This’ll be my first Ludum Dare! It’s exciting.

• Platform: HTML5 most likely
• Engine/Tool/Magic Box: Construct 2 (or maybe Unity; still deciding on that one)
• Graphics: Gimp 2.8.2 all the way.
• Audio: Audacity, sfxr
• Other: Notepad++ for kicks

I’m pretty close to a real-world location, so I might do that. Until then, I must meditate to hone my mind and body for some jammin’. Good luck everyone!

Here’s what I’ve been putting together: a game about the circulatory system!

Making good time so far. Hope I keep it up.

So I finished! First Ludum Dare, and I finished! Went pretty well, all told. A tip of that hat to the folks over at Tinkermill (where I put most of the game together); the space was appreciated and the self-proclaimed beta testers were (mostly) helpful.

Bloodbath: A game about blood. Blood. And more blood.

If you’d like to play it, here it is: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=34171

Here’s a timelapse of my game crafting: http://youtu.be/Gfj_Z1TXj8s

They say that every time you make a timelapse, a time traveler’s heart skips a beat. Real idiom. No joke.

I didn’t officially announce I was doing this until now, and now I’m done. Oh well. This one was a good one! I made a hacking game, but then didn’t think it had quite enough of theme in it, so I made the player a ghost. It turned out better than last time for sure (if still very arcadey), but as to how fun it actually is, I can’t say (still have the creative tunnel vision, likely will for a month). Here’s a sneak peek:

OOOOOoooOOooo

Sums it up pretty well. Can’t wait to see some of the things others put together!

Edit (6:00): I just realized, I did the least popular final round theme in addition to the most popular final round theme.

What I Used

• Construct 2 – Still a wonderful piece of software, great for quickly getting an idea into action. But it does have…problems. It pigeonholes you into working it its style (enforces a frame rate based event loop, which I like, but then forces you to define functions inside the same loop, ech), and exports to things besides the web still don’t always work as intended. Not to mention its image editor and audio system have quirks and limitations of their own. I’d say, for something based in HTML5/Javascript with only the few developers working on it that have been, it’s pretty good. I have consistently been able to find new ways to use it.
• sfxr– Wunnerful as always. I don’t know enough about audio engineering to make full use of the manual settings, but I know enough to be dangerous.
• GIMP– My favoritest thing. Wish I knew how to use all of it, but I make do with what I’ve got.
• msPaint– I used this with a drawing tablet I picked up cheap a few months back to make the title screen (because GIMP and the tablet don’t trust each other for some reason). It’s, well, Paint. Ya know.
• Audacity– A solid sequencing recording tool. Along with a $5 mic (one of those people put on their collars to speak on stage), I got some rather good sound quality for the music side of things. After running it through a noise reduction filter (it was terrible before that), anyways.
• AWS– Amazon Web Services for hosting the game. This was something I was setting up anyway, so I’m pleased with it (being a homebrew, DIY type, I don’t mind all the work it takes to get it functioning). It’s in the cloooud.
• The Interwebs– They provided me with answers where there were none. Invaluable.
• Violin, Piano, Guitar– The triumvirate of incredibly vanilla instruments. Used em all! Plus a little ghostly moaning.
• notepad++ – In my opinion one of the best plaintext editors out there. Code syntax highlighting, good indents, plugins galore. I only used to make JSON files for the dialogue, but still.
• Guacamole– Gotta replenish calories.
• chronolapse and ffmpeg– Marvelous tools for timelapse video production. Speaking of which, here’s a timelapse video:

What Was Good This Time

• I knew what I was doing this time! It was my second Ludum Dare, and while I paced my first one really well, enough went wrong that it was a close shave. This time went more smoothly, and I had time to spare (maybe finished 4 hours early).
• I implemented a full dialogue system from scratch, which I’ve never really done before! It was great too, because I could make any object use any dialogue, and cycle through several dialogue options, since that
• I actually put an ending in this time. Though it does take a while to reach?
• I actually put MUSIC in this time. Which is so so important I can’t even describe it.
• I got sleep every night, no problem.
• I made a postmortem this time!

What Was Decidedly Not So Good

• I opted not to use the time I had to spare to spruce up the game a little more. Really should’ve.
• The timelapse video wasn’t as long this time (I set the screenshot interval for chronolapse shorter because dual monitors).
• The game still wasn’t explained very well.
• I wasted half an hour deciding I didn’t want to scrap my compo aspirations by using an open source dial-up tone. I did consider recording my own, before realizing I haven’t had dial-up in years. Eh.
• I just went with the first decent recordings of songs I did (it was all pretty improvish), so there’s definite fumbles in there.
• The gameplay is only really arcade level, wasn’t much more than that.
• GIMP and my tablet don’t trust each other (The Huion driver I’ve got doesn’t entirely work).

For Next Time

• Maybe try another library/IDE/codebase – Construct 2 is good, but only goes so far. Plus, it only does 2d.
• Really dedicate myself to the LD and nothing but the LD during the LD.
• Maybe do it with a friend, try the jam? Could be real fun.
• Get that drawing tablet working, learn how to use it to make more than scribbles
• Get better at improv musical self-recording (i.e just go with it, make fewer errors)- that haspotential to be a real strength
• Look up fewer things (just know them from the outset)

Well, that’s it. If you haven’t played Ghostnet yet, and you actually read this whole thing, you probably should! It’s not half bad. Stay spooky, friends.

I’m in for my third Ludum Dare! Compo is the way to go.

This will likely be the final one I use the toolset I used for the last two for – I figure after that I need to move up to something more advanced. Construct 2 is nice, so I may just end up extending it somehow, but it does have somewhat low limits. Definitely have been having fun with Haskell (and managed to write a mixed synchronous/asynchronous game loop with a bit of monadism), so that might be used next time. Next next time.

That snowman.