I’m IN, part two! In Part One, I began the I’m In posts (FIRST!), established my persona and idiosyncrasies, shamelessly plugged my domain name, and asserted the dawning of a new era! Sixth LD here we come!

My Tools:

• CODE: Lua + LÖVE in Notepad++. My basecode can be found here, a collection of community libraries. It’s got lots of cool stuff in it that brings me up to par of Flixel users, but it’s not quite ready to use yet. I’m still working on getting it together. EDIT(4/20): It’s pretty much ready to use now. =) Still haven’t added Spriter support, but I’ll get to it.
• GRAPHICS: Paint.net, possibly Photoshop. BIG NEWS: I’m going to use Spriter, if I can get it to work. And BIGGER NEWS, my pen tablet! EDIT: I’ll probably try using AutoTileGen.
• SOUND: Aria Maestosa for music. (S/B)FXR for sfx, and my laptop’s mic. Audacity, for everything.
• DESIGN: Pen, paper, the font of eternal inspiration (internet), and Tiled for tiles. Yes, I do still hate Tiled.
• STREAM: Open Broadcaster Software and my twitch.

My Goals:

1. Make something weird. I hate making games that are the same as tons of other games, but when I try to do something irregular, my thoughts turn to making something “cool.” Making something cool, though, is not the right way to think about it. It just leads me to try to be better than everyone else, and takes me away from making something FUN, which should be the goal. Making something “weird” seems to be the better way to think about it.
2. Make it juicy. I got reminded of that big juiciness presentation on grapefrukt’s site, so I figured, why not follow some of its advice? And even more importantly, the advice of this.
3. Explore my design space. You know, insert as much coolness as I can within the constraints of my idea. I mean, there’s only 48 hours, but what I’m trying to say is that I’m going to try stuff. New Cool Weird stuff.
4. Minimize combat. The fact that 90% of the games in the world involve combat is lame and restricts the art, man. We can do so much more, and I intend to. (Other things that restrict the art, man include realism, goals, standardized controllers, and F2P.)
5. Tell a story. I feel like my best talents are in the realm of storytelling, and yet, my entries never tell stories. (Okay, one did, but said story was admittedly terrible.) I’m going to try to have a stronger focus on characters and writing this time.
6. Save time for aesthetic. Graphics and music are important parts of the game that I often leave for the end. I’ll shuffle my normal schedule around to get them done earlier, I think.

I will ignore all the goals above as required.

So, I’m thinking tomorrow or Sunday (probably Sunday), I’ll start streaming some warmup action. I’ll probably code myself an intro and maybe a small game. I’ll keep you guys updated! UPDATE (4/20): Maybe tomorrow.

P.S. Good luck to everyone, especially the newbies! I like to say that without them, the Ludum Dare wouldn’t be the Ludum Dare. Which is why I just did.