My first Ludum Dare! Gonna be using HTML5, GIMP, as3sfxr, probably some other stuff I’m forgetting…

The base code I’m starting with(pretty much the bare minimum possible): https://dl.dropbox.com/u/34994455/template.html

Also going to attempt to stream at http://www.twitch.tv/aneeslol if my internet can handle it.

Didn’t have time to add sounds or music or anything that makes the game polished at all, but at least it’s playable! Basically, I learned that coding AIs is very time-consuming, so that’s something to avoid for the future. This was my first LD, so I pretty much made all of the mistakes you could possibly make: working with an unfamiliar environment, getting over-ambitious, etc. Can’t learn without making mistakes though!

Anyway, here’s the game: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/34994455/MATM/murder.html

So basically I’m using this LD as an excuse to get off my ass and get started with using SFML, since:

1. I need a proper engine to use for bigger projects.

2. I’m tired of javascript and not knowing how to do anything with it. I want my classes and inheritance and everything else that I’m so used to having when making games!

Of course, I was too lazy to do the warmup weekend, so I’ve spent whatever hours I could yesterday and today to code a few small fragments of the engine. The rest I’m probably going to have to port in from my old XNA engine.

The base code is in this project, along with whatever random engine code I thought might be useful to port over from an old XNA game: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/34994455/sfmltest.7z

So there’s my base code. As for other tools, I will probably just use the usual: GIMP for graphics(maybe Spriter if I can bother to figure it out and really need the animation?), Audacity/bxgjakls3 or whatever for sounds, Wolfram Tones for music.

It’s a shmup where you have a bunch of weapons, but you only get to use them once. Pretty happy with it, and I’m glad I manned up and actually made something, considering how lazy I’ve been lately. Hooray for Ludum Dare motivation!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=18671

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/34994455/LudumDare29%20Codebase.zip

Using C#/SFML, GIMP for graphics, probably bfxr for sound, probably Wolfram Tones for music, Audacity for something perhaps maybe?…and that’s probably it. Also will be streaming at http://www.twitch.tv/aneeslol, woohoo!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=18671

Hooray! I think it turned out pretty well. This wasn’t actually my first idea, though. Originally I came up with the idea of a game that takes place inside the inner faces of a cube(or some other geometric object), and you could unfold and refold the cube to rearrange the level and progress. While I think it would’ve been really strong on the theme and perfectly simple for LD, it required too much 3D in order to execute it well, and I don’t know anything about 3D. So instead I came up with the of a platformer where there’s water and you could change the water level, and things acted differently whether they were underwater or not. While I think it ended up being a really cool concept for a platformer, I don’t think my entry ended up being as strong on theme as I originally imagined.

Some stuff I learned:

– Level design is really difficult and time-consuming. I pretty much had this whole final day for coming up with levels, and I ended up getting really stuck after the first 5. Maybe it was a result of not having enough mechanics to play with, but I think there were definitely more possibilities than what I ended up with.

– Tools are awesome! I had learned the basics of using Spriter and Tiled before this, but this was the first time I actually put them to work on a real project, and they certainly went a long way in making the game turn out as good as it did. Spriter let me have some animations and a decent resolution instead of tiny static sprites like my previous LD entries, and without Tiled it would’ve been impossible to make the levels quickly enough to get this done on time.

Anyway, that’s pretty much it. If I ever feel like revisiting a project this is definitely the first one I will go to, since I feel like there is a ton of room for expansion and improvement. Thanks for reading/playing!