Only 7 more hours until my first compo. My home office is always at the ready:

Though I’ll probably spend a lot of time in coffee shops instead, no way am I sitting in one place for two days straight.

The contest starts at 9PM local time, so I may start doing a bit of work tonight if I feel confident that I can force myself to go to bed at a decent hour.

Everybody vote for layers! I’ve got some good ideas there. 😉

Tools: Macbook, Wacom tablet, Ruby, Gosu, cfxr. Possibly chipmunk for physics but I’d rather avoid it to keep things simple. I’m gonna try and avoid 3d too, or keep it to a minimum.

Lots of coffee and green tea. I’ve stashed up on miso soup, dried fruit, and burrito fixings. I’ll try to avoid hitting the homebrew beer but I make no promises.

Tags: desk, ruby

Tags: LD #14 - Advancing Wall of Doom - 2009, motivation

So, this is my first LD. I’ll be using GameMaker to program (although if my CS4 trial didn’t run out I might’ve used Flash), and PXtone to create sounds. However, I ran into a small problem for this weekend. First, I came down with a sickness yesterday. Then, on Saturday (first day of working on the game) I have a concert to play in at about 7:00 AM. The rest of the day is free, thankfully. I’ll get most of my stuff done then. Then, the next day, I have a piano recital to attend to, AND an awards ceremony to go to. As a result, I won’t get a huge amount of production time. I’ll still try my best, though.

Looking at my archive, I find that this is my 8th competition ever… Hope that is my lucky number this time, and I can actually submit a game that I’m proud of… I usually deliver a complete game with sound and everything, but I never seem to quite nail it gameplay-wise.

So, my primary goal this time is too try to tone the ambition enough to have time to actually do level-design and such, while keeping it high enough to actually be fun to code the game.

I’ve just finished to build my framework (don’t know if that’s against of the rules or no, I’m just taking some stuff out of the way, like D3D initialization (ripped from the samples) and some stuff I took from my previous competitions (like a particle system, which I love!)). I hope that’s not against the rules, but I’m guessing it goes in the spirit of the compo, considering lots of people program with Flash and SDL and other such platforms that implement that logic from the base.

Anyway, here it is, for those that want to look at it…

Framework Source

I’m using Visual C++ with Direct3d for most stuff, FMOD for sound. For art, I’m using 3d Studio and Photoshop CS3, and for sound, I’ll hopefully use Musagi and Sfxr… If I do any 3d artwork I need to spritify, I’m using IBGen, but I doubt, since my talent with 3d is almost NULL… I wish it wasn’t (and that I had a loader of some format or anything), so I can do 3d stuff for a change, but that’s wishful thinking…

Advise for the first-timers: don’t do 3d…

Competition starts at 3am local time, so I won’t stay up waiting on theme… I’ll probably just set my alarm to 3am to see the theme and go back to sleep thinking on an idea… goooooooooo proceduralism!

Good luck everyone!

A friend of mine (Morre) have convinced/forced me to participate in this madness. I don’t know how much time I can put aside for this mission since I have an exam that I should be working on instead.

Anyways.. Hopefully I can manage to get something finished (thanks to all those motivation posters <3).

I will probably only use Slick as of custom libraries.

Good luck everyone!

Tags: java, Slick

Participated in the GlobalGameJam This year and was pretty nice, let´s see what I can in this challenge. will use Love2d game engine.

Tags: love2d, lua

This is my second Ludumdare, after entering the bulldozer tree destruction game for LD13. I didn’t really finish last time, so this time I’m determined to do better. I don’t really have many ideas figured out so far, but I guess I’ll wait for the theme and roll with it from there!

Stuff I’ll be using:
– Unity (game engine)
– Textmate (text editor)
– Photoshop
– 3D Studio MAX (yes, I am determined to do 3D again! D: )
– GarageBand (for music!)

See you on the battlefield tomorrow morning! Just five and a half hours until the kick off, I should probably get an early night!

This is going to be my first LD. I first heard about LD right after LD13 and have been looking forward to participating since that.

Since this is my first go at making a game in 48 hours I’ll stick to a language and library I know, C++ and SDL.  I’m using Visual Studio 2008 as my IDE. Other tools I’m using will be Gimp for art and sfxr for sound. Not sure about music yet.

The compo starts at 5 in the morning in my timezone. So I won’t be awake when the theme is announced. I’ll probably get up around 8 and start then.

Someone at work pointed this competition out to me, so I figured why not give it a shot.  In my usual manner, preparation has only just begun.  I still don’t even know what development environment I’m going to use.

Following what seems to be tradition, here is my workspace.  complete with cat and emergency supplies (the good stuff is in the fridge!)

Tags: desk

Tags: ld48_14, motivation

So, I didn’t get anything done last time. I’m hoping to this time, if I can think of something for the theme that hasn’t been announced yet :P. I’ll be making a really simple game with Torque Game Builder, so that I can learn to use it. But, I probably won’t get something done with that, and be forced to make a really quick game with something else.

Planned tools:

• TGB for making the game
• Paint.NET for graphics
• That’s all!

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v476/julianmh/ld14workspace.jpg

Filled with crap, it’s my desk. The CDs by my Laptop are, from lrft to right, Guns N’ Roses: Use Your Illusion II, Pennywise: About Time, and Pennywise: Full Circle. The Pennywise are there because I’m seeing The Offspring in Toronto with Pennywise opening.

Tags: deskphoto

With PlatyGame in hand, I’ve got some simplified basecode ready.

#include <PlatyGame.h>
using namespace PlatyGame;

int main (int argc, char* argv[]) {
if (!initialize())
return 1;
atexit(shutdown);
if (!initText())
return 2;
atexit(shutdownText);
if (!initSound())
return 3;
atexit(shutdownSound);

bool fullscreen = false;
if(argc > 1) {
if(strcmp(argv[1], “fullscreen”) == 0) {
fullscreen = true;
}
}

Screen screen(800, 600, “Game”, fullscreen);
if (!screen.good())
return 4;

Sound snd(“snd/platymuus.wav”);
BitmapSprite splash(“gfx/platymuus.png”);
splash_run(screen, splash, snd, 4);

return 0;
}

Tags: C++, LD #14 - Advancing Wall of Doom - 2009, PlatyGame, SDL

Not about to miss out on a real compo, not when I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks. Doches is in, though I’m still undecided on what I’ll use. First time around was Ruby, second was Python. I had pretty good success just diving in and learning python last time; thinking about doing the same for flash. Or maybe Objective-C. Who knows. Really, I guess it depends on how much I like the theme.

And come-hell-or-high-water I’m doing all the extraneous stuff this time, too. I’m doing this compo right: motivational posters, journal, food. Everything that goes into my stomach this weekend is going to be photographed and blogged in real time. You heard it here first, folks.

Also, I’m responsible for the twitterbot in #ludumdare. If it annoys you, complain to me!

Cleaned and ready to go!

Tags: desk

Just over 4 hours to go and I’m looking at the possible themes, wondering which one I can do justice to in the 5 or 6 hours that are going to be available to me this weekend. I came close to talking myself out of it, but what the hell – I’m going to go for it.

Back in the days of the BBC model B (yeah, I’m old) a procedure in BBC BASIC was defined with DEF PROC and invoked with PROC followed by the procedure name – spaces optional. Let’s just say that I won’t be calling the procedure named RASTINATE this weekend.

Tags: LD #14 - Advancing Wall of Doom - 2009, motivation

As per compo rules, I thought I’d make available some random functions in torquescript that I might use since I don’t feel like rewriting such nonsense.  They provide stuff like “generic button” behavior, gotoMount, changing the mouse cursor, having a splash screen, and “fade in / out”.  No game code in there, I swear!  Just some nice utility functions that I’ve come to rely on a bit heavily.

MouseOverCursorChange.cs belonged to Stanley D. Chatman, and

splashScreen.cs belonged to Mike Lilligreen, both of which were freely available TGB resources, and I may have modified either of them (so don’t blame anything on those two guys!).

I put everything in a zip in case anyone wants to take a peek: The Zip

-Tim

Tags: libraries, rules

Not for the game, for your development work!

If you have a Nico Nico Douga account, go search for the tag 作業用BGM.

More music than you can shake a stick at. Also, the downtime when the current mix ends and you’re looking for a new one helps to clear your head.

Say hi to my desk, which I hope to see only when I do Photoshop work:

Other than that, coffee shops and the university will probably be where I am most of the time, meeting up with pythong and mathias. Wee!

Tools

• Ruby (1.8, sadly)
• the Gosu library—<plug>just released version 0.7.13!</plug>
• TextMate
• Photoshop + Wacom
• cFXR
• MacBook
• actually
• I’ll make this list
• a bit longer to make it look
• like I am well-prepared

So be very afraid! … *runs to the mall to buy some pizza*

Tags: desk, gosu, ruby