You are not supposed to be here, tiny creatures; you are playing with fire. Side effects may include isolation mutations and ruins.

I'm thrilled to see so many posters using FOSS. My whole suite for my first LD is FOSS, with the exception of BeepBox, which is a free online composition tool for 8-bit sound. Close enough to FOSS to be worth using.

Weapons of choice are Fossa (Ub20LTS), Blender, GIMP, Audacity, BeepBox, SimpleScreenRecorder and PulseAudio.

Can you hear the war drums? Only a few moments remain. Good skill to you all; luck has no power here.

Bold to take a 7 hour sleep, but I wager the mental refresh will pay itself off. This is the only day for the double shift in compo, so the bulk of the work is at my doorstep, and tomorrow is just the final polish. Being my first LD, I'm naturally encountering every blind spot in my workflow. Blind spots that conveniently remained undetected during my practice jams in the past few weeks. I didn't get as far as I had hoped, but I did the very basics in place. I have a character and a monster, and we can attack each other and it can perish. Game over screen is on the agenda today, as well as polishing up the currently abysmal combat. And I still need to create some tiny creatures. Good skill to you all. Luck has no power here.

Thinking of reinventing my main character. Feels risky with only 17 hours left. Decisions, decisions.

Well, my game was overly simplistic, but I made a whole game in 46 hours, 40 minutes. Whew! Time for some much-deserved celebration!

Incoming Cellular Activity!

I'll take it. This was my first game jam of any kind ever, and I thought I had 3 days but found out on the first day that I only had 2. Also I had been thinking of one kind of game in the days leading up to 56, and then just... sat down and made a different kind of game. I do not understand why. Anyway, lessons learned. I'll do better next time.

I spent all winter looking forward to LD57 and it goes and sneaks up on me like this. My fault for telling my brain "April". BAM you have 72 hours to prepare. Not even time to squeeze in a practice round, and I haven't touched dev since LD56. Gonna be quite a feat this time, but the critiques of my first game are still fresh in mind, and I'm ready to bring a smoother combat system this time around. As with my first LD, 56, I will be competing solo with a primarily FOSS pipeline.

Weapons of choice: Ubuntu 20.04; Godot whichever version I have; GIMP; Audacity; Beepbox (Only thing I'm using that's not FOSS, and only because I don't mess around much with music recording these days. With a time crunch, I find it more efficient to engineer music rather than play it. I hope to remedy this in the future and get more familiar with LMMS, but alas, life is ever an obstacle.)

Good skill to you all; luck is irrelevant here. And as always, en garde!

Oh my, oh my. GIMP has automatically updated, and on my system has a crashbug whenever I change brushes. Yikes! How incredibly frustrating and poorly timed. Fortunately, I have heard of another FOSS image editor. Krita! I've never given it a fair shake, as I've used GIMP for eons, but I guess this their chance to impress me. I'm stumbling around a bit with it, but I like it so far. Another lesson learned. Turn off automatic updates for programs that don't need internet access. For now I just have to wait for the GIMP devs to fix the bug and release 3.0.1. Until then, Krita to the rescue. Thank you, Krita! You saved my Ludum Dare!

Alas, life is ever the obstacle, and I only managed about 3 good working hours. I won't be able to make the compo, but I can downshift into the new 'Extra' category. I find that a tad bit embarrassing, but far more acceptable than giving up. It'll give me time to make a better game and rebuild some characters I lost a few years ago. Every Ludum Dare comes with lessons learned. See you all on the longer battlefield.

I'm not even in confident in most of these, but they sound like interesting challenges.

I slid in at literally the last minute. Got a working Linux version through the door as it was closing. I'm sweating. But I'm in. Also uploaded a Windows version which I cannot test, and I'm working on getting a web app version up hopefully in time not to lose any votes. But for now, food and sleep are the priority.

Well fought, everyone. May the best game win.