This is my first time doing a Ludum Dare, and really my first time making a videogame. I registered at the last moment (~20 min from the start time) and have been running on nervous enthusiasm since.

The Alone theme caught me off guard, since I’ve had a mostly complete, thematically relevant concept knocking around in my brain for over a year now. This kinda feels like cheating, since I can skip the design phase and get right to coding. I don’t feel too bad, though; I haven’t done any coding or other resource work until now, so I’m following the rules. It just feels weird to finally get this thing into a tangible form.

The original idea called for Unity, but I don’t actually know how to work that software yet, so I fell back on GameMaker. I already have a (n incredibly fake, hacked together) pseudo-3D environment and the first interactive object in place and working as expected. This is way more than I thought I could get done in a couple hours, so I’m very pleased.

Beautiful.

Well, there goes all my work down the drain.

I had hit a snag while coding, so I decided to update GameMaker while I worked through the problem. When I downloaded and installed the new version (8.1), the old version (8.0) wasn’t deleted. “Simple enough,” I thought. “I’ll just get rid of 8.0 with the Windows uninstaller.” As it turns out, the project I had been working on was stored with (and deleted with) the 8.0 files.