When I showed McFunkyPants’ Keynote to my 16-year-old daughter, she said, “That is one wise baby.”

And over the course of the weekend, she kept asking me, “Are you doing what the wise baby said?”

And I would say, “Yes, of course.”

But I didn’t. I made a NOOB MISTAKE and got over-ambitious with my game design. I wanted to make a platformer with conversations at various places because I had a story to tell. But I decided that my platformer level would be larger than the screen, smooth-scrolling, and 256×256 tiles in size.

And I felt that I needed an editor in order to make my (one) level. I spent most of Saturday trying to beat it into submission, and when my wife told me Sunday that she needed to go out for most of the day to get the kids ready for school, I knew I wasn’t going to finish.

After an hour or two of working on the editor, I should have ditched it, reduced the map size to 64×64, and edited it by hand. If I’d done so, I’d have finished something; as it is I have a half-finished editor, a nice conversation system…and no game.

Ah, well. There’s always LD22.

My game is called “Eternal Life”, and it’s going to be a Metroidvania, which means it’s going to need a large, varied level. So an editor was pretty much inevitable.

So here it is! Try not to laugh.

I am hereby declaring the framework and previous source I’ll start with for LD21. You can download it here:

http://www.viridiangames.com/bin/LD21Framework.zip

It requires SDL, SDL_Image and SDL_Mixer.

This will be my third LD. In my first one, I only placed in Best Timelapse. In my second…I didn’t finish. I expect to do much better this time.

Discovery. Come ON. Name me a game where you DON’T discover anything.

But…

“Discovery” suggests a Metroidvania to me. Those games are all about discovering new powers and discovering new areas of the map you couldn’t get to before.

I’ve been thinking about writing a Metroidvania. I actually already have a main character and a storyline. It’s called Zeta.

So…really simple version of Zeta?

Yes. Yes, I think so.

The Ludum Dare is serious business for serious folks.  See my face?  This is the face of someone who is serious about completing a game for Ludum Dare 19.  I’ll also be doing a timelapse.  A serious timelapse.

Even though I didn’t manage to finish my entry, I still did a timelapse. Because timelapses are cool.

Well…I bit off more than I could chew, but I might have managed if I hadn’t had some family distractions today.

So. The game was Star Kittens; the goal was Dungeon Keeper in space…with kittens. How close did I come?

Well, you have sculler droids that act like imps, digging out whatever areas you select. You can also tag dug-out areas as room types (the only rooms I got in were the dormitory (red) and cafeteria (yellow)).

Once you have a large enough dormitory and cafeteria, kittens will start spawning, but because they have no AI, they just stand there. So the game is not completable, indeed there’s very little real gameplay at all.

But here’s a screenshot!

I hope to do much better next time, and Star Kittens has so much good code in it that it would be stupid not to finish it…eventually.

I’ve decided to (mostly) ignore the theme to work on a game I’ve wanted to work on for a long time.

Basically, it’s Dungeon Keeper. In space. With kittens.

I’m not kidding. Here’s a picture of a security kitten! Considering that I have no artistic talent, doesn’t he look fetching in his lovely red uniform? (The actual icon is 32×32 of course.)

Awake now!  And I know what game I’m going to make.  It’s not going to match the theme perfectly but it’s one I’ve been wanting to do for a while now.

So here’s my first screenshot!  Which is actually just a screenshot of the framework I got running before the compo begain…

Cleaned up some old code that uses SDL into a working 2D framework…no sound support, unfortunately.

This is just a test post to see if I can still post.  I intend to compete in…LUDUM DARE 15!  (15!  15!  15!)

Here’s a time lapse of my desktop as I competed in Ludum Dare 11.

Here’s a youtube link.

I know, the screenshots got cropped. The program I was using to grab them wasn’t grabbing the whole screen. Sorry about that.

And yes, there’s a whole lot of downtime in there. I’m married and I have three kids. My wife made a pithy comment about my participation, which you can see in the video.

You can download a higher-quality version here.

With 1 minute left!

Download it here!

Did Viridian bite off more than he can chew again? OF COURSE HE DID!

Frankly, I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish. Using treasures in rooms requires a tag system and I don’t know if I can finish one and get all the tags on the map and debug them in eight hours. At the very least, I should have a complete game where you run around killing monsters and getting treasures…but I wanted so much more.

Despite many distractions, I now have a castle map that you can walk around in. Monsters spawn and will chase you (but don’t hurt you yet). You can outrun monsters and they’ll lose aggro.

Now I need treasures and puzzles. Puzzles will require a tag system and frankly that scares me. I now have 22:30 left…can I finish in time?! Tune in for the exciting conclusion! (Excitement not guaranteed.)

…For I cannot build a castle…

Oh, wait – YES I CAN!

(Yes, I know those aren’t the right lyrics. But that’s how most people hear it.)

Okay, finally got something I like. When the Minimalist theme was announced my first idea was a minimalist RPG, like a Roguelike. And I’d been thinking about writing a Roguelike for a while…but I don’t think I could write a good Roguelike in two days.

After getting some sleep I thought of a very simple action game – top-down, 2D. You start in the center of a room and must avoid enemies until a weapon spawns, at which point you can pick it up and kill them. Unfortunately this is almost exactly what MrFun is doing…and he’s actually a good way into making his game.

So I came back to thinking about the minimalist RPG idea, and of course of the first games I thought of was the original Legend of Zelda. (Except that some people claim that Zelda isn’t an RPG at all. Why? Because there are no stats to improve. You don’t level up and gain abilities; all your abilities come from things you find in the world. Want more health? Find a heart container. Want do to more damage? Find a better sword, etc. I can see their point, but I don’t think I agree with it.)

And then I remembered a game I played a long time ago called Castle Adventure. It was a very good real-time RPG similar to Zelda, where you picked up items that gave you new abilities and allowed you to explore (and ultimately escape) the castle. Combat was a bit lame, however – it had Roguelike combat, where you just ran into an enemy and whoever was tougher won. I liked that there were a lot of puzzles in the game, though. You used treasures you’d already found to access new areas of the castle and get more treasures.

Both of these games seem to strip the concept of the RPG down to its roots. So I’m going to write a game similar to them, but adding improvements of my own. It’ll have Zelda-style action combat but it’ll also have Castle Adventure-style treasure collecting and puzzle solving.

And it’ll be in text mode

I finally come up with an idea and discover that MrFun is already doing it.

Minimalist.

And it won by a huge margin.

What the heck? A Ludum Dare game is pretty much “minimalist” by default!