The agenda is clear for the weekend, and I’m back for my fifth LD.

Joining the jam last time was fun, and I’m really happy with the game we built, but since there were only two of us and we both had to work on Monday, competition was pretty fierce. Although I mainly do LD as a challenge to myself, the competition element is still important to me, so I prefer the compo which seems a bit fairer — but that’s why it is the compo, and why the jam is the jam, after all. Thus, I’ll be working solo again.

It’ll be a browser game as usual. I considered libgdx + GWT instead of my usual CoffeeScript, but even if I wanted to port the game for a proper and official Android release later, the odds of LD-quality code being good enough are pretty slim, and I’d probably want a full rewrite anyway. Also, using JavaScript ‘directly’ has the huge advantage that you can build UI elements in HTML and leverage CSS3 animations.

Music (if I have time to do it) will be LMMS, and perhaps I’ll use it for some sound effects as well. Actually I might do music early in the weekend, because listening to it over and over will help me set the mood for the rest of the game.

I can do vector art in Inkscape reasonably well nowadays (for a programmer, that is), but I’ve never tried pixel art, so I’d like to practice that this time. For lack of a better tool on Linux, I’ll probably use Gimp. Ideally I’d also like to do something with parallax scrolling, just because I’ve never done it, it’s ridiculously easy to make, and it looks really cool. I hope I can come up with a game that fits the theme and combines both of these — and ideally isn’t a run-of-the-mill platformer either!