This is my first Ludum Dare and I will try my best using

• Java with Slick2D

Just found out how to use this great Engine properly.  *yay*

• Audacity for Sound (if there will be any)
• Gimp for Graphics (if there will be any )

Good Luck and even more fun everyone!

(damn I really need some Potatoes right now)

I see many of the participants starting with programming (ok ok I started a bit later than them, because LD26 started at 4AM local time (Germany, Leipzig))

My collected thoughts with two main ideas for possible games.

Mindmap with collected Ideas for games.

So basically either I’ll make something with people surviving against nature or other things OR some kind of space style asteroid mining game (no asteroids clone!). I try to flesh both ideas a bit out during my lunch time.

After fleshing out one of my two main Ideas I started programming. Slick2d makes it really easy to create a small prototype very fast!

Island with 1 Person on it.

So the first Day of Ludum Dare ends here (at least where I live) and I was suprisingly productive. From the graphical standpoint nothing much has changed from my last Screenshot (thats because I only worked on logic all the time). My little Persons are now getting Resources and bringing them to the construction sites. So my next target is to get a small economy into the game (wood, stone, ore, wool, grain …) that they use to produce Food and build more Houses and protect from the forces of nature/wild animals.

There are 4 key features that I hope to implement until tomorrow evening:

1. small economy as mentioned above
2. Family system, so that each person has a house with his partner and children
3. Season system (Summer/Winter) so that you have to gather enough resources to survive in the cold months.
4. Enemies: Wolfs attacking the Village from time to time

Sure there are other Ideas that would be quite nice but wont add much into the gameplay.

I hope I’ll make it till the jam deadline but I am already proud of what I achieved until now, so that I will show you a short video of the gameplay elements implemented until now

Ludum Dare 26 – minimalist simulation

The following things are implemented until now:

• Different building types (Houses for more population, Farms for wool/grain, Lumberjacks for Wood, Mines for Stone and Ore, Smiths that make Tools out of 2 Ore, Mills convert Grain into Food)
• Task scheduling: Every Building tells its current need for ressources to the a taskmanaging class that searches for the Person with the least workload and gives him the Task.
• Population growth if there is enough space in houses for more People.
• great programmer art!

What I hope to implement until the jam deadline is:

• Every villager needs food to survive
• some use for the wool … originally it was for the changing seasons, so the villagers need wool in addition to food to survive during the winter
• some use for the tools (“tools” include weapons) … meant for defending the village against Wolves

It is far from perfect, but I have to do other things tomorrow, so I can’t put more effort into some polish.

It’s playable and even fun to look at. Tomorrow I’ll write a more statistical review of my first Ludum Dare =).

Good night Ludum Darers!

Link

Good morning Ludum Darers (at least if you live in central europe 😉 ),

as I announced last night I want to have a look at the things that went right/wrong during my first Ludum Dare (yep it’s my first and i finished my game! Yeah!)

Let’s start positive and look at the things, that went right:

I was well prepared

I’ve read some Posts about people struggling against their Tools because they were inexperienced with them or they didn’t test if they are all working correctly. As I think it is always a good idea to learn new technologies/tools/libraries I think LD isn’t the best place for it. You are under heavy pressure of completing your game and most of the time there isn’t that much time to put much effort into getting your tools running/learning new things from scratch.

Besides from the technically preparation my fridge was full and I had enough chocolate to survive the weekend without having to leave my dorm.

My game idea was (luckily) small enough to be made in 48/72h OR it was flexible enough to shrink it into something playable 

I must admit the game i submitted isn’t the game I had in mind half way through the first day of LD. There were plans to involve more natural effect that the villagers have to struggle with (changing seasons, wild animals). Luckily with the implementation of the starving mechanic the game went from a pure simulation to a game that made a lot of fun (as you could lose it). So, yesterday evening, I decided to throw those missing things out of my concept and put a point system in place. So you will get points for creating tools (that cost the villagers time that they cant use for collecting food) and for the pure survival (every 10 seconds you’ll get 1 point).

I finished it! ^^ 

I have enough half baked (potatoes) projects that never reached a playable state during the last years, so I am really proud to have a fully working little game. Next to having a finished game, I had a lot of fun during the creation AND I learnt a lot.

Now for the bad sides of my LD Weekend

My code is a mess!

If you look at the sourcecode of my game you’ll easily distinguish between code I wrote before LD Weekend and code created during the weekend. It isn’t well structured, good commented or even well thought through. So it ended in a ocean of straight forward written code without thinking it all through really good.

That leads me to… I didn’t plan properly

Basically in everyday single person projects I have 3 main phases

1. Collecting Ideas
2. Modelling Classes and interactions between them
3. Programming

Unfortunately I left out the second, but really important phase, so that my code ended mostly in a bad condition.

The idea was to big to be made in a weekend

Even if in the “positive list” there is “i finished it”, I only could finish the game through cutting some gameplay elements out of the game yesterday. So basically, yeah i finished it, but also cut about 25% of the gameplay that I originally had in mind.

TL;DR

Concluding I can say I had looooots of fun during my first LD and learnt a lot. It was nice to see streams of other participants or even some people appearing on my own stream from time to time.

HERE is my entry Mimisi (Minimalistic minimalism simulation). Have fun with it, have a look at the source code, take what you need, improve it if you want to… do whatever you want with my game as long as you have fun doing it.