This Ludum Dare, I convinced a bunch of friends to join in on the fun and we got together to go through the pain and joy as a group.

We made an entry each, as per compo rules, sitting around a table in the offices of “ACN Services”, a company ran by Jail-By’s dad. This allowed us to have enough room to have computers set up, one each, one music/sound design machine (with software and hardware that Minimicro and I have), and a machine with a webcam pointed at us, and we called ourselves “Team #define true false” or #dtf, and we made a website at http://xi.gd/ld23

So this is a dual post-mortem, with a “What went well” and a “What went wrong” for my game, and for the #dtf event.

What went well for #dtf :

• Jamming with friends is FUN, programming fails are so much funnier when you have other geeks to share them with in real time.
• The location was great, we had plenty of room, tables, chairs, a kitchen, a shower and space to sleep.
• We ate well, we had plenty of fruit juice, and we had music playing all the way through on Minimicro’s awesome monitoring speakers.
• Four of us (Minimicro, Jail-By, Flower Power and Niavlys (in absentia)) were on their first Ludum Dare event, and also their first game development. I feel they learnt a lot, and are hooked.
• All in all, a bonding moment, great fun, cheese, music, beer, coffee, thousands of lines of code, 3 technologies (Lua/Löve, C++/SFML, JS/HTML5), random webcam shoutouts, fits of laughter.

What went wrong for #dtf:

• Sunday was the first round of the elections in France, so Niavlys couldn’t be with us at ACN Services, which was a bit of a shame.
• The internet connection was a little dodgy, which made uploading a bit of a struggle, and caused a few problems.

And now a little bit about Robot in the Garden.

What went well:

• I managed to write quite a bit of reusable code, and I learnt how to actually do object-oriented in Lua
• I doubled the size of my character from last event, and now he has 20 pixels of lush, high definition detail, compared to the measly 10 pixels of screen space of the main character of LD#22′s Solitas Exodae. Which meant I could make a 4 pixel highlight and a 2 pixel shadow, bringing this character to an unrivaled level of realism.
• I’m pretty happy with how the dynamic light and grass growing worked out, it was an idea I had in the back of my head for a while, will do it again.
• The computers were fun too. Since functions are first-class citizens in Lua, I could make a generic computer and pass the functions I want the computers to execute as an attribute.

What went wrong:

• I SCREWED UP AGAIN! I only started on gameplay around 10 hours before the end, so that means I failed on my promise to bring more gameplay into the game.
• I wanted to implement at least another few game mechanics, such as a gardening thingy (not sure how that would work), and a puzzle that used the computers. But you’re stuck with the two silly games you have there.
• The coins don’t do anything either.

Hey guys can we have “Senseless violence” next time?

Hey guys, we’re #dtf and we just woke up.

Hailing from the south of France, we’re a bunch of mates participating in Ludum Dare, most of us for the first time. #dtf hope to produce a grand total of five games (one each, naturally) and you can see how that goes over here : http://xi.gd/ld23/

“He took his vorpal sword in hand:

Long time the manxome foe he sought”

– Jabberwocky, Lewis Carrol

Yes, I woke up this morning quoting the Jabberwocky, stared at my coffee, fell back to sleep, woke up again, noticed the pain at the back of my throat, and groggily had to admit to myself : “I’m ill”

I’m still in, don’t worry about that, but I just thought the “I’m in”/”I’m ill” parallel was pretty cool.

After my (scandalously awful) LD#21 entry (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=1561) and my (controversially awesome) LD#22 entry (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=1561), I’m in for LD#23

Please note that I promised a “Gameplay to the max” entry this time round (in this post http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/12/19/you-want-a-post-mortem-i-got-a-post-mortem-for-ya/), so keep your eyes peeled, and hold me to my promise.

My dad asked me to make sure that the atmosphere would still be there, so I hereby promise that I will not sacrifice atmosphere for gameplay.

So wish me luck, and a good luck to everybody else getting ready for this (hopefully epic) 10 year anniversary LD#23 extraordinaire!