Here’s a time lapse from last weekend’s coding/graphics/sfx/music binge, also known as Ludum Dare! The soundtrack in the video is the music I created for the game. You can check out the game here!

As an added bonus, here’s the original “design document” I carefully crafted before writing a single line of code.

Woohoo, my second Ludum Dare game (and pretty much the second game I’ve ever programmed) is done! With the help of some cuba libres, I managed to complete the last few missing pieces: the player sprite, the music and a little sprinkling of gameplay balancing. Composing the music was pretty painless and it took only less than two hours. It’s a pretty simple tune but a simple tune suits the simple game, I would say. It’s probably a little too downtempo regarding the pace of the game but regardless of that I think that the deep dub atmosphere suits the game well.

Anyways, check out the entry here. It’s Flash so no need to jump through any extra hoops to get playing.

Okay, my game is now pretty much in beta shape and you can try it out here (Flash required). I might still do some polishing and balancing but the most glaring omission is still the missing player sprite.

And if I happen to come across some extra energy still, I might do some music too.

I’ve had some excellent progress yesterday evening and this morning. Yesterday I had a few bouts when I was completely stuck with programming for a while and I was very close on giving up. Luckily I pulled through by resorting to dirty hacks since right now I’m feeling pretty good about the game!

Snow Globe Kerfuffle (the current name of the game) is in a shape that you could call it a game already since I’ve got a goal for the player (destroy catapults and then get to next level) and failure condition (if too much of the globe breaks or if player is hit, it’s game over). I revamped the tile graphics to have a more idyllic snow globe scene for the player to wreck. Next up: do more levels and make some audio. Oh, and the player itself is still missing a sprite.

The visual experience is already much better and there’s loads of functionality in: player can shoot buildings and the glass sphere. If the sphere breaks, it stops the player from moving over the gaps so once I get the enemies to shoot back (pictured here in yellow-green), it’ll be almost like a game already!

I’m making some new progress despite being severely slowed down by my coding “skills”. Here’s a screenshot:

So, this’ll be my second ludum dare (unless I get cold feet after seeing the theme). You can check out my first game here. The first time around I used LÖVE but this time I think I’ll try to do the game using Actionscript/Flixel. Graphics tools will be Photoshop (and possibly Modo if I need to render something) and audio/music will be done with Ableton Live. Coding is definitely my weakest area and this second ludum dare will probably be the second game I’ve programmed, ever.