Ludum Dare 40 was going to be awesome. I was far away from everything that would bother me, my (not quite yet) wife was in another country, I had no obligations, albeit I had no real world meetup to go to but that would be okay.

On Saturday morning, I woke up and saw the theme. All I could think about were the games where you pick up everything. Found a snotty tissue paper on the road? Pick it up, it might be needed for the puzzle where you cover the drain when you insert a coin in to the machine and the fish flies out of the machine and without something covering the drain it uselessly goes down the drain. You have 100 coins of gold, 5 days of food, plate mail armor, a sword, three staves of monster scaring, a wand of fireballs, and a ten foot staff in your small backpack? Sure why not toss a human sized jade statue in there as well. I'm sure it will become useful someday and only takes up one inventory slot. So I made a game where the more you picked up, the slower you moved.

If you are interested, you can see the progress report here.

But, Sunday, something happened. I have no idea what. I'd like to blame my friend who told me about a new version of Angband, which I haven't played in years and really should never play again, but I would also have to blame Factorio. In any case, I absolutely did not add anything to the game. I fixed no bugs, changed no assets, wrote no new code... killed a bunch of monsters in Angband and a bunch of trees in Factorio. (And both of these games are ridiculous examples of the trope. In Factorio you can hold a train, a tank, and a small car in your inventory, no problem, along with enough walls to surround your base and keep out the biters, and all the laser turrets you'll need to defend your base.) I did nothing but play video games on Sunday. :(

Sunday night, I picked up my (not yet) wife at the airport, told her I didn't finish Ludum Dare, showed her what I had done, and she was lauded me on how much I accomplished. She told me I should finish the game on Monday.

Except, on Monday, we had to drive to her parents house, as we were getting married on Tuesday. So we woke up, got organized, and drove to her parents house. And of course, there, I wasn't getting much done. Monday in the middle of the night, the night before our wedding, some time around 2.00am, my (will be in about ten hours now) wife wakes me up, and asks: "Did you submit your game?"

I woke up, looked at ldjam.com, realized I had about three hours to go before the Jam was finished, wrote up some nice text for it, uploaded it to itch.io, found a button that said "Unfinished", and submitted it like that. I got back in to bed and promised her to remind her that on the night before our wedding, she woke me up and asked me if I submitted my game to Ludum Dare.

You can check out the work in progress if you like.

I would have included a cute animation from the game but I can not seem to edit video (using OBS to capture the display and every video editor I try seems to crash on me when I try to make an animated gif). So instead, a recycled screenshot!