How i failed my first Ludum Dare
OK, i totally failed Ludum Dare. I originally didn’t think i’d participate but after some talks on IRC with ruben01 and Kivan i decided to give it a go. At 1:40am. Not a good idea. Also, the woman wants to be taken to an HR Giger exhibition the next (same?) day. Actually, I want to go to the exhibition, but i always like scape goating the woman.
My plan was to write a very basic 2D platformer. Bob, the protagonist, would be accompanied by Cubocy, an artificial life form. Because you know, going alone is dangerous. Cubocy would have helped Bob to get through a maze of puzzles, only the two together could solve. Bob could leave Cubocy behind for some time, to get blocking things out of the way. Outside of the protection of Cubocy Bob would have been attacked by various evil forces. Here’s a screenshot:
And here’s a runnable Jar. What i accomplished in 6 hours:
- wrote a simple tilemap renderer from scratch. The levels i created in Paint.NET, in the same manner as they are created and loaded in Metagun (pixel color == tile/object type). That turned out to be ridiculously easy
- Took the Bob template and created walk, jump and idle animation
- Created a silly little sprite for Cubocy
- Made Bob walk, jump and idle as well as collide with the world. I think the physics turned out pretty great. Caveat: the collision detection took me like 4 hours to get right. Thanks to Kivan for nudging me in the right direction!
- Made Cubocy follow Bob
I guess with another 10-12 hours or so i could have created an actual game but i’m afraid i have to give up at this point. I’ll take Badly Drawn Rod’s advice and begin early next time, reserving two entire days for the challenge. Here’s the obligatory time lapse where you can see me fail. Don’t laugh 
After 4 hours of sleep it’s now time for HR Giger! Hurray!