Howdy, Ludum Darers!

Seventh LD48, working on my fifth completion. Now that college is out of the way, game development is becoming more of a hobby than a potential career so having game jams like Ludum Dare give me a great excuse to scratch that creative itch that I don’t get at the job.

Engine: Unity (2D). While I am a huge proponent of using frameworks to get a deeper understanding of how a game is held together, engines like Unity provide a clean, professional tool set that gets you to creating your game much quicker. I was looking for an excuse to try out the “new” 2D mode of Unity for a project I am working on in my spare time, and this compo looks like a great opportunity to do so.

Art: Paint.NET or Inkscape. I am not an artist, so usually I either create very crude pixel art or try and leverage simple, generated shapes to keep things abstract. In college, I used Linux distributions religiously, mainly due to most of our code needing to run on *nix architecture, but there wasn’t ever a great, complete replacement for Paint.NET on Linux. Most of the programs out there like Pinta either missed a few key features or felt clunky by comparison, and I always felt like I was barely using GIMP for my development. I might take a longer look at vector graphic programs like Inkscape if Unity supports SVGs.

Sound: bfxr/sfxr. I finally started to prioritize sound in my last Global Game Jam game and it added so much to the game for so little effort. A jump without a sound is barely a jump at all.