So this is my first post, as I joined especially for LD#20 “It’s Dangerous To Go Alone, Take This!” I’ve just finished Mary’s Awesome Adventure, which I wanted to submit to the Compo, but I guess it’ll just go into the Jam section now.

Title screen for LD#20 It's Dangerous To Go Alone

So that’s that, and hopefully I’ll be able to do something more awesome for the next Game Jam. Tools used:

• GIMP for the title graphics and editing of the graphical resources I found online
• Eclipse for the IDE
• Java for the language
• JGame for the engine
• Linux Multimedia Studio for creating the music and sound effects (+ various soundfonts I had sitting around)

Figuring out the collisions in JGame took a decent chunk of my time, also hanging out at a friend’s house for a few hours on Saturday. Plus I was developing on Linux and I had Eclipse set to use OpenJDK at first, and OpenJDK apparently does not like to do sound. I’m going to chalk it up as an issue with PulseAudio (which I can’t seem to rid my system of 100%) since it worked fine when I switched to the official Sun JVM.

In retrospect, I should have become more familiar with JGame before the competition. At first I was only using it because it provided for threading of the screen-painting and logic procedures so my dual-core with no graphics card could actually run it at a decent speed, but it turns out that the collision detection capability is pretty nice too. Next time will probably be in Java again, but hopefully with more interesting mechanics. I’ve already got an idea for a music shooter where the attacks are timed to an mp3 file you input.

Now, I just hope I can upload a .JAR file. I haven’t checked, but that shouldn’t be a problem… right?