First of all, here’s the timelapse: Making Metagun timelapse

This LD was timed extremely well for me, hitting one of the few free weekends I have these days.
During the voting rounds, I hoped for Skyscrapers, so I could do a life-in-the-city simulation that I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time. Of course, it didn’t win, but instead the somewhat hard to work with “Enemies as Weapons” won. Because the theme gets announced at like 4 am my time, I was asleep when it got announced, but I managed to wake myself up at about 5 am to see what it was. I stayed up for a couple of hours, thinking about what kind of game I could make, but couldn’t think of anything interesting.

So I got some more sleep. When I got up, I almost felt like giving up. There just wasn’t anything interesting I could do with the theme. But since I had promised people I’d livestream it, I eventually got online and started brainstorming. Not long thereafter, I got the idea of having a gun that shot other people who shot back at the player. I figured it’d make for an interesting platformer mechanic if you yourself were responsible for the dangers in the level.

And strangely, after that, I never ran into any real problems. I implemented some basic physics and rendering framework, then added some graphics, and got started on level design pretty early. I added new features to the game as the levels demanded it, which both meant that new features would get introduced gradually, but also that I didn’t waste any time implementing stuff that never got used.
I felt relatively finished with the game when there was about six hours left, so I spent a few hours just polishing it and adding some fluff features like an ingame credits list and such.

I think I got a bit lucky this time around by finding an idea that fit my style pretty well, but I also felt some experience from old Ludum Dares help me guess how long certain features would take to implement.

What went right:
Almost everything went surprisingly well! I had a great flow this time.

What could’ve been improved:
As usual there is no music. But worse, the jumping still feels a bit off. I should’ve spent more time early on to really nail it.

There’s a big release the Monday immediately after LD, but I care not! I will do this!

We’ve also got a board game/ginger bread baking day planned with friends, but I still care not! Making games and eating junk takes precedence!

I will be developing my game in Java, using Eclipse.
For art, I will use Paint.net and quite possibly my wacom tablet thing + photoshop.
For sound, sfxr, of course. DrPetter is a wonderful human being for that tool.

I’ll record the entire thing using chronolapse, and stream it live on livestream.
Socially, I’ll be tweeting and hanging out in the irc channel, and I’ll try to post something on here every now and then.
Food will be fatty and salty, and there will be red bull.

Good luck, everybody! I’ll see you next weekend!

As usual, I’m working in Java, and I make everything from scratch. I decided to go with a purely billboarded sprite based 3d engine this time, and I’m making some kind of dungeon crawler a la Dungeon Master or Eye of the Beholder. I’ve got much of the engine implemented, and it’s about time to start working on the actual game now.

The plan is to build game areas, and add the required game features as I go along, so I won’t implement monsters until the map actually requires monsters.

Click here to try the latest version. Use WASD + Q +E. There’s not much gameplay yet.

I’m also streaming the entire thing live here. There’s no sound because I have a cold, but there is soothing music.

I uploaded a Timelapse of the Chambered to YouTube!
I recorded this at one pic every four seconds, and it ended up being about 14 minutes at 60 fps, so this video is skipping quite a few frames.

So when’s the next LD? I miss it already.

For some reason I decided to really limit myself technically. The screen is 160 x 120 pixels, and the only available graphics is drawing four color 8×8 pixels sprites. Each color index can be one of 240 different colors in each sprite, and the sprites can be flipped along the x and/or the y axis.

Click here to play!
(Click the applet, then use the arrow keys)
((No gameplay yet))

The idea is to make sort of a 2d Minecraft or a harvest moon clone, where you wake up on some shore and have to do the best you can with the tools you find on the island.

The last couple of weeks, I’ve been playing around with javascript (compiled from Dart) and WebGL, and this is my chance to make some kind of game using that combination. I will be streaming it as usual, and hopefully making some kind of timelapse as well.

I’ve been doing LD on and off for a long time, and it’s some of the most fun game development I’ve ever experienced. Sure, there might not be enough sleep, and the food might not be the healthiest in the world, and the final hour or two is a frantic scramble to get rid of the most crippling bugs and trying to polish things up enough to make it all seem at least a little bit game like, but it’s all worth it. The sense of completion when/if you finish the game is incredible.

I can’t want to see what games people make with whatever almost certainly horrible theme we end up with.

==> Play now! (WebGL required) <==

 
I found this theme very challenging. All ideas were either way too narrow to be fun, or way too broad to be restricting at all. While I was trying to figure out what kind of game to make, I implemented the WebGL framework I needed in Dart, which involves quite a lot of heavy lifting, including having to write shaders. WebGL gives you almost nothing for free.

Once I had the framework up and running, I had no idea what game to make, so I temporarily ditched what I had to try out another idea. That idea sucked, so I went back to the original mess and slowly over the day turned it into a game about santa claus having to gather wood in order to be able to create all the toys he will soon distribute.

Tomorrow, I will tweak and try to balance the gameplay, add a titlescreen and a game over screen, and look into getting some sounds in there. For once, I’m not worried about running out of time.

For the first time ever in Ludum Dare, I finished my game early. It’s called Last Minute Christmas Chopping, and you can check it out here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=398

After wasting a lot of time yesterday on getting sidetracked with another game idea and not having any idea what to make, it all kinda just fell in place and the game got made pretty quickly after that. I got to learn a few new things (how to use Web Audio, and that Dart does VERY lazy field initialization), and I actually get to go to bed at a reasonable time after a Ludum Dare.

I can’t wait to see what other games have been made this weekend. If you’re still struggling with yours, good luck, and I believe in you!

My “brilliant” plan for making the timelapse video was to record everything in realtime in full HD, then try to compress it down to six minutes or so to fit the song I was going to use for it.Unfortunately, compressing some 20 hours of footage takes AGES, and I messed up the math, so I instead ended up with a completely silent three minute video that you can enjoy here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llme7tCNCk0

I woke up soon after the theme was announced. The results were very interesting, and I’m very happy with the theme. I spent some time thinking about a game to make, and I’ve been wanting to explore the incremental game genre for a while.

I slept a few more hours, talked to some friends, thought about the game, then started programming at about noon. Over four hours, the game got simpler and simpler as I explored mechanics, and at 4 pm it felt complete.

I am done. It feels very strange to finish this early, I’m usually struggling up until the last couple of hours. Good luck and have fun, and I can’t wait to see what you all make!