That was definitely a great experience. I realize now how the personal effects of something like Ludum Dare to a developer is vastly more important than the actual competition.

Despite falling quite short of my original concept, I’m extremely satisfied with how far I got in 48 hours. I have a good idea now how I will structure my game engine, as I add some of the slop back into it as good re-usable components. Ironically, I spent very little time on music and sfx. Wait actually no time on sound effects at all… oh well.

The rundown of this weekend:

Friday Night: Got the concept down. Then World’s End and, very appropriately, a local pub with some friends. Awesome movie btw.

Saturday:

• Getting the day/night cycle timing right
• Debugging tools
• Developer images
• Collision Detection
• Initial music
• Win/Lose conditions
• Wisps & Plants

Sunday:

• Pseudo-lighting for the night scene
• Enemy
• Animation sheets for everything
• Tweaking the game logic (# of stuff generated depending on score)
• Testing
• More music (at 10 till 9, haha)

My initial concept actually involved having a little compound where you farmed during the day and then adventured out into the night. Your speed would prevent you from going to far at first. I had some additional power-ups and enemies in mind as well. After a few cycles of prototyping I realized that this would take more time than I had, so I went with a day/night collection game.

What’s particularly great about this experience is I now have a pretty decent javascript engine to use going forward. There was quite a bit of development during this game that I will be able to re-use for future games and future Ludum Dare competitions. So next time I’ll be able to focus on the game a lot more than the engine.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=24792