Thinking about it now… my first game was really bad.
| LD23 | Tiny World |
Description:
Simple game where you have to kill yourself with various different objects in the game. Each death makes the world smaller until it’s not really a world anymore
Thoughs:
This theme and my game were both really bad. I remember being excited about entering my first Ludum Dare. Thanks, Notch for indirectly introducing me to LD48. When I saw the theme I was dissapointed. I thought “What kind of theme is this?” I still think it was a bad theme. But the game was worse. Seriouly? Did I really use tiles that were just a dark gray square and a light gray square? The characters were seriously just faces with squares? I didn’t even have a background. Wow this game was bad
| LD24 | Evolution |
Description:
You play as four different kinds of bugs. I think there was ant, fly, spider and something else. For the ant you collect food, for the fly you dodge walls and for the spider you put spiderwebs and catch flies.
Thoughts:
This game was significantly better. I think this theme was the coolest of all the themes that I’ve made games for. I don’t really have many thoughts on this game, mostly because I don’t remember it too well.
| LD25 | You are the Villain |
Description:
This one I remember more than LD24. I still don’t remember the story, though. I think that the fairies were evil and they hunted unicorns for their laser horns. Anyway, you play as the fairy. You get a laser horn and hunt the good princess and her cat
Thoughts:
I don’t really know what I was thinking when I came up with this game. I like it, but it’s weird. I think I used a random level generator for this one. It was probably a really simple one. I think I generated a point at the left edge and to generate the next point I added a random number between -2 and 2 to that number. It was weird… I don’t think I had a very unique interpretation of the theme, but I don’t really care that much
| LD26 | Minimalism |
I thought this theme was so bad I didn’t enter this one. LD48 games are minimalist without a theme saying so! I can’t imagine how this got picked for the theme!
| LD27 | 10 Seconds |
Description:
A roguelike where you fight monsters and gain wealth while searching for the 10 seconds.
Thoughts:
I hada really weird interpretation of the theme here. I didn’t really want to do anything time based because I usually hate timing games, so I decided that seconds were these weird trophy/sortof things in this universe and built the game about that. I tried a roguelike for this one. I think it came out okay, but the level design got really stupid at the end, the javax.sound.sampled API is horrible, and it wasn’t clear enough. Even so, after the Ludum Dare I liked this game so much I considered remaking it with Flixel and adding more story and that sort of thing. I was originally going to have a story where these ten seconds sortof held time together. I might’ve actually put that in the game. Now that I think about it, it’s too similar to the story of one of those Pokemon mystery dungeon games. I think.
| LD28 | You Only Get One |
Description:
Another roguelike where you go through dungeons, fight monsters, get armor, and reach the end.
Thoguhts:
This one was really loosesly tied to the theme. I felt like making another roguelike for this one, soI made a roguelike and barely tied it to the theme at the end with the statement “You (only get) won!” I don’t like how similar it was to my last LD, but it actually had sound and decent graphics. I had some weird things in it. Not sure how many people noticed, but you can equip the heads that enemies drop just like a helmet. Actually, I don’t know if I mentioned at all that there was an inventory system.
What will I keep in mind this Ludum Dare?
Sound is pretty important, but it’s probably better to not have any sound than to have really bad sound
Don’t make three roguelikes in a row
Let the theme guide you, not direct you
Technical things to keep in mind:
Don’t bother rendering offscreen objects
Solid collision is important
As cool as Java is, it’s not optimized for pixel operations
I don’t really have to keep a lot of these in mind, since this time I’m going to be using the HaxePunk + OpenFL + Haxe trio. I’ve used Java for all of my previous games, so it’ll be nice to try something different. I’ve made my own engine for all my previous games, but I’m not very good at keeping things efficient. I’ll try to collide against all the entities instead of selecting the ones that I might actually collide with. I’ll render offscreen objects because I don’t feel like not rendering them.
Using HaxePunk should make my games faster. OpenFL and Haxe should make my games more portable (than Java? Wow!) and the combination should help push me towards doing something new
I’ve decided to enter in the Jam this time with one of my friends. He’s never done Ludum Dare before, but he’s getting in to making games and he’ll help with creativity, graphics, and sound. He might also help with someprogramming, but it’s not his area of expertise
Now, the tools we’re using:
Art: aseprite/GIMP/My custom sprite editor if I get it working enough
Sound: sfxr/bfxr/audacity
Music: lmms/schismtracker.
OS: Arch Linux.
Language: Haxe.
Framework: OpenFL.
Engine: HaxePunk.
Editor: emacs.
Physics: My simple physics/nape depending on the game.
Planned platforms: Flash, Windows, Linux, Mac, and maybe android depending on the game.
One thousand words. Try putting this in a word/charactercounter. I think it’s pretty cool
