The prototype I’ve got as of the end of day 2. You can move an avatar around, and there are two screens, which you can move between.

Mac version
Windows version

In a sense, the game here or at least the code is “done”, at this point it’s just making more screens. However I’m very worried about time. I’d wanted to be further along by now than I actually am.

I just spent the last two hours on an incredibly disheartening, basically failed attempt to add music, most of it spent digging through boxes desperately trying to find a 1/4-inch audio cable. (I eventually managed to jury rig a cable by plugging a bunch of adapters together; I then discovered one of the cables was broken.) By the end of all this I was very loopy but I had an ogg file, which then wouldn’t play; after half an hour, and crazy lengths like rolling back vcs, trying to figure out why I couldn’t get any ogg files to play, I realized I had typed a line like “bgmusic = new Sound()”. Problems here: (1) that is a line of C++; (2) the program is written in Lua. At this point I realized I was badly messing myself up by trying to do this without sleep. So: Sleep now

Last night before I went to bed, I fed Drawception the prompt “Ludum Dare”.

This is what happened.

(Drawception is a web version of Eat Poop You Cat, it’s a telephone game where random players alternate trying to describe a picture with a phrase and draw a picture from a phrase without being able to see any of the words or images that lead up to it.)

Current windows build (as of 1:43 AM saturday morning)
Current mac build (as of 1:43 AM saturday morning)
Current source code (continuously up to date)

Current build is not interactive, it will display and animate the first of the three images above. I don’t actually know what my game mechanic is yet. I thought I knew when I started, now I don’t.

Currently concerned that this may wind up being a paint program and not a game. Maybe that’s okay.

What you are looking at is this running full-screen in your GPU.

This is gonna be my third Ludum Dare. I’ve actually participated in the last two– for LD21 I made an intricate and fairly complete prototype of a game I may go back and “finish” someday, for LD22 I wound up busy all weekend and made a bizarre generative sound demo on the last day. I think I’m getting better at this whole game jam thing– since I did LD21 I’ve also participated in two of the Pirate Karts and also the Molyjam. (You can find the full list of my games here.)

I am planning to make my game this weekend, whatever it is, with Polycode, a library I’ve been moving my development to over the last year in the hopes it would let me write part-C++-part-Lua programs with little fuss. There has admittedly been some fuss. Polycode is alpha and has some usability issues, so I spent most of my free time the last few days trying to clean up Polyconsole, my get-started-with-Polycode project (which has some niceties like a debug console), partly so that it would be in a good shape for me to use for LD, and partly so that I could then write up a nice blog post and post my tools before LD so that maybe other people could use them. And, well… I did get Polyconsole actually in what I would think of as a “ready to show to others” state before LD started! Here’s what the demo I’ve been working on with it looks like right now:

…except… that was all I had time for before LD, meaning I didn’t write any documentation. And without documentation and build instructions I don’t think my code will be much use to anyone. But, if you want to see the codebase I’m gonna be working from this weekend, see here. I’ll write a more useful blog post about what “Polyconsole” is after LD. You’ll have to take my word for it: It’s TOTALLY AWESOME.

Anyway: Ludum Dare 23. I’M IN