Well theres about 6 hours to go, and I am done. Well as done as I’ll ever be.

I have just submitted my game, BioBattle.

Link here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=3280

The timelapse that I have been recording is listed on that entry page too.

Here’s a preview pic of the final version:

I had a couple of hours earlier today where I got pretty much nothing done. It was at this time where I was mainly working on pseudo-GUI stuff, which is extremely boring.

I managed to push through it and get it done however, as it was critical to the main ‘gimmick’ of my game. That gimmick being the ability to create your own bacteria out of various parts to use in battle.

It’s starting to come along nicely if I do say so myself, although I will have to do something about the graphics.

As per my last post, the latest(ish) version can be played here: http://buddat.net/ld23

So I’ve been sitting here for 16 hours trying to work though this game. Admittedly I haven’t accomplished much in the last 4 hours as my brain turned to mush, so I am going to go get a few hours sleep.

I do have a recent build up for play-testing though, only Quick Play is currently working:

http://buddat.net/ld23/

13 hours in, and my brain is going into meltdown, so i’ve switched over to poking at graphics.

I’m truly horrified to find out the amount of people that actually have artistic talent on this site, my art extends to bad finger paintings.

Nonetheless, I push on.

Here’s a new pic:

So we’ve just past the 8 hour mark, and my brain is slowly starting to melt.

I had a couple of hours there where stuff would just not end. I set up a system to render certain Strings on the screen, then realised I had no idea what those Strings were. from there I spent 2 hours building the framework for my game, just so I could get those strings to test it all.

Frameworks man, frameworks.

Anyway, now I have something small to show, a bit of String rendering, but it contains a good chunk of the gameplay framework just to get there

So I haven’t really said anything about this game yet, so let this be a small explanation.

It is based off a game design from 2001-ish, where you build your own ‘monsters’ and depending on the parts you use, they get certain skills that are used to battle other monsters. In my version however, the monsters are bacteria. Tiny World? Micro World!

Dinner comes soon, then I hope to get some basic battles going before I focus on rendering some ugly graphics instead of nothing.

So it’s almost 5 hours in, and I’ve honestly not done much that I can show.

I have a title screen for the start of the game which I threw together while I was thinking about the actual gameplay. I have a basic state-based system for updates and rendering, and I’ve just now started on the mammoth effort of coding the gameplay.

I hope to get the basic design of the gameplay in before I have a crack and getting something up and rendering. I figure if I spend the first hours where I’m not sleep-deprived writing code, I can spend the groggy wee-hours drawing crappy graphics and making shitty music to go with it.

Should be fun

I was a bit surprised to see the theme be Tiny World. I had a whole game lined up for some of the other themes, but Tiny World had me stumped.

Luckily I figured out a way to…sort of mold my game idea around the theme, so it still fits.

I am currently well underway with coding, working on the title screen and text rendering at the moment, hoping it wont take me too much longer else I’ll not get much of the game done.

This will be my first Ludum Dare, so I’m not too sure how I’ll manage with cramming everything into the 48 hours.

I’ve decided to use Java and LWJGL. I haven’t started a game from scratch using LWJGL before, but have used it while helping out with other games, so I hope it’ll be a good learning experience for me.

Should be fun nonetheless!