The early release of the theme for the mini-LD #28 has really got me excited. I have an idea that is probably not going to be unique, but I look forward to trying it out anyway. The waiting is killing me, though – I really want to get prototyping and trying out ideas.

I just hope I get all the time I need to work on it this weekend. This is my first participation, so my design is probably far to complex for the time available.

My intended tools are:

• Python / PyGame
• … maybe GIMP for graphics? That isn’t my forte.

Okay, so I have done a lot of the groundwork for my entry, now it’s time to finish the design. I thought it was a good time to take a moment and post on my theme.

When thinking of war, the first thing that came to mind was the idiotic kids card game, War. If you haven’t played War,  it boils down to the world’s longest coin-toss: you and your opponent each flip over a random playing card. Highest card takes both. If the cards are tied, you add more cards to the wager. Repeat until someone runs out of cards. No way to affect the outcome, no strategy. The game is mindless idiocy, but some might say that makes it the perfect analogy for real war.

So, what can you do? In the game, you play a regular grunt, and it’s your job to stack your generals deck. In a top-down shooter, raid your opponent’s territory to force him to burn cards. Collect high cards and special power cards to give your a chances a boost. Complete objectives to keep from running out of cards, all while your mindless general is playing ‘War’ in real time.

This is my first Mini-LD, or any LD entry, and so I hope I haven’t overshot. I will be busy on Friday, so I hope nobody  minds me starting early.

I have attached a screenshot of the game in action. As I have not as yet done any work on the graphical side of the program, all I have to show is a text dump of the War cardgame implementation I hacked together

Also, any suggestions for a game title are welcome.

Did I make it? Of course not. Do I intend to finish my entry, just for the fun of it? Absolutely. Will I finish it…?

Probably not. But I like my idea enough that I don’t want to abandon it yet.

Postmortem: Why didn’t I finish?

1. Real life got in the way. I am not too upset about this, I had a pretty great weekend.

So, roll on LD #21!

Dear Sir or Madam,

I would like to complain about your website, hosted at www.ludumdare.com. The contents of the blog are hazardous to my enjoyment of my weekend. As a hard-working individual I value my all-too-limited free time, but reading your blog entries caused me to get excited about participating in your so-called ‘Game Jam’.

I am therefore forced to inform you that I will be participating in LD23 (my only previous participation being Mini-LD 28), and I intend to use the following tools:

• Python 2.7
• Pygame
• the usual sound and music generation tools.

I will be developing on Windows with an eye for porting to Linux.

In conclusion, please make the theme something to do with giant killer robots.

Regards,
frnknstn

So, here’s me saying I am lost. I had an ‘interesting’ idea, but it is probably either too technical to ever become anything more than a toy. What I did was spend all day writing proof-of-concept code and a shitty editor to do what I wanted.

Then I thought, hang on, let’s see if anyone else has done a roguelike using subpixel rendering, and I see that none other than Terry goddamn Cavanagh had suggested it in back in 2008, and there is a really awesome library for Roguelikes called libtcod which I don’t have time left to learn.

So now I am going to take a nap, maybe gonna get something to eat, and reconsider my future.

Okay, so I am one day in, and what have I accomplished? No actual gameplay, not even a real design. I also was bitten by a pygame bug, but that cost me only 2 hours. The other 14 were my own fault.

I need to sleep, and then I will decide whether to call it off entirely, or to completely dump my original idea and try something I can accomplish in ~12 hours, or even just see if I can get SOMETHING working with my current progress. I will admit it is tempting to just slack off tomorrow, see some friends, and leave nothing but this subpixel sprite editor to be my weekend’s contribution to the ‘corpus Ludum’.

I missed the deadline by a wide margin. If I didn’t have to work today, I would be making my entry entry-able.

Postmortem: What went right:

• Timezones: Being UCT+2 is pretty cool, but I would say that UCT-1 would be best. It means that the theme comes in around midnight, you can get a full night’s sleep while your unconscious  mind is working on ideas, and then still get two days (8am – 12pm) to work on the entry.
• Paid attention during voting: Especially during the final round, listening to the chatter on IRC gives you insight into what the theme is likely to be. Although my favorite didn’t win (Vote Alchemy in LD #24!), I still had a couple proto-ideas for the top contenders

What went wrong:

• No actual planning: I didn’t actually sit down with a pen and paper until 12 hours before the deadline. This was my fatal mistake. Simply jotting down what systems and objects I would need for the idea gave me a much better idea of the scope of the project; if I had done that on day 1, my time management would have been much improved.
• Library bug: I got bitten by a bug in Pygame. This shouldn’t have cost me more than an hour or two, but I tend to obsess about these things. Once I found the workaround, I should have just done it and got on with the project.
• Waited to long to get things *moving*: Nothing beats that moment when you start to get some actual movement and feedback from your game. Working on a game is one thing, seeing it in motion is something completely different. The morale boost it gives is astounding. Next time, I will get something up and running as soon as possible, instead of getting bogged down in the internals or producing art.

Some reasons why most MiniLDs are awesome:

1. Know the theme earlier: It’s nice that everyone is given an equal handicap for the full LD48 by only announcing the theme at the beginning of the compo, but I like to know in advance. It’s fun to be able to scheme and plan and throw away bad ideas before the pressure is really on.
2. Flexible timeframe: The MiniLD runs STRICTLY from the Saturday to the Sunday. NO EXCEPTIONS. Unless you are going to be busy that weekend. Or you have a great idea and just can’t wait to start. Or you decide to do it on Friday and Saturday instead, but your idea on Friday didn’t work out so you restart on Saturday and work until Sunday. Or…
3. Good themes: The LD48 theme voting process is good and fair, but choosing  a theme by committee means that the truly odd themes get weeded out, as do the more open-ended generic themes.
4. If you finish making a game, you are already a Guaranteed Winner ™! Tied for first place!

Some MiniLD hosts may be more or less strict about some of the above, so YMMV, but the MiniLDs are mostly known for focusing on the fun.

Hey, looks like spending five minutes browsing that ‘how to make tiles that aren’t completely terrible’ tutorial paid off!

Now to find an easy-to-use Python .tmx loader…

In past game jam events, I have always felt the jealous stab of pride when it comes to talking about my game idea or theme. I know that when it comes to programming, ideas are cheap and success comes from perspiration, marketing and luck. The ten thousand people and five hundered fully-featured websites that came up with ‘Facebook before Facebook’ can attest to that. That doesn’t make it any easier for me to admit that nobody wants to steal my dumb idea.

So, my simple idea for MiniLD #36 is a top-down team-based military shooter. As you lose health, your display loses contrast and it become harder to tell friend from foe.

Thanks to the relaxed rules of this MiniLD, I will be ‘borrowing’ some of the graphics functions I made for my unreleased entry in MiniLD #34 ‘Aspect’.

Will this be the first game jam I actually finish? Probably not, based on my previous experience, but I hope to achieve my super-secret goal of learning how to properly package Python projects.

I am in. At least, I want to be in. Or I want to want to be in.

I am actually feeling less enthused about this compo than for any of the previously participated in. If I do finish an entry (which would be my first completed game jam entry) it will not be all that interesting or all that exciting. Looking at what some people considered to be their throwaway entries, I would have a hard time coming up with something that interesting or inventive.

Still, we will see if the theme selection leads to inspiration.

Tools:

• Python
• Pygame
• mtPaint, and GIMP
• If I end up doing a tile-based game, probably will use PyTMX to load Tiled maps

I am in! My leave start on Friday, so no work stress.

However, history is not on my side. Of all my game programming jams, Dare or otherwise, I have yet to complete a single entry. I didn’t do the warm up last weekend or ever. In fact, the last time I completed a game was when I was in high school, twelve years ago.

Still, I will try put something together in pygame.

There are an interesting set of themes, prompting me to do an idea dump. It’s the closest I am going to get to doing any real preparation for this weekend.

• Colonize – You are a strain of bacteria, trying to spread to nearby jars of mayonnaise. Call the game “Colonnaise”.
• End of the World – I have been playing a lot of Pharaoh lately. Maybe a level of a city-builing sim, where instead of trying to construct vast monuments, you are collecting resources to make the artifact that brings about the apocalypse?
  • Earthquake Engine?
  • Portal to Shub-Niggurath’s lair?
  • The Song That Ends The World?
• Fortress – Fighting game with badly-animated anthropomorphic castles beating the turrets off each other. Or maybe a clone of a game I vaguely remember from my youth, where you flew a helicopter to drop off troops onto a side-scrolling battlefield so that they can assault the enemy’s fortress.

Thanks to this month’s MiniLD, I may get to do awesome things for the price of one!

1. Finish making a game for the first time in 13 years
2. Complete my barely-started LD #25 entry for the theme ‘You Are the Bad Guy’
3. Make my January entry for One Game A Month

The game is still untitled. In it, you compete against other evil entities to swallow the most galaxies, thus ending the universe. In practice, it is just a re-theme of Hey! That’s My Fish, but I think it is turning out pretty cool It will definitely have hotseat support and really bad AI, but I will try to add the following by the end of the MiniLD:

• Remote multiplayer support
• Better AI
• Cool graphics effects
• An installer
• SFXR-level sound effects
• Music-generator-level music

In case you hadn’t noticed, I like lists. If you do too, consider using WorkFlowy!

I am in, will give it my best shot.

Some terrible theme ideas, free to an irresponsible home:

• Death is Useful – Tower defence game where instead of kills earning gold, they directly become the maze of towers
• Deep Space – Stealth game with using “portable hole” extradimentional spaces as hiding places
• Everything is Connected – xbill clone
• Isolation –Like Shelter, except you are a Glacier
  

Things I should probably do before the Saturday start time:

• Download and install a recent version of PyGame
• Acquaint myself with this new PyCharms editor everyone is talking about
• Failing that, do a practice app in Sublime to re-acquaint myself with the whole games-making process
• Failing all that, say “fuck it”, wait for Saturday and learn to make a Twine game

Clearly, I have a list addiction, but I am an enabler. If you like lists too, try Workflowy.

• Generations: build and program bots to survive on a desert island. Unlock new components as you go, but the island’s resources don’t replenish
• Two Worlds: business management sim in two parallel universes, one where your kickstarter succeeded and one where it didn’t.
• We Must Go Deeper: Sopwith, except underwater
• You Are Your Own Enemy: beat yourself up while having an out-of body experience to make the NEXT out-of-body experience intense enough to rob a bank.
  – OR –
  You Are Your Own Enemy: design security systems to please clients who you later go back and rob

Here’s my complaint and confession: I have entered about five LD or Mini LD events, and have yet to complete a single one. Frankly, it is easy to get disheartened about my meagre from-scratch solo projects. I look at the blog filled with Jam groups, with talented artist and interesting music. They are leveraging their middleware or frameworks or engines or personal “Base code”, being productive and interesting.

So, this time around I am going to surrender. LD compo is no longer about making a game from scratch in 48 hours. I will be using my own personal code base that I have developed over these last 5 jams, including but not limited to:

• my slow and buggy tile engine
• my fork of PyTMX for loading Tiled maps
• if decide I make a hex-grid based game, my hex helper classes
• my previously-written functions for things like framerate calculations and text rendering

No game logic will be reused (but if the them Contrast wins, I will use my unstarted idea from the Mini LD with the same theme). The aim being to imagine what the median level of functionality Ludum Dare participants get from their frameworks, and pull code to that effect from my history of unfinished works. I don’t know if this strictly counts as “personal base code” in the eyes of the rules, but it seems to be the only way to finish a game.

You can track my development here: https://bitbucket.org/frnknstn/ld29_beneath_the_surface

Twelve hours in (eight of which were sleep and sundry) I present to you:

BUBBLES!

I am now 20 hours in. Progress is slow, and I can feel my effectiveness waning.

I am in for my 6th attempt with 0 submissions. There is even a non-zero chance that I can get a friend to help, but if he doesn’t I will be using the following:

• Python
• Pygame
• Pycharm
• PyTMX
• Pyxel

My base code will be adapted from that which I used for the first commit of the previous project, available here.

It looks like 300kb/s upload just isn’t enought to stream development. I tried everything I could think of, but I can’t get a config that is watchable and also comfortable to actually develop in.

I am still quite excited to participate. The themes are mostly good, but strangely I haven’t had any early ideas for them yet.