I tried the last Ludum Dare, but because of timezones I missed a day & ended up with nothing.

This time, things will be different.

I’m thinking of making a raycaster in Java just because I want to learn some game logic & how raycasters work.

Just because it seems so trendy, I’m going to write out what I’m going to use for this Ludum Dare:

• Language: Java
• Graphics Library: Java AWT & maybe Swing
• IDE: Eclipse
• Graphics Editor: Paint.NET
• TODO List Manager: todotxt.net
• Sound: My voice. All acapella, bitch.

I was thinking of making a Raycaster, but since this is my first proper LD & I’m new to games programming, I’m going to go with a platformer instead. Plus most of the themes I’ve seen don’t really suit a Raycaster…

Instead of using the standard Java AWT & Swing packages, I’m going to use Slick2D.

I used it previously & I can’t remember why I stopped with it…

Preparing for the competition I thought of most things, but one thing I completely missed was level management.

I didn’t think about how I was going to load the entities in a world, how I would load different levels, none of that. So the last 8 hours of my day were spent trying to figure this out & make it work. I tried loading a PNG file & looping through the colours which would be related to an object. I tried using TilED but didn’t know much about it. I knew how to make a level with it, but nothing about using it in the code. I tried creating an array of integers & each integer matches to an object.

None of it really worked, so I’ve decided to just work on this at my own pace following my own theme. Because that way there is no pressure to get it done. I can just take my time.

Tl;dr, here’s a picture of a banana: