Day 1 of Ludum Dare 22 will end soon and I think my game is far enough to get it finished.
All the core programing stuff is nearly done. What do we have?

• Tiled background which can be leaded by an image. Translation between pixel color and
  tile is done by a mapping table so I’m very flexible.
• Sprites (not yet animated) can move around and have collision detecton implemented.
• Background and foreground are repeated images which have a delay to the camera position
  so we have a 3d-effect
• Keyboard input and action system is implemented so we can easily add new features.

And what are our todos?

• Of course, there must be a really cute and stupid story. I will do this now.
• Sprite animation.
• Sequence function for story mode.
• Cute and stupid paintings for character, tiles and story.
• Sound and music .

You can play the current version at
http://dl-web.dropbox.com/u/2720564/LudumDare22/index.html

It’s been.. 9 hours! I’ve amassed 500+ screenshots and settled on something achievable! But this is just a milestone..

I have myself a temporary menu/state handler, and a good deal of prototype code – I spent 2 hours after the theme was announced brainstorming and had a lot of ideas to balance out! Here are some ideas which came out that I rejected:

• Implication of danger/attack (intense atmosphere)
• Items of power (balanced gameplay is important to me)
• Paranoia
• Emotional independence
• Clones
• Dying if alone
• Wildcard: honeytraps

Here are the idea I’m adopting:

• Survival
• Trails (tracking or tracing paths)
• Distractions/focus
• Context sensitivity
• Separation

I made some concept art with some distorted perspective which I’m growing fond of.. I think an extra dimension will bring it more to life?

Either way – sleep is next on my agenda.

So I figure I may have about 5 more hours of game dev in me today. My goal is to get as much code finished as possible so that tomorrow can be mainly 12-14 hours or so of game tuning/polish, graphics, sound, and music. We’ll see what happens!

After being otherwise occupied for several hours and eating tea, it was good to get back to work on the whodunnit. In the last few hours I’ve not written any code, nor drawn any art, but I have produced a prodigal amount of waste paper. The end result is that the algorithms which drive the scenarios (it’s dynamically generated each time) seem to be working – at least on paper.

The camera’s gone walkabouts, so pictures of the mess will be up later. Tomorrow is implementing everything, but for now I’m off to bed.

Hi there. My name is Chris, I’m the guy responsible for this game, and this is my first Ludum Dare ever. I’m going to use a library which I haven’t touched for literally years (pygame), in a language which I hardly ever use (Python). I only decided to enter half an hour ago (after the contest started – yes, I’m that hardcore), so I’m completely unprepared.

No matter. I’ve probably got pygame installed… do I? Oh yeah, I do. That’s good. So… how does one use this, again? Meh. I’m sure there’s a tutorial on the net somewhere.

Did I mention that I’m going to a party tomorrow? That will take up pretty much the whole day, and mean that I probably won’t be up and functional before noon the day after, which is the deadline. So I only have tonight available, and it’s currently 6pm here. Factoring in an hour for dinner and assuming a responsible bedtime of 10pm, that means I have… three hours.

Hmm. Oh well. At least there’s crap-all on TV.

Maybe I should stop typing English and start typing code right about now.

Any second now….

…wait for i

and kicking. It also runs.

I’ve decided upon a type of who-dunnit-mystery-game (minimal clues), though I’ve yet to pin down the details. I’m going for a very minimalist art style (obviously), but also a fairly minimalistic puzzle style gameplay. More updates as I figure things out.

Anyhow, here’s what’s on screen after hour 5.

To add to the conglomeration of photos, here’s my workspace for the moment.