Ahoy sailors!

Nice so see so much activity here already! The theme was revealed at 4 am in Finland, so my first hours were sweet (I think I dreamt of some delicious cinnamon pastry at some point) but not so productive – after a hard-working week I don’t get up very early, even if it means losing a few hours of productivity

I should make a game about cinnamon pastry.

Now that I’m finally more or less awake, it’s time to get rolling! I think I’ve got my idea down – it’ll be a short but sweet RPG where you can only ever loot one thing. There will be a boss and after that you’ll be awarded points that will be calculated from these components:

•  the time it took you to complete the game
• overkill damage (the leftover damage of a killing blow)
• amount of killed enemies
• amount of player HP left
• the value of your loot – you could skip getting a helpful combat item and instead take a surefire point boost

Now that’s the starting point, I will probably narrow it down a lot. Also the balancing might be too time-consuming, we’ll see…

My roadmap for today will be this:

1. I’ll start with a simple screen with the player that can be moved.
2. Add an enemy, implement HP and damage actions.
3. Add an “inventory” of one possible item that can have a visual representation and some stat
4. Make the enemy drop the item
5. IMPLEMENT BOSS FIGHT LOL!!! …I might not have time for a proper boss fight so I’ll go with a bigger enemy that has more HP and more damage, and see if I have time to code more gimmicks to the fight.

After that (if I manage to get it done at all) I’ll focus on drawing some graphics and making or using CC-licensed sounds/music.

I’ll make the game in Java using LibGDX. I thought about using Unity, but I’m afraid I might end up learning the new 2D stuff for the whole weekend. I’ve been lately getting into libgdx and at the moment I think it requires the least amount of time spent in learning the ropes – C++ and SFML are also nice but with Eclipse I get to cut the amount of time spent in boilerplate code by a lot. Also, libgdx provides a desktop, Android and browser build with the same base code, so that’s very nice.

For graphics I’ll use Photoshop, sounds not yet sure (might end up getting CC-licensed stuff since I don’t have a lot of experience with sounds and music) and for fonts and stuff I’ll use Shoebox.

Allright, time to get started! Happy Ludum Dare everyone!