Let me tell you about my first ever 48 hour Ludum Dare experience!  I made a top-down puzzle game where you, the player, control the movement of both a green Link-like guy and a kitten at the same time.  It is dangerous to “go” alone! Take this [kitten].  ”Go” as in, yes, “going” to the bathroom.  In this puzzle game you have to collect TP for the toilet and litter for the litter box!

Play the game – Click here for my game’s competition entry page.

I’ll go through my experience chronologically as I talk about how my game came together, and then I’ll also tell you about the process of making each of my levels if you don’t mind spoilers.

Part 1 – How 48 Hours Turned Into a Game

Ok, so Friday night the theme was announced. When I saw it, I simultaneously felt like I had to do something Zelda-like, while also not wanting to do anything so literal.  The direct reference to such a classic game put me in a bit of a mental bind.

I started brainstorming ideas. For inspiration, I grabbed from the internet both the Zelda screenshot and the famous meme image. I actually had them up on my screen during the whole contest!

Inspiration: The Dangerous Duo

Some Zelda parody ideas popped into my head right away, but because you can’t reuse existing Zelda graphics for Ludum Dare, my ideas basically amounted to “recreate Zelda,” and that seemed a little impractical in 48 hours. There was one particular moment from the first Zelda that I kept thinking about:

Kittens are made of meat…

For more inspiration, I started to read everybody’s blog entries, and I was amazed by all of the clever interpretations of the theme.  I started to think about each word in the theme individually, and tried to figure out how I could play off of it. It was then on Friday night that playing on the word “go” hit me with an idea: I’d been wanting to do a simple classic top down puzzler for awhile, so what if I did something with needing to “go” to the bathroom.  I figured the player could be a little Link guy like from Zelda, and there could be a kitten companion (like from the meme) at the same time.  Visions of pixel toilets and pixel litter boxes flashed in my head.

More after the jump!

(more…)

Holy crap, finished in time. Really focused and left a bunch of things imperfect at the end. HOORAY! I didn’t Ludum Fail my first time!

Anyway, my game is an old school arcade puzzler. You play as a guy who needs to “go” to the bathroom, and will take a kitten with him so he’s not alone… and it is dangerous.  The game is HTML5/JavaScript using the Akihabara engine, and the graphics are a bit of a ZX Spectrum flavor.

Play it now!

It’s my first Ludum Dare, and I’ve made some rookie mistakes, and now I’m behind! Oh well =)  Not much of a game at this point. Here’s what it looks like:

Hello, nice to meet you all.  My name is Zach.  This is my first Ludum Dare. Terrifying. heh =)  I’ll be doing something web-based with JavaScript, 99% certain of that.  I’ve been working with the HTML5 game engines Akihabara and Impact, and I may use one of those.  I’ll probably be using CFXR and PXTONE for sound/music.  Other than that, TextMate and Photoshop are my tools of the trade.  I think a Ludum Fail is a serious possibility, but I’m in!

Just a few hours now!