Man, it’s been years since my last decent entry into Ludum Dare. The past few times I’ve done this, I’ve shot for something overambitious, or something that required a tool I wasn’t very familiar with, and gotten very little of substance done by the deadline- so little that it soured me on playing and rating other people’s games because I didn’t want to draw attention to my own. This weekend, I’m hoping to end that streak, working more efficiently by sticking to what I know. As per the keynote, that’s what I’m doing differently this time: using exactly the same tools as last time. Here’s my tools, literally copy-pasted from my last “I’m in” post:

• Programming language: Haxe
• Game engine: HaxeFlixel
• IDE: IntelliJ IDEA
• Graphics: GIMP
• Tilemaps: Tiled
• Sound effects: bfxr
• Music: probably GarageBand

There are a couple caveats. The core mechanic from my best idea does seem to require the use of Nape, the physics engine I struggled to use for the first time last LD, and have gotten no more familiar with since then. I’ve sworn to myself that if I don’t completely tackle the Nape stuff today, then I’m cutting it and figuring out an easier-to-program mechanic. Also, HaxeFlixel’s HTML5 target is completely broken with regards to text, and I didn’t get the chance to finish writing the code I need to compensate for that before LD started, so that’ll set me back a little time. That said, I really like my idea, and however difficult it might be to program, it’s at least simple enough in design terms for me to feel comfortable attempting it.
Good luck to everyone!