A couple of my thoughts about my first participation of LD:<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t Take the Theme Too Seriously<\/strong><\/p>\n I think I tried to interpret the theme a bit too literary. I thought the game has to be *about* minimalism, which means that minimalism is not about its styles, but the *goal* of the game. What\u2019s the problem with that? It turned out to be difficult to come up with a game design that is about minimalism but still enjoyable. I thought minimalism always involves some sort of design or structural construction, which is a creative act, so the obvious choice for me is to make some kind of puzzle game. But I didn\u2019t want to make a puzzle game! I wanted to make an action game. So this put me into a dilemma. I spent one hour for brainstorming the basic idea in the beginning, but even after that, I wasn\u2019t really sure what I\u2019m going to do.<\/p>\n The first idea that came to me was a trash compactor. Its goal is to minimize the volume of garbage, and it can be a game. But it didn\u2019t much sound like minimalism, so I came up another idea, which is to design a minimalistic house under some condition (think of an artsy house that modern architects design). I was thinking of something like \u201cArt Game\u201d by Pippin Barr<\/a>. You push materials around and then \u201cplay\u201d on it. And then at some point, the materials turned into food, and some crazy insight told me that I should make a platformer on the top of it. Hence the idea of my game \u201cControlled Diet\u201d<\/a> has come into reality.<\/p>\n You cannot Learn Your Tools Enough<\/strong><\/p>\n I used a combination of Windows + Linux environment (I run Arch Linux on VirtualBox on Windows). I edit and compile on a Linux machine and test it on a Windows machine. I used a vanilla Flex SDK 4.6 and Makefile (Yes, I am very old school). I used a shell and Python interpreter, as well as a set of well-known tools (e.g. ImageMagick). Here are things that I think would be useful if anyone uses a similar environment like mine:<\/p>\n The bottom line is that the more efficient the edit-build-test-debug cycle, the better. Try to spot the bottlenecks as many as possible and eliminate them.<\/p>\n IRC is Helpful<\/strong><\/p>\n I had been lurking around the Ludum Dare IRC channel for a couple of weeks, and I can tell that this is a very nice place to hang out. You see a lot of people talking about their ideas. At one point I was murmuring about the need of creating a quad-tree implementation that was necessary for my simplistic physics engine. Then someone in the chat said \u201ca quadtree is overkill for this\u201d, and he was right; I didn\u2019t really need a quadtree for only a dozen of objects. Now I want to thank that person. You saved me a lot of time.<\/p>\n Things that Went Okay<\/strong><\/p>\n Believe in Your Idea, with Passion<\/strong><\/p>\n Generally, I think I\u2019m more of an \u201cidea\u201d guy. I wanted to come up with a wacky, eccentric idea and somehow I succeeded in it. I finished my game, and even its not the most fun thing to play, I still enjoyed the whole process a lot. It was a nice challenge, and hope I can do this next time again.<\/p>\n\n
git config --global core.filemode false<\/code>\n\n