What I learned not to do in a ld48

Ok, so some of you have found my game and seen that is less than… anything good. I can tell you right now that it is not at all what I had in my head when I started coding. This is just a quick recap on how I ended up with “walkabout”.

Ignore writing anything down

This turned out to be a huge problem for me. At first things were fine because I couldn’t even start putting the game together until I had a way to manage my game data in c++. The problems started when I got just passed that point and wanted to start getting things ready for the screen and the game as a whole. They started… then they got worse as time went on because my ideas changed little by little and I would go back and see that I had started code for an idea that I had several hours prior.  I figured meh.. fix it and move on. This led to me making a huge shift in my game idea Sunday morning so that I could have something. The hammer was a last minute push for something and the game turned out nothing like any of my original ideas.

Change Ideas Last Minute

Another bad decision I made was changing ideas Sunday morning. I ended up with less than I had. It was a terrible feeling come closing time knowing that I had tossed 1.5 days of work for .8 days of work. This one can probably be fixed by just planning a few things out from the get go.

Dont bother with code versioning

This one was not so obvious until sunday morning as well when in my baggy eyed stupor I deleted code for the code in the current version of “walkabout”. I ended throwing it on Github with just the final version. Had I kept my code in the repo from the beginning I could have just rolled back.

Don’t bother packaging code

Another thing I just didn’t do was package the code. In my rushed state I just submitted the source. Sadly this makes it a pain in the butt for the people that want to judge my… I suppose we can call it a game (:

Conclusion…

Sadly I didn’t get to make what I would like to have turned it. I’m still not super confident that I should have entered the code in that I did. I now know what NOT to do next time. On that note.. bring on LD48 in April!

Here you go I hope I can do this in a week :D. AAAAnnnd it’s upside down

I have done several ludum challenges and I usually pic a tech that I havent used before. This time I think I’ll try and use something I AM familiar with. That being said I will either be using sfml in either python or c++ or HTML 5 and canvas. For graphics it will be Pixelmater and Paint.net. For sound itwill be BFXR.

Good luck to everyone and have fun!!!

I will not end up finishing my game this time. I decided to take my first steps into 3D land for this jam. I bit off a little more than I could chew. From flipping through pages in my OpenGl books to trying to figure out how to really implement some of my ideas I just didn’t have enough time… and I did the jam. However — I had a ton of fun building it and looking at some of the screen shots posted it seems there are a ton of great games that were built.

Here is the source code for my project: http://github.com/beersbr/ludum_dare_27

I’ll add some screenshots to the repo and an I’ll update the readme with what I wanted to accomplish.

Way to go everyone!

So many awesome looking games already being submitted; I have a hard time saying anything at all. (Well done everybody).

My goal was to finish a game. I can, proudly, say that this time I did that. This is a solo game. Was built using only js/jquery/webgl. Really simple. But its complete enough to call it a game. Check out My GAME here!

Gonna be trying for a finish this time.

Tools:

Ipad + pixelmator

garageband + bfxr

c++ / opengl/ SDL 2

Here we go!