Really poor day yesterday, so many distractions just within these 4 walls.

Added character animations, walking, talking, items in an inventory, a menu system… all the right elements, but they’re blocking me from working on the story of the game.

At least the girl says hi to you.

Argh, this is my 6th Ludum, and the first one I’ve failed at. What do I class as failiure? Simple: not releasing a game within 48 hours.

Its like 2 days later, and here I am weeping into my soft squidgy programmer hands looking back at what went on.

But enough of my ;_;, lets start off on a brighter note:

THE POSITIVES

• http://mkv25.net/ludum/ld28/preview/ – I managed to upload -something-
• I made a reasonable stab at the artwork and animations. Paint Shop Pro helped me out as usually with basic pixel editing and painting.
• I got walking, interactions, and an ingame menu working, these were neat features, and could have been strung together to make quite a nice game.
• The music is kind of neat, I played around in Otomata to make a few sequences
• Audacity was simple to use, and I was able to cut, fade, and loop my music track with relative ease

THE NEGATIVES

• Lack of a clear idea – this is the first Ludum I haven’t felt 100% confident in an idea from the get go. My ideas spiraled into a multi-biome exploration of the concept of “One moment in time” from monkeys with sticks, lighting striking, apples falling, and so on. Its a bit of a lame excuse to pin this on… maybe excuse isn’t the word… I think its a damn clear reason that without conviction in my own idea, I didn’t have the drive to actually make it work. What was it I wanted? I wasn’t really sure.
• Going for a long walk on a Sunday. Yep. That eat up most the day. Its December as well, pretty cold here, I was tired when I got home. Why did I do that? Maybe if I had a better idea I would have stayed home and coded.
• Building a game engine from scratch, again. I actually quite enjoy this part of the challenge – not being too prescriptive with framework before I begin, and really crafting something unique for the challenge… but in this case I had no structure to drop content and ideas into, and feature creep kept on creeping along… requiring me to implement more and more basic features that I might have got if I’d used an existing framework, like HaxePunk on my LD26 Minamalism project. In fact, there were a lot of similarities between the two (side scrolling, interactive stories), and it might have been healthy to strip that project back and build up from there.

Anyhow, thanks for reading. Have a little look if you’re interested, maybe you’ll get a sense for what it could have been.

I’m glad I got this off my chest. <3 I can move on now…

~Markavian

I liked totally flopped on LD28, I was requisitioned to Edinburgh for super-hero duties for LD29, and finally I’m back, ready and willing for LD30.

And here my declaration of intent:

• I intend to make a game this weekend in 48 hours, from scratch, including all code, graphics, and sounds
• I will be using:
  • Paint Shop Pro, and Adobe Flash CS5  for graphics
  • OpenFL + Haxe – for cross platform development
  • Audacity – to process whatever sounds I can cobble together
  • Flash Develop – as a development environment

That about covers it. I thought about giving Unity ago, but hell, I’ve got a template now, and I’d rather churn out ideas with my own limitations then mess around with new tools. Call me old fashioned. 😀

Good luck everyone!

I thought this was philanthropic enough to warrant publicity, (oh the humanity):

Extracts from my twitter feed – https://twitter.com/Markavian

“My LD code was already released for the compos, but now I’m porting it all to github…”

• #LD23 https://github.com/Markavian/LD23  Miniature Worlds – source code and assets
• #LD24 https://github.com/Markavian/LD24  Battle Arena Evolution – source code and assets
• #LD25 https://github.com/Markavian/LD25  Test Subject Gamma – source code and assets
• #LD26 https://github.com/Markavian/LD26  – Tamborine Man – source code and assets
• #LD27 https://github.com/Markavian/LD27  – A Medieval Story… in 10 seconds – source code and assets
• #LD28 https://github.com/Markavian/LD28  – You only get one… – source code and assets

Will update the git repos with readme shortly to link out to playable versions, in the mean time, you can check out my previous entries from my profile page:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/author/markavian/

Happy dare-ing…

Edit: https://github.com/Markavian/ldtemplate – my LD template was already in github, this’ll be the starting point ~(code and placer assets) for LD30.

#LD48 #LD30 My minimalist setup for Ludum Dare tonight. 4 hours to go! pic.twitter.com/nEgsfXFoN1

— mkv25.net games (@Markavian) August 22, 2014

#LD48 #LD30 secret success tactic 2; don't bite of now than you can chew- "Connect the worlds, rule the universe. pic.twitter.com/Da19CeIzLE

— mkv25.net games (@Markavian) August 23, 2014

Excuse the typos, mobile phone auto-correct… I can into English honest.

I’ve finished my first draft of the rule book:

https://github.com/Markavian/LD30/blob/master/design/design.md

This is my game design; programming and asset creation will begin in earnest shortly after lunch. If you get a chance, have a read

#LD48 #LD30 needlessly colourful card artwork for the game… pic.twitter.com/2FAPZhmcGw

— mkv25.net games (@Markavian) August 23, 2014

You’ll just have to use your imagination for the sci-fi painted pictures in the centers…

#LD48 #LD30 Ok, think I'm ready to start coding now… designs for the game screens are ready: http://t.co/A0yUIyE7Lt

— mkv25.net games (@Markavian) August 23, 2014

#LD48 #LD30 I mean, like… I have a title screen with a button that goes "bzzzt", that counts as a game right? pic.twitter.com/FmWPydPbzG

— mkv25.net games (@Markavian) August 23, 2014