This is gonna be my third Ludum Dare. I’ve actually participated in the last two– for LD21 I made an intricate and fairly complete prototype of a game I may go back and “finish” someday, for LD22 I wound up busy all weekend and made a bizarre generative sound demo on the last day. I think I’m getting better at this whole game jam thing– since I did LD21 I’ve also participated in two of the Pirate Karts and also the Molyjam. (You can find the full list of my games here.)

I am planning to make my game this weekend, whatever it is, with Polycode, a library I’ve been moving my development to over the last year in the hopes it would let me write part-C++-part-Lua programs with little fuss. There has admittedly been some fuss. Polycode is alpha and has some usability issues, so I spent most of my free time the last few days trying to clean up Polyconsole, my get-started-with-Polycode project (which has some niceties like a debug console), partly so that it would be in a good shape for me to use for LD, and partly so that I could then write up a nice blog post and post my tools before LD so that maybe other people could use them. And, well… I did get Polyconsole actually in what I would think of as a “ready to show to others” state before LD started! Here’s what the demo I’ve been working on with it looks like right now:

…except… that was all I had time for before LD, meaning I didn’t write any documentation. And without documentation and build instructions I don’t think my code will be much use to anyone. But, if you want to see the codebase I’m gonna be working from this weekend, see here. I’ll write a more useful blog post about what “Polyconsole” is after LD. You’ll have to take my word for it: It’s TOTALLY AWESOME.

Anyway: Ludum Dare 23. I’M IN