{"author_name":"Jens Nolte","cat":"LD #23","comments":[],"epoch":1335399180,"likes":1,"metadata":{"p_key":"55962","p_author":"Jens Nolte","p_authorkey":"12770","p_urlkey":"91682","p_title":"Planet Gravity","p_cat":"LD #23","p_event":"LD23","p_time":"1335399180","p_likes":"1","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"12770","us_name":"Jens Nolte","us_username":"jens_n","event_start":"1334880000","event_key":"10","event_name":"LD23"},"text":"

Yeah… Somehow I managed to not write the final status update until now \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n

I will give you a summary of my weekend instead.<\/p>\n

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I joined the Jam 24 hours late due to some real life (well, university) work. The original plan was to work through the weekend, but when seeing the theme “Tiny World” I was in love and just had to hurry up to be able to join.<\/p>\n

To get a overview I did a short sketch on the whiteboard . It was a “planet” – a circle with a house on the side and a tree on the top. I decided to skip over to coding. My motivation obviously came from “building a planet”. Making a game was really secondary on this jam, my interest was art-, style- and tech-related.<\/p>\n

After posting an on this blog I started modelling a simple planet. Then I wrote the first version of the force field and added greyscale\u00a0shading (greyscale because I had no motivation to teach my obj-loader to import materials).<\/p>\n

The state at the end of the day:<\/p>\n

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The next day I fixed the loading of colors and almost instantly went back to greyscale because it looked like a plastic world (though fixing payed in the end when I had to emphasize the gameplay-relevant items). I still had about twelve hours to go. Time to implement shadow mapping! The light shining through the planet was really annoying and I already wanted to play with it for some months.<\/p>\n

8 hours before the deadline Nick (@urahziel<\/a>) visited to look at my progress and decided to join me. A three hour break later (last chance to make a break :D) we returned to work, this time with a game design idea (credits to Nick) and the motivation to implement it – knowing that I would get a model from a skilled modeler really gave me a push. Though I still had to finish the shadow mapping first. I just had to do it \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n

The story ends with last-hour-gameplay-implementation and last-minute balancing. So last-minute I actually forgot to fix the game name on the title screen from “Tiny World” to “Planet Gravity” (though I silently fixed the download before anyone could notice :>).<\/p>\n

What to take for the next ludum dare?<\/strong>\u00a0I had no idea what to expect from this jam. If I had known how good the perception of the game would be (based on the current comments) and I would definitely have saved some of the long breaks and taken this project more seriously from the beginning.<\/p>\n

I will definitly keep the nine hours of sleep on the last night. Being wide awake during the final stressful hours was super-helpful and I can absolutely recommend it.<\/p>\n

So that’s it.\u00a0Let me finally I invite you to play\u00a0Planet Gravity<\/a>!<\/strong><\/p>","time":"April 25th, 2012 7:13 pm","title":"Planet Gravity"}