and running in engine with some temporary textures. Also spent some time making a bunch of music and sound effects. Still no closer to putting any game in there but progress is progress.

Only been going for about an hour here in London (very late start), got all my timelapse nonsense set up. Here’s the healthy start to the day for me:

Thankfully there’s no chance of me leaving the flat today due to some unusually seasonal weather here in London:

Only 10 minutes to go. Nearly 2am here in the UK. So my plan is to go to bed around 3am hopefully with an idea of what my game might be ready to start on fresh in the morning.

This is my 3rd Ludum Dare and sadly I can’t make it out to the Cambridge meet up as I have for the past two as I’m going to a party tomorrow night. So here’s the obligatory workspace shot:

My goal is fairly simple. “Keep It Simple Stupid” while I quite liked the game I made last time (Inside Job) it wasn’t ready in time because I’d gone way too ambitious.

In terms of declaring my tool set I’m actually going to aim for the jam as I’m not into the competitive side, however I’ll reveal all anyway. If I go for a 2D game I’ll be using Stencyl to making something in Flash and if I go 3D it will be my typical Unity + SketchUp tag team.

Good luck everyone, I wanna see some awesome stuff!

So this is my second Ludum Dare and I’m now declaring my first failure. My game project was too ambitious. I’ve done loads of work on it and it’s really coming together but there’s no way I’m going to be done even for the jam deadline without rushing it out and I don’t want to do that as I think it’s going to be a nice little title.

Guess I’ll post on the blog later this week when it’s done. NEXT time I will make sure it’s something I can do in 48 hours.

So that’s day 2 of my jamming done. We’ve left the Cambridge meet up and although a few of us still working on projects tomorrow I think we’re all doing so in the comfort of our own homes.

Game still a fair ways off. I think next time I’ll go back to aiming for a 48 hour game as my amibitous project for the jam is wearing me down. But non the less I shall be back to coding from tomorrow afternoon (once I get back to London) and there will be a game for you all to play by the end of the jam time limit.

Another day at the Cambridge bistro with a team of LDers working on projects. Not got my phone cable so no photos of the obligatory bacon sandwich. However I did just make this guy and I think he’s pretty special:

Also Terry whinged at me yesterday until I changed the name of the game from the pretentious: “What I would give for one more chance” to the much more senisble “Inside Job”. Spoil sport!

So my game is preteniously titled: What I would give for one more chance

Here’s a WIP screenshot: