I began dabbling in game development in December when my classes for the year ended. I realized that you needn’t have completed school to develop games, and I had a pretty solid understanding of the programming courses I’d taken (and I got high marks and awards in them bragbragbrag this is such a crap aside i’m writing it anyway stop me i regret this). Participating in Ludum Dare seems like a really cool thing to do, as I have not completed working on any project yet. In the past month I feel like I’ve gained a solid understand of how to make a thing, and only a thing- frustrating vagueness of that phrase intended. I want to make a game this weekend. I’m not going to go crazy with the scope of the project (I’ll REALLY try not to, this has gotten me into trouble in school many times over the years, hope I’d learned my lesson by now). I have no expectations for the quality of this game, but I will finish it. That’ll be some kind of milestone.

Remember- just like ol’ Dredd always says: “I am ready to create a video game.”

I’ve read some things today that I think (hope) will be helpful to me during my development. I’ll compile a short list of things I found which I hope serve me at my tired-est:

(most things in the LD tips section [http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/tag/tips/] are probably worth reading)

list of content generators-http://kelgardev.forumieren.org/h2-tools

Blip and Bleep Maker- http://www.bfxr.net/ (this thing is really cool!)

Stutter, a cool workflow task-setting helper thing- http://stutterapp.com/ (not sure if I’m using the word workflow right, a clear sign that I’m not a professional and also a sign of weakness to other competitors)

cgMusic, a random music generator- http://codeminion.com/blogs/maciek/2008/05/cgmusic-computers-create-music/

All the other tools I plan on using are on my desktop, including a lot of free, open-source software for my poor collegiate ass.

In my final preparations tonight, I’ve brushed up on a few things, such as publishing builds in Unity, creating menus, and other things I don’t have a lot of experience with, as someone who hasn’t completed a game before. The tragic thing to happen would be that I don’t finish because I somehow get into an area I’m just not familiar with, and would have to learn on the fly. I’ve tried to prevent that, but there’s only so much preparation I can do before I know what I’ll need to have already known. I also took a glance at each of the themes. If there’s one thing I think I’m good at, it’s at coming up with ideas on the fly, ideas that sometimes seem pretty good at the time they are come up with. Though, I also know that if I don’t come up with an idea in the first 15 seconds of needing one, I often freeze up and way overthink it, so here’s hoping I think very little while coming up with my game idea.

You know, I’ll just work really fast it’ll be fiiiiiiiiiine