So anyway. I only had about 5 hours to work on this one, a couple hours in the evenings, as we had guests over and stuff like that.

I woke up, checked the theme, and thought about it. What is “alone”, really? Absence of other people who are supposed to be there. I thought about making a game where you’re living a normal day, think you see people, but when you go there, they’re a mirage or something. But that would have been a massive content load and doesn’t really have any point..

So I thought about.. what if we hold a party.. and nobody came?

While doing some babysitting, I used some crayons and drew art for a maniac mansiony game. Sort of. Very simplified.

When I got time to actually work on the game, I scanned these in, created one wide texture in photoshop, placing all items where I wanted them, and then blew up the graphics using my Koalizer filter (which can be found on my site) and destroying the resolution.

It looked better while windowed, but I always planned the game to be played fullscreen. In retrospec, 160×100 pixel resolution MIGHT be a bit too little for modern audiences..

Anyway, during the first couple hours I got all of the above done, plus loaded up in OpenGL, with a person walking and you could click on things and it would say things about the clicked things. But there was no game.

It’s strange, but I got really stressed about this project, enough that it affected my sleep. I’ve never gotten such things from LD games before. And I’ve thrown in the towel more than a couple times, and it’s not a biggie.

Anyway, I decided to go with a look/use interface, with a couple cutscenes. You’d do things and eventually hit the bed, as nobody came, and reach game over. Designing a few (short) action chains you have to go through and hacking them in (and they are a hack!) took most of the rest of the time.

So there it is, for what it’s worth – hope you have more fun with this game than I’m expecting you to =)

So here’s my entry, Worst Birthday Ever. The zip (link in image above) contains C/C++ sources and win32 binaries. Done in about 4.8 hours.

Bonus feature: launch with a parameter for windowed mode.

Can walk around, and click on things to get descriptions and stuff. I’m 37.5% confident I’ll get something together. Heading off to bed, and I’ll probably have around 2-3 hours to work on this tomorrow. Maybe it turns into a game? We’ll see.

This is 70% mockup – everything’s rendered through opengl and most (if not all) art is loaded as textures, just the whole game is missing. I’ve worked on this one for about 1.5 hours now, and if I’m lucky I’ll have another 2.5 hours left. Not feeling too motivated at the moment, but we’ll see.