My goal for the jam was to simply participate and try to complete the most basic thing possible. I had not yet made any finished games and am still learning programming so I knew finishing a game of any kind was going to be a challenge.

DAY 01:

The Jam started at around 2pm on Saturday (I am in New Zealand) and I got started at around 4:30pm as I had been at a Gnostic meetup for most of the day. The theme was announced and it was an ambiguous one:

‘You only get one’

My initial Idea came fast – within the first 10 minutes of starting: An atmospheric auto-runner with a Rastafarian theme. I quickly sketched out how the game would look:

I envisioned an epic widescreen slo-motion shot of a tiny character running across the screen with a trailing Ethiopian flag behind him and holding a crucifix scepter and crown. Most things I make have pyramids so a chucked a few of them in there to create a psychedelic African landscape. The specifics of what would happen in the game other than running was still a mystery but I decided to just dive into Gamemaker and start creating it.

I started in Gamemaker by just getting some blocks moving. I created the ground object and built a crude level including the pyramids.

– Ground Object

Next I programmed another block that would be the character. This was relatively easy as I have been doing alot of this already in my Shark Slam game and all I really needed to add was a jump button and some gravity and collision detection. When the character was moving sufficiently I added in some temporary graphics for the sky and made a rising sun.

– Rising Sun

I made most of the graphics in Gamemaker and with the mouse. I thought I might go back later and do some better ones but decided to finish the game first and do it only if I had time. Although part of me was really interested in achieving an abstract beauty by just using really raw pixel art.

Next I spent way too long trying to get the aspect ratio right. I wasn’t fully conversed with how Gamemaker’s view system worked and ended up with some warped screens. I noticed most of my problem was due to an optical illusion that made my square character look squashed as it fell out of the sky. This caused me a lot of headaches until I realized it was correct after all.

Once the aspect ratio was sorted I moved onto the next crucial component – the drifting flag. At this point I was starting to get tired as I had had and early morning. I got a particle system going for the flag but it wasn’t working correctly. I was trying to get it to look like it was waving in the wind and also had physics for when the player moved. This turned out to be a major pain. I tried for about 2 hours to get it working how I wanted but it just wasn’t happening. I was getting really tired and frustrated and suddenly felt a panic coming over me. I felt like I was going to fail and wouldn’t be able to finish anything in 48hours. I had a feeling like I really hadn’t learned anything this year and I was useless and this jam was really showing my how incompetent I really was. I wanted to give up. I wanted to quit.

I went to bed defeated.

To be continued tomorrow…

Check out the final game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=29051