So this is the obligatory I’m in message. This is the first time  I’ll participate in the ludum dare compo. I watched the last few with great interest, but I thought my skills were to inferior to compete (or even create a executable game). Now I have some more knowledge, I’m still a noob, but I really want to test my self and see what I can achieve within this small timeframe.

I’m a c#/.NET developer and I thought it might be handy to use the skills acquired from work also for game programming. So I’m making this with Java and Slick2d 😛 Or maybe javascript (depends strongly on the theme. Some things are just simpler to implement in the browser, like interactive novels etc.).

The reason I chose java over c# (which I btw still prefer to java) is that java can be easier ported to other operating systems and I want to reach a wide audience with my games (when they’re finally finnished XD).

I intend to use following tools:

Programming:

• Eclipse JUNO
• Slick2d/LWJGL
• JGD (my own small toolset or library if you want to call it that)

Audio:

• Ableton Live
• SFXR/BFXR
• Field Recorder

Graphics:

• Paint.NET
• Paint
• PyxelEdit

I have setup a seperate page about my library I will be using. Basically the library is just a bunch of useful data structures and components (for example my library contains a simple event manager, a 2d array list, some noise implementations and some helper classes, that make my live easier with key configs…). The library does not contain any game logic etc. I’ll post the source of the whole library in advance of the compo (I’m cleaning it up right now, because it has some really really really ugly parts 😉 ). If I will be making any changes to the library during the compo, those changes will be included in the source of my entry (or it’s included, if you want to or not 😉 ).

The info page for my “Libary”: http://wiki.thobens.ch/display/SC13P/JGD+Library

(Currently the source isn’t uploaded yet, as I’m still working on some prototypes to practice for LD :D, but the source will be uploaded during the week before LD).

Of course, if I decide to make something based on HTML/Javascript, then the whole Slick2d / JGD part is out of scope here 😉

I wish everyone the best of luck and a lot of fun during the compo and I hope some brilliant pieces will emerge from this contest.

This is the final version of my Ludumdare 24 entry… Everything was running fine the first day, but when I woke up the second day of the contest, I felt very sick (and I still feel very sick ). I decided to abort the contest, as I could not concentrate to work because of the sickness…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MiVrE5-IhE&feature=plcp

Last thing I finnished today was the cellular theme, that also plays in this video..

The game idea:
The player controls a swarm of cells. He does not control the cells directly. He has a focus and several modes, the swarm can be put to. The modes are not implemented (also, besides following the focus the cells don’t do very much)… I thought of four modes to implement: Follow, Eat, Attack and Defend. Each mode would change the behavior of the cells depending on the surroundinds.

I like the idea and if I can iron out some of the problems I had (memory leak anyone) I might complete this game sometime in the future…

It was a fun time (at least the first day).

Oh, if you like the theme, you can download it here:

http://www.atombrot.com/foo/cellular_theme.wav

Sadly the other collaborators from our last jam entry couldn’t take part in the competition this time, so I’m joining forces with a friend who is interested in game design/development. I’ll be the code monkey and she is my graphics lead and we’ll see were it gets us 😉

As we’re both quite unexperienced we want to focus on completing a simple and small game, that fits the theme nicely but is simple enough for us to complete (and maybe even polish) 😉

Tools and frameworks we’ll be using:

• Eclipse
• LibGDX
• Paint.NET
• Ableton Live
• BFXR
• PyxelEdit
• Field Recorder

We’re both looking forward to challenge ourselves next weekend 😀

This was a close call. Would I have known that there is this upload hour, I may have done some more, but I managed to just save my entry one minute before the contest ended 😀

At first we were a bit disappointed by the theme (or maybe intimidated, as we didn’t have any ideas what to do). But then we had an idea and we managed to more or less do what we wanted. At last, we could not implement all the features in this short time, but we are both still very happy with the results. Dhy is new to computer graphics and I’m impressed with how good she coped under pressure and produced really cool art for the game.

But I have to stop babble around and give you a chance to try it out: Entry page

Here is a small video shownig off the intro and me failing at the first level XD

This was a lot of fun, but I think now I need to get some rest. Can’t wait to play the other games that were created this weekend.

So I thought I join the compo and take it as an opportunity to learn more about box2d and box2d lights and hope that I can reuse some of the code from here for my other projects. Also I wanted to retry on my idea of cellular warfare in the deep ocean, which I already tried to do for LD25 I think 😉 I don’t have the full weekend to work on this, so I hope I get something small running…

Haven’t done very much yet, just some small setup with stage and world with libgdx, done some graphics and rendering it.

Not sure yet how much time I can put into this LD but I’ll try to do something with unity. Looking forward for a nice theme. There are some I like quite a lot in the final round 😀