So hyped to be entering Ludum Dare! This will be my seventh time doing it and I’ve managed to produce five fully-working games in my past six attempts.

I will be entering the compo and using a completely new stack of technologies that I have never really touched before (until this last week or two I guess):

Framework: Phaser

My first ever entry was a Flash game since I’m an old Flash developer. After that I moved on to Game Maker which I really loved and haven’t given up on. My motivation for the switch was to get into a more multi-platformed and open source model. I’ve only been looking into this for about a week but it seems like a solid, if opinionated, framework.

IDE: Visual Studio Code

Not open source, but very multi-platform being that this software was built on the amazing Electron platform with HTML/CSS/JavaScript. I’ve only been messing around with this for two weeks but have been VERY impressed. It is very early (still in Alpha) but I hope this goes on to replace the existing Visual Studio eventually. It’s lightweight like a text editor (fast, simple UI) but does heavy lifting IDE things (debugging, intellisense) when you need it to. It’s also got built-in node.js and git support (my version control of choice).

Language: TypeScript

It is very rare when something makes me say “Holy shit, this is awesome!” in the development world, but getting to know TypeScript has definitely done that for me. I work with JavaScript every day at work and while it is becoming better and better every year, TypeScript makes it feel like an honest-to-goodness heavy duty, modern language. Just the fact that you immediately see inconsistencies and errors instantly in your editor before running code OR compiling it makes you much more productive opposed to vanilla JavaScript. The type system also makes it easier to logically organize your code and is really powerful. It also works perfectly with existing JavaScript code (type definitions for existing libraries, yay!) and is open source to boot.

OS: Mac OS X

I work with Windows at work but have fond memories of doing web development in OS X in the past. I wouldn’t call myself an Apple fanboy but I just find working on OS X a little more pleasant. This will be my first game development of any kind on a Mac and I’m looking forward to it!