Hi everyone, here’s my desktop time lapse during the writing of Minimum Friction, my entry to #LD48.  This was a very exciting competition and I am very satisfied with my results. While I did three Global Game Jams, this was my first time on a Ludum Dare. It was also the first time doing a game all alone in such a short time. It’s very different from jamming with friends and is a great way to check our skills to deliver something complete, instead of part of a total.

At first the theme seemed daunting, until I had an idea about a platform game that played around gravity. To make it different, I decided to remove the ground and platforms, both to get a minimalistic game and and to something different. That was a little before I started writing the code.

Some funny things people can notice, I started writing the menus and splash screen. I was trying out the SFML 2.0 library for the first time, so I spent some time playing around with the lib to get the feeling of how input was handled and how to use graphical resources, which is quite different from SDL (which I used for a long time). It wasn’t until late in the night that I started coding a level.

The best I did was in Saturday night: a level loader. This allowed me to do many cool things that would have been difficult to achieve if I used hard coded levels. By Sunday I had a “to do” list that was 50% done for submission (I can’t believe I actually planned multi language support). Credits screen was a late addition, and I had to cut some corners, instead of loading a text and rendering the credits, I used an image and that did the trick. Finally, I fine tuned the levels and by 10PM EST Sunday I uploaded the final version.

If you still have to play it, please check out the Minimum Friction page and let me know what you think! 😀