Well, my game did pretty well, so I guess I’m happy.  There were a lot of cool games this time around.

My big lesson from LD22 is that I can make a game in 48 hours, seeing as even in the Jam I had pretty much wrapped up by the 48 hour deadline.  My second biggest lesson is that I can’t psychologically handle 72 straight hours of LD Jammin’.  I’m going to try the compo next time around.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=4884

It’s finally finished!

I think the 72 hours of the Jam really proved too long, since I had to take many breaks of doing other things (besides eating, sleeping, etc) in order to remain sane.  Next time I will definitely consider entering the Compo.  I will also remember to play all the games I really want to play BEFORE I enter a 72-hour single-track development contest.

Well, on Day 2 of the Jam I managed to make a few new weapons, work on enemies, listen to the music my brother composed for the game, and more stuff.  I don’t remember yesterday all that well, actually.

Today, I’m hoping to add a lot more weapons, more levels, hopefully a title screen and level select, scoring, game balance, and the put the music into the game.  Things are looking up.  I hope.

My progress so far:

There’s a level with solid tiles and tiles you walk through.  Enemies use basic pathing to find you.  The player has a weapon, which fires bullets.  The sprites onscreen are sorted by depth, so they don’t have that nasty sorting hting where you;re in front of someone and on their face.  But I disgress.

Tomorrow: bullets kill things.  Enemies are spawned.  More weapons.  An artist friend is stopping by to help finish the music my brother made and to do art.

Sunday: I expect the basic game works by then.  More weapons, finishing art, testing.  Probably score stuff, menu and title, maybe more enemy types.

Monday: Testing, testing, testing!  Then testing of the distribution to the only other Windows machine in the house, which went badly last LD.  Sorry I use XNA, all.

I must say, this was not my favorite theme.  Nonetheless, I was able to adapt my idea for Kittens to Alone, so everything worked out fine.

So far I have a level with floors and large solid tiles, a player that moves around, and enemies with horrible pathfinding.  It’ll play a bit like Boxhead: Zombie Wars, but with kittens, rainbows, and awesome soundtrack (which my brother is composing as I type).

I’m too lazy to post screens right now, and they aren’t that impressive.  I’ll just say everything except pathfinding is going along nicely.

I’m doing the Jam, so I don’t know if this is required or not, but I thought I’d share the two classes I’ll most likely be using this coming LD.  One’s a text drawing class that uses a pixel-y font image, which was coded by my friend Lectus (who is doing the 48-hour compo).  The other is a basic class for handling menus, which you use by making a new Menu object for each menu, adding menu items, and running introduce() when you switch the menu you update/draw.  The buttons take delegates as arguments, so the class that creates them needs to define the functions itself.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/36926855/Menu.cs

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/36926855/Font.cs

I’m going to have an… interesting LD this time around.  First of all, this will be my second LD compo and my first LD48, as I did the Jam last time.  Additionally, I have finals the two days leading up to the compo weekend, so I will have literally seven hours between taking my semester finals and starting a 48-hour game.  But hey, it’ll probably be all right.

Language: C# using XNA

Platform: Windows (I use XP still, btw)

I plan to make the sound effects myself with a mic and sound editor, so my game will either have bad sound effects or literal onomatopoeia ones like “bang”.