So, another Ludum Dare is upon us. Haven't had much time to prepare for this one, mainly due to my job taking up all the available time.
But damn it if I'm not going to at least try to get something small done.

Been writing up a small framework over the course of the week, this time built around multiplayer as a core, so going to try and figure something out that can be played over the network.
Not going to have much free time during the weekend either, but hopefully I can spend at least ten hours on something.

The best of luck to all you other guys though, hopefully you'll end up with more time to build your masterpieces.

Well, been very busy with work these last few jams, but this time I'm actually prepared so I'm back with a vengeance.

Going to be my usual shtick of C++ and SFML, though this time I'm not going to complicate things with scripting support, and I'm going to try to set up some collision handling and rendering helpers in advance. And I'll be streaming as much as I can as well, even if I won't be able to run the entire compo time, got to get a reasonable amount of sleep to be able to return to work on monday after all.

Might try some procedural music this time, just play some sounds on algorithmically controlled intervals and pitches. Can't be worse than what I've had in earlier jams.

Well then, that was fun. Been dehydrated the whole weekend due to a rogue heatwave, and lost almost half of the available time finishing life- and work-related things.

But I still managed to get a game together, and it actually plays well too.

There's no audio in place, and I didn't have time to do my usual intro scenes.
But all the gameplay got finished for once, not a single feature cut from the final product.

...well, except for a nicer UI, but who has time for that? Honestly? :grinning:

I might look at throwing together a Linux AppImage on Tuesday, I should have some free time after work then, but for now I know how to build a Flatpak - so that's what you'll get if you don't want to compile it yourself.

I don't know why, but I've somehow completely forgotten about Ludum Dare - even after having talked about it and shared some plans with my sister just this weekend.
Going to have a go anyway, though we'll see how well things go with only two days of prep work.

Tools of choice are probably going to be;

• KDevelop / Vim
• GIMP
• (Audacity)
• (LMMS)

Might just grab some royalty free audio and skip the judging on that though, don't tend to be very good at sound design.

And the language / toolkits will most definitely be;

• C++ 17
• CMake
• SFML

Going to try my best to not go overboard with the lower level stuff as I usually do, no need to write it as a generic engine with an LD game inserted after all.

Sadly, it turns out that sacrifices really have had to be made.

Life decided to intervene in my development time and I simply do not have the time or energy to finish anything remotely game-like in time for the compo - and work means finishing in the jam doesn't sound any more likely.

But in april, that's when the comeback happens. I've got it stamped in my calendar this time.

Well as it turns out, I seem to actually have some free time for the coming weekend, so I guess it's time to see if I can squeeze a game in there as well.

Though considering my overall busy-ness, I think I'm going to stick to the tried-and-true method of doing my games in C++ and SFML, it's done well for me so far. And while there are other things I'd like to test, I think those would be better suited to using when there's the time to learn how to properly do so.

Going to try and avoid falling into the traps of doing advanced scripting, multiplayer features, or any other time-heavy things - as I've done before. Though I was thinking of writing up some shaders this time, for that little bit of extra compared to my usual vector graphics. And hopefully nowadays, even laptops have powerful enough iGPUs that shaders and other complicated graphics shouldn't break everything, as they did back when I first started toying with them around LD 25 or so - the first game where I had to release a GPU-specific binary.

Hopefully all the rest of you have been starting to hype yourself up about what's coming, and I certainly hope that time is permitting for this to be another great instalment.

As it turns out, I discovered I had an actual working plan - and design - all ready to write down for this theme.

Bring on the clockwork / steampunk survival top-down shoot'em up, with design taken from everything from Dungeon Siege to Freelancer and Space Pirates and Zombies.

I probably spent far too much time on doing a gear rendering component, as well as a whole modular weapon system, but at least it was fun. Next comes doing all the assets, which are probably going to be all vector designs, though I've got plans for some more intricate ones to go with the classics.

Let's see how well life and free time treats me this year, missed a few compos due to both of those coming into effect after all.

If everything goes well, I'll have another little C++-based project done for this time as well. I was looking at a handful of frameworks, but I think I'll stick to SFML for now, don't really have the time to dig myself into a new one after all.

Here's to many more games!

So, I managed to have a nice idea for a game and some mechanics before bed. Which of course meant some implementation this morning. Some simple stellar mechanics have been finished now, and a set of components are in place that should hopefully result in a nice space game.

Had some issues with data corruption due to a few mistakes in variable handling, so lost some time on that, and also lost a bit of extra time trying to find a nice scale that would fit while still offering some realism. Got that working, but I wanted to keep a larger galaxy than that would've allowed simply due to floating-point precision constraints, and I really didn't want to have to go to double precision just for inner-system positions.

Here's how it currently looks with a rather zoomed-out view.

And an animated version is available too, using some quick and dirty values just to test the concept out with.

Decided to dig out an old gradient shader from another LD entry, (LD31: Entire Game on One Screen) and of course realized it was off in its rendered size.
So I rewrote it. And while doing so I ended up trying some other things that I found during the research.

And suddenly ~5 hours have passed, and I've made something beautiful with no actual gameplay...

And an animated version is available too, since it still looks much better in motion, even after imgur's had a go at it.

Well, today got slightly "wasted" in GLSL shader coding and orbital system generation. (And some stellar mechanics) I'm not too unhappy about that though, I do LD to get better at programming after all.

So, the player's currently a bright white moon, with twin-stick like controls, and no physical interactions.
I'll fix that tomorrow.

Today's brought with it full system generation and orbital mechanics.
In the background, quite a lot of gameplay pieces are done, they just need to be hooked together now that I have system generation in place.
In the end, you'll have inter-system jump gates as well as rare direct-linked wormholes, and you'll use them to transport goods between planets. Starting from nothing and building your way up to a galactic trading fleet.

Some pictures from today, showing the graphical progress;

And a short video of the kind of systems that can be generated. (as well as a remaining shader bug)

Finished hooking up some additional pieces of game mechanics I'd built earlier, to get something closer to being actually playable.

Only the exploration parts at the moment, might end up having to go more for an exploration game rather than a heavy focus on the trading.

Still felt really nice to travel about and explore though, so I'm not complaining about that. And it gives me a good reason to add more generation features; names, planet types, etc.

Some progress shots, and fun issues;

Accidentally made pong, because as it turns out, it's not good to be too exact and end an inter-system travel exactly on the centre pixel of the return gate.
Also accidentally managed to swap two entities. (And yes, I checked, and you can have a solar system orbiting around the player in normal play too)
Quite happy with the final result as well, looks and feels quite nice to move around with, even if I have some glitches in my lerped render system at high velocities.

Haven't really been doing any jams for a while now, turns out that full-time work can eat up free time like nobody's business.
But I figure it's time to have a go at another LD compo, see if I still have it.

Going to be doing what's turning out to be the usual for me;

• C++ (most likely 17)
• SFML

• EnTT

• Vector graphics (in code)

• LMMS for audio (if I have the time)
• And maybe some shader bling

And hopefully I'll not end up doing too much backend work in places where it doesn't really matter. Always tend to lose some time on that.
But it is fun, so I'm not making any promises.

I'll try and see if I can do a Windows build this year too, but as I don't have any system to build - or test - it on anymore, that's probably going to be a low priority.

Either way, I'm hoping to have some fun; Write some code, smash some bugs, get something interesting into people's hands.
Hope the rest of you all are going to enjoy yourself too, be it with the creating or the consuming.

Well, I wasn't sure if I was going to have time to join in on another LD, but it seems like life is going to be allowing for it this time.

I guess it's time to brush off my usual C++ setup with SFML and EnTT, there's no need to fix what isn't broken after all. Probably going to skip all the bells and whistles this year though, put the likes of scripting and UI frameworks aside, no idea what's happened in those spaces since I worked on a game last. Might throw in Box2D though, not that I'm sure if a physics engine is even going to be usable at all for whatever idea I come up with.

So, started off as it usually does. With me waddling through some tech issues, figuring out a reasonable game idea that feels novel to what I feel like I usually do, and drawing a bunch of thoughts and such onto a virtual canvas.

Then my computer froze. Luckily I had some post-its and a pen on hand to scribble down my thoughts onto paper before forcing a reboot.

And with that, here's a quick shot of the first day of progress for me; (Feels reasonable for just three hours)

A little field of basic pineapple plants, sitting in a void of cornflower blue.
Going to be adding more plants, improving the render quality, making a random generator instead of static plants, and more tomorrow.

A miserable little pile of- Sorry.

So, this time I did manage to actually finish something that could charitably be considered an MVP of a game.
Unfortunately life just didn't allow me enough time to actually finish up the intended gameplay, so it's only a very basic prototype of something that could easily be hacked together in a couple of hours. (Since that's basically the amount of time I managed to scrape together for working on it)

I'd normally try for getting it out as a jam/extra entry instead, but since I'll have even less time the coming week (between work and moving) I don't think the result would be much different at all. Though who knows, maybe I'll be back at it next weekend if all goes well.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/fruit-picker-xtreme

It's at least playable, and doesn't crash randomly for odd reasons. (Though it does leak memory on Windows, Visual Studio 2019 apparently doesn't properly implement C++17, and I ended up prioritizing getting it to actually build without sacrificing too much code over figuring out why releasing said memory caused crashes)