It’s a little late but here is the post mortem to my competition entry The Lonely Island, which you can find here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=3428 .

The plan.

My plan was to make a bit of a survival simulator where you are stranded alone on an island and you have to slowly gather the resources you needed to make your escape. I wanted to have day/night cycles, mountain areas and loads of different items to find and craft. All this turned out to be a little too ambitious though and I ran out of time before I could add any of these things. In the end I had to quickly implement making a raft and escaping before the development time was up.

Day one

The first day went extremely well. I got the tile maps loading and rendering very quickly and made great progress on the GUI along with some of the more important mechanics. I’m not too familiar with AS3 and Flash Punk but most the things I tried to do either worked first time or worked shortly after trying to implement it. Bug’s didn’t take more than 5 – 10 minutes to fix and it started to look like I would be able to add either everything or most things I had planned on, but I was wrong.

Day two

In comparison to day one, day two was a nightmare. Nothing worked first time and major bugs took what seemed like forever to fix. It didn’t take long for me to see I either wasn’t going to finish on time or I wasn’t going to be able to add many features. I started off the day by getting the map scrolling with the players movement, and this caused a load of problems and broke most of my GUI and I had to spend at least half the day fixing everything. I learned a valuable lesson from this though, get scrolling maps in ASAP in the future. After I finished climbing over that humongous hurdle I didn’t have long left to implement the crafting system. After thinking for a while and the most easy and time efficient way to get crafting in I decided to go with a simple combining method for creating tools and the raft. By the time this was done I only had about 20 minutes to implement some simple sound effects and get my game submitted.

What went well

I have never really tried to make a GUI before so I’m pretty proud of the results, even if it is a little crude. This is also my first game from the top-down perspective, which was a nice change of pace making.

What  didn’t go well

Many things. The art, for instance wasn’t particularly good but then again my art never is, I just wish I had some more time to spend on it.
The scrolling maps, as I stated earlier, didn’t go well while implementing and ate up most my time but at least it got sorted out in the end.
My game also ended up being too easy and lacking in features as a result of various problems and the time constraint.

Most importantly, did I have fun?

Hell yeah I did. Making a game to a set theme in 48 hours is an amazing experience and I learn so much each time I enter. Ludum Dare also has an amazing community surrounding it which I am proud to be a part of.

Day one draws to a close for me. Since the last update I finished up the inventory system, added the messaging system, created the player sprite and animated it and started work on some of the tile transitions. Things are going well so far, I’ve got allot done but I still have a long way to go.

No more developing from me tonight, I’m going to relax for a bit then get some well needed sleep.

I’ve been busy working on the GUI since the last update. Got the players stats all up and running and almost finished implementing the inventory system along with a context sensitive menu when clicking objects.

I’m glad to have the brunt of that out of the way and once I finish up the inventory system and get a messaging system sorted I’l try and do something about the atrocious art but I doubt it will look much better in the end, just smoother tile transitions and what not.

I woke up a few hours ago and got to work.

I’m creating a survival game where you’re stranded on an island, alone and confused you have to use your surroundings to survive and possibly even escape depending on how far I get.

So far I have the basics of the tile engine working along with collision detection, movement and some very shoddy placeholder art.

But now it’s time to eat breakfast while looking at everyone’s creations so far.

Got a few ideas going, Now I’m going to go to bed and mull them over in my sleep.

Good luck everyone!

Decided to enter last minute.

This time I’ll be attempting to use Flash Punk to make my game. I’ll use paint.net for the artwork and SFXR for any sound effects if needed.

Edit: Oh and I’ll be using the Ogmo editor for any tile-based level editing if its needed.