Update 1:

I decided to go for option 1, the ultra-simple 3d modeller.

The other options didn’t set my “ooh shiny!” reflex ablaze, although they are probably significantly more doable in the time frame.

In the same vein as Ludum Dare I have given it a Latin name - Carpe Lutum (Seize the Clay).

I have put all the woes I had with Flex in LD12 behind me - i had so much trouble because I was trying to treat it like normal Flash, and it will resist you every step of the way if you try that. Use it like an app platform and it purrs like a kitten.

Here is a screenshot of my interface as of hour 5:

I’m sort of a climber. And pondering about the teme, i stumbled upon Spiderman! The real one. Alain Robert.

You will not be Alain ofcourse, unless you finish the game. Then you get the Alain Robert award of stickyness. Or something.

The game will be something like this: You have to drag someones hands/feet to different position on the building/tower and if it’s good, he won’t fall down. During the climb there will be numerous hassles like birds, window cleaners, office workers, and policeman trying to stop your tour the force.

This might be a bit too difficult for a first game, but trying doesn’t hurt. It will also involve some physics i guess, and i wonder how good i am with that.

So this will be it. I wonder where i’ll be tomorrow.

Update: I might do something different altogether.

I’m up an about, and while the theme wasn’t something as good as say ‘pacifist’, it’s still very decent. Compared to the theme of the last LD it has super mega combo greatness. Only drawback I see is that there could be about 50 tower defense games, and 10 x-jumpy games. So I have no interest in making that, at least.

No, instead, the first idea I had was kind of like Civ., but instead of cities there are towers, and all players have only one tower. Then they need to expand the towers influence to gain more land, and then by exploiting the land keep adding levels to the tower. First I thought like these could by 20th century skyscrapers. Then I thought that perhaps it’d be better to set it in older times and make it like the Tower of Babel. First to reach the sky wins. So that’s the idea so far, yes.

For now, I’ll start by writing some hex playing field code, I believe, and do some test art. I think I will use the D programming language this time.

I finally have an idea of a game. And not only that, I have an intro for the game ready. So now I just need to make the game!

The idea is that you should drown cows. They come flying in from one side of the screen, and you must catch them, and make them bounce into the other side where there’s water. Otherwise the cows will die as they hit the ground, and we don’t want that, now do we?

The intro is a bit weird as to fit the game and the theme well. You can try it, but maybe it’d be better to wait for the rest of the game, too, so you can enjoy it all together. Here’s an image of it to inspect while you wait:

Here are all the things I can remember of the million I considered for this ridiculous theme (Weird/Unexpected/Surprise):

- Plan a surprise party. The challenge is getting it all done and everyone hidden before the victim returns from being kept out

- Whack-a-mole variations. One of them a surprise party one (wife’s idea): Kids you have to keep whacking into place so they aren’t visible when the surprisee arrives, as they constantly fidget and want to get up.

- A mountain goat hopping around on a mountain, trying to scare birds. No, I don’t know why. I just thought controlling a mountain goat that hops around would be fun.

- A stealth game where your goal is to sneak up on people and give them presents or some other surprise. I realized after a moment that this is that one Burger King game.

- A web version of Scattergories. You’re given a letter and a topic (”Actors that start with A”). You can enter 5 things that fit, and you get points for each one you pick that nobody else did. See how that fits the theme? It’s quite clever. The real challenge here is incorporating peer review so that you can’t just enter “GHJDKHS” and win.

Anyway, I have settled on a web game, sort of similar to Andy Schatz’s conversation game. It’s a text adventure where you roam around a maze, and when you get to an empty room, you can add your own on. That will undoubtedly result in weird, unexpected surprises. Each room can contain a riddle to open one of its doors, the content of which is entirely up to the room builder.

Obviously, verifying the appropriateness of submissions will be a high priority.

Checked the winning theme this morning (around 7 hours after the start of the competition) and my mind was just blank. I opened up GraphicsGale, drew a bomb which I was quite pleased with, and that was it. No ideas popped into my head, and aside from deciding I wanted to use the bomb I’d drawn, I had nothing to work on or with. I then went out for the afternoon.

I got home 3 hours ago and started doodling around, until about an hour ago I finally have an idea.

It involves trying to detonate all of the bombs on a level by sliding them around so that when one explodes, it ignites the fuses on any unlit bombs next to it. At the start of the level one or more of the bombs will already be lit, and to make things more interesting, the bombs can have different length fuses.

I’m hoping to be able to come up with a range of levels of varying difficulty, but there’s only just over a day left, I want to get at least some some sleep tonight, need to get to bed early tomorrow, and I’m in the mood for coding rather than working out level designs, so I’ll just have to hope I can get the bulk of this written tonight and in the morning, to leave me a couple of hours early evening tomorrow to put together some levels.

I’ll be coding this in FreeBASIC and just using the standard graphics library, so it’ll be cross platform and work without any dependencies, unless I also find the time to add sounds effects and music of course,  in which case it’ll need FMOD.

Got to pop out for an hour now, but when I get back I’ll put together a quick mock-up screen.

agh! i’ve got crap-all so far and i can’t seem to think of anything that hasn’t already been done already! if i can’t think of anything decent by tomorrow morning i’m going to have to play my Come From Behind Desperation Game card.

 http://www.slayradio.org/home.php for the win!

Perhaps not much of a reaction though. Here is my first sketch, I haven’t decided if I’ll do this yet.

Im thinking of using a physics lib on this one.