Saturday was both a disaster and an extremely productive day. On the positive side, I was able to hammer out lot and lots of code and complete everything on my todo list for the day.

On the negative side, I wasted many hours sorting out issues to things that shouldn’t have needed to be sorted out. Included in the problems was one in which my ftp program was uploading a text file as ASCII when it was being read locally as Unicode. This resulted in the game working fine locally, but as soon as I or anyone else tried it online, the thing stopped working almost entirely.

I also had a code issue in which I wasted nearly two hours trying to sort out. In the end, I decided to recode the offending block of code. Thirty minutes later, I had a perfectly working second version.

A little frustrating that the 2-4 hours I wasted may have made next next 11 hours much much easier, but such is the nature of the Ludum Dare, I suppose. At this point, I’m treating my first Ludum Dare like an Ironman. I’m not here to win, I just want to cross the finish line. Regardless of what happens today, I will cross the finish line.

On to what I have so far:

Expanded the level a bit more to allow for testing. My first trap has been implemented – As noted by the /0 block. Monsters are functional and working.

I feel I Should expand upon my theme idea a bit. The basic premise for the game is that the player is a Virus, escaping the Anti-viruses of the system. Due to lack of time, the end-goal will be to survive the longest before being overrun by the anti-viruses. To aid in the escape, the player will have access to 3 traps that they can lay. Essentially the traps all have an effect on the anti-viruses chasing you. My current goal is to have 3 different anti-viruses with different behavior for the final release.

With the 11 hour deadline looming, I feel as if I’ve already wasted too much time writing this blog post. Sheesh, back to coding.