Back in August I just happened to check my twitter and saw that @notch was streaming some programming.  I checked out his stream and ended up watching it all weekend!  Watching someone code a game from scratch got me interested in picking up coding and game design again, something I haven’t done in years.  So now, four months later, here I am, ready to start on my first Ludum Dare!  Thanks, Notch, for the inspiration, and the LD staff for making such a wonderful and interesting competition!

For my first LD48 I’ll be using a very basic game engine from a book I’ve been using to relearn Java.

http://www.delmarlearning.com/companions/content/1435458087/SourceFiles/8087-resources.zip

Also going to possibly use a very basic, not polished, weather system I made this week. (Makes use of the basic game engine.)

http://www.mediafire.com/?f9t1o8wzlr4cdpe

This will be my 3rd LD48.  Have yet to finish a game, and probably won’t this time either.  Have to work Fri/Sat night, but off Sun/Mon.  So I’ll be doing the Jam instead if I have time.  Should be fun none-the-less.

This will be my third LD48 in the past year since I started them. (Missed December due to work.) The first time I didn’t get anywhere near finished.  But I had just started programming again so I wasn’t surprised.  The second time I had a playable game, it just wasn’t finished enough to submit.  No sound, music, only one enemy, that kind of thing.  This time I think I will finish.  I will be using game maker studio this time around.  I just started using it yesterday, but I was able to get a basic platformer/puzzle game up and running in a few hours.  This is good for me because this time around I’m only going to have 36 hours to make my game.  I wasn’t able to get the whole weekend off.  So the theme will get announced 30 minutes before I even leave for work.  Oh well, gonna be a blast anyways.

I, unfortunately, had to work last night, so I’m just now getting home and starting.  I was able to do some brainstorming while on lunch and came up with a game idea.  I’m not really a fan of the theme, but I can deal with that.  I plan on my game basically being a slight mash-up of Limbo and Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee.  You play as a small dog like creature on some alien planet that can shift into a mist form(incorporeal).  The levels are made up of “rooms”, similar to Oddworld (no scrolling camera).  I’m still debating between giving you limited phasing power, to make it more puzzle like, or letting the phasing power recharge and making it more action/platform-y.  The graphics are going to be gray scale (mostly black) silhouttes, similar to Limbo.  That’s basically where the theme comes in lol.  Shape based graphics, and fairly simplistic game play (move, jump, phasing; that’s it).

I knew going in to this that the hardest part of my game to code would probably be the phasing collision.  Getting the character to not get stuck in a wall when phasing back to existence isn’t the easiest thing to do.  At least I thought it wouldn’t be.  I ended up wasting many hours on a messy, stupid, convoluted way of doing it.  When I was minutes away from finishing coding it I suddenly thought of a better way.  I turned my 175 lines of shit code into 30 lines of amazingness.  And those 30 lines work perfectly.  I love programming lol.  Here is a high res shot of the main character.  About to start working on the low res version for the game.  I also need to change his feet/legs.  I’m not really happy with them.

Third time attempting Ludum Dare, third time I’m not completing my game.  What really sucks is, if I had been able to get off work Friday night, and not lost those 12 hours of LD time, I probably would have finished the compo.  Oh well, hopefully I can finish for the Jam.  This teleportation code has been kicking my ass! lol.