(click the picture)

Roughly 285 people came up with a game idea and made it happen in just one weekend!  That’s a pretty awesome thing!

I have a new wallpaper!

All 285 Jam and Compo Games!

Here’s a zip containing various size wallpapers and the Python script that generates them (requires PIL) : DOWNLOAD.

The Ludum Dare website doesn’t give you a great way to get notified of comments on your game. So I hacked together a bookmarklet to generate that RSS feed.

I’m having trouble keeping WordPress from mangling things, so go over here to get it.

Everything I wanted to get in feature-wise is in!  Now to get some audio in there.

I’m really happy with how this came out!  You can play the current version (and eventually the final version) at http://excitemike.com/1958_BNL.  Yes, the name of the game is odd.  Perhaps you can discover its significance.

Oh boy I feeling the lack of sleep/breaks right now.

Needing sleep pretty hard over here, but so far things are looking much better than they usually do at 5 hours in.

Doesn't look like much, I know.

The slightly-unusual control scheme is working and (I think) kind of fun, I can now load up levels made in Tiled, Collision handling seems solid (for once), the little guy’s animations change to reflect important state changes… I’m feeling good about this Ludum Dare!

Here’s the pre-compo framework/library declaration.

Framework: Stego, the as3 framework I’ve cobbled together over the course of these events.  I may go with Unity instead if for some reason I feel like going three dee once the theme is decided.

IDE: FlashDevelop.

Graphics: A copy of Photoshop CS 1 which as far as you know was obtained completely legitimately.

Music: Yet again I’ll be trying using WarioWare DIY for music.  This hasn’t worked out so well in the past, but I don’t have any better ideas.

Sound Effects: I bet you can guess this one.

Timelapse: I will be using Keeyai’s Chronolapse, unless my laptop has problems with it again.

Will be listening to: Some combination of my DragonForce station on Pandora and my 8bitcollective favorites.

Sauce Control: Mercurial, pushed to Bit Bucket.

Twitter: @ExciteMike

Interweb pagesite: http://excitemike.com/

Strategy: I have a couple of super-simple game ideas that I’d really like to try out, so odds are I’ll be shoehorning the theme into one of those.  The main issues I’ve had in previous LDs were doing crazy graphical things that take a long time to make/tweak or doing something that breaks the assumptions of my collision response code (switching to tile-based, how sliding along a surface is handled, or resting contact).  I will just make sure to do pretty standard sprite stuff for graphics, and collision-wise I think I have a much more elegant solution now where I can use hitboxes (matched to sprite animations with this tool) to detect and handle the sorts of things that needed special handling in previous games.  If I need to come up with ideas for levels, this should help me come up with something fast.

To make this post more exciting, here is a random Star Trek image: