I’ve written up a post-mortem for my 48hr comp entry, Solar Sailor.

Play & rate the game here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=10456

… and then read the post-mortem here:
http://codervil.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/solar-sailor-post-mortem.html

I’d also like to say a great big THANK YOU! to everyone who’s tried the game & left a comment so far. This is the first time I’ve put an entry into Ludum Dare and the community here is wonderful!

Ready for your playing pleasure, at long last, my first official completed Ludum Dare entry: Solar Sailor.

You can jump straight in and play it.

There were a bunch of extra things I would have done if I had time: better AI, more playtesting, better artwork for the planets (any artwork, actually), etc…  But I guess that’s true for all of us. Looking forward to getting comments, criticism, sleep and – most of all – a chance to play all the other amazing looking games everyone’s been posting!

So after a slow start I’ve got something that’s finally starting to look like a game. It isn’t one yet – you can’t win or lose and the map is randomly generated for now – but it looks like there’s a chance it’ll actually become one before the deadline expires. Whew!

I’ve been posting details on my blog, but this is what it looks like so far:

As you can see, it’s a bit light on artwork right now. I’m still working on the game mechanics; hopefully I’ll have time left for some drawing after that.

I struggled a bit to find an idea for this theme so most of my time so far has been spent brainstorming. But I’ve got an idea now & I’m forging ahead. Here’s where I’ve got to:

Pretty basic, but at least it’s a start. If you want to read more about my progress, I’m blogging about it here: http://codervil.blogspot.co.uk/

I’ve already declared myself in, but now I know which tools I’ll be using so here they are:

• Code: Javascript & WebGL, with some open source helper libraries (see below).
• Graphics: Pixelmator, Autodesk Sketchbook Express, Nuke
• IDE: Vim, Chrome‘s built in developer tools & WebGL Inspector
• Source control: Git & Github
• Webserver: either Dropbox or Github Pages

Sound is my weakest area, so I’ll only try to put some if I have time left at the end (ha! unlikely!). If I do, I’ll probably just use Garage Band for music and record myself beatboxing into the mic or something for sound effects.

I’ve found a couple of really nice helper libraries for javascript, which I plan to use too:

• Brandon Jones’ gl-matrix (I have my own fork which adds vec2 operations).
• David Bau’s seedable random function.
• The Khronos Group’s webgl-utils.js.

I’ve got some WebGL learner projects in my github account which I’ll probably copy and paste from too.

One thing I don’t have yet is a good blogging platform. Any recommendations? I want to be able to post screen shots and code snippets of my progress & that’s about all.

So I think that’s everything. Can’t wait to get started!

This will be my first “official” Ludum Dare entry. I kind of took part unofficially in #22 & had a blast! Learnt a lot too. One of the things I learnt was that packaging issues can suck up a lot of your time if you write your game in C++, so this time I’m gonna use JavaScript and WebGL. Hopefully that’ll mean someone besides me gets to play it. So yeah, can’t wait!