Wow, I didn’t realize it had been so long since I entered one of these! Looking at my archives tells me it’s been two years since my last participation in LD27! Life isn’t always permissive towards shutting away for three days, and twice I’ve had to choose between Ludum Dare and Prom. This spring it wasn’t just Prom, but the ACT as well. I love making games with you guys, but not enough to skip that. If you guys schedule the spring Dare on my prom weekend again, I’m going to be convinced it’s a conspiracy against me.

Just because I haven’t jammed with you guys doesn’t mean I’ve been idle, however. I’ve been learning a lot (both in programming and elsewhere) and have done a lot of work on personal side-projects. In fact, one of them is incredibly relevant to the compo here!

I’m planning to enter the compo with my game in C++, with a Windows and Linux support (I hope, I’ve never tried to distribute a Linux program before). I’ll be building off my “SkilLib” engine, which I’ve been working on (slowly) over the course of a year or so. It’s an entity-component based system and it’s not like anything I’ve ever made before, but a while back I made a proof-of-concept clone of Breakout (on GitHub here) and it seems to make more sense than the traditional inheritance model. Of course my implementation may be totally hacked together, but that’s kind of half the fun. I just made my repo for SkilLib public, and I plan on adding to it some more to make it more feature-complete before the jam begins. As for some deeper tech info, it references the Simple OpenGL Image Loader (SOIL) as well as GLFW and GLEW.

While I’ve gotten incredibly unlucky so far in LD dates since 27 all those jams ago, this one comes the weekend before school starts, so I won’t even have anything else to worry about. Maybe it’s a good sign. I look forward to jamming with you all once again!