Starting on the day something is due is decidedly ill-advised, but, as I understand it, the submission date for this mini is flexible, so there’s that.
No idea what’s happening here, yet, but there seems to be a bit of a hostage situation with the knight…if only some brave adventurer would come rescue him…
Of note: I’ll be starting with a little bit of skeleton startup code rather than going from scratch. I’ll post this when the entry is done.
I decided to finally finish start the doodle/mini-LD project from a few weeks ago as sort of a warmup round, and, unlike every other jam/speed-coding/short-dev-cycle attempt I’ve ever made, I actually feel like I’m not a miserable failure this time! Go me!
I’m eighteen hours in, and I’ve managed to go from some really crappy initialization code and an empty directory to a really crappy level editor and previewer, and even a crappily-animated heroine to go with. (I’m slacking off at the moment because I’m waiting for Imagemagick to finish downsampling the contents of my timelapse directory, and I really don’t feel like looking at the project at the moment, so I’m avoiding burnout.)
Things I’ve learned from this little exercise:
I think I’m probably going to goof off for the evening at this point, then pick up bright and early tomorrow; 12 hours would be just enough to actually make it into a real game…
In (sorta kinda, I guess?) accordians* with the rules, my framework/startup code can be found at http://illegal-instruction.org/.
*yes, accordians.
12 hours in, and this is as far as I’ve gotten:
Traditionally, I’ve done quite horribly at these; invariably, I either give up due to a perceived lack of talent on my part, the utter frustration of not having my skill set and/or the allotted match my ambitions, or real life getting in the way. The last six attempts have produced only one publicly-released binary (along with a lot of early exits and vapourware announcements) – and even this was devoid of enemies or an objective; this is quite a sad, embarrassing little ratio.
Each time, I tell myself I expected better, I should stop overdesigning everything, I should stay focused, I should do this, that and the other, and each subsequent time, I go out and make the same mistakes. Although there are probably a variety of things I’ve gotten wrong (one does not, after all, bash out a perfect FFXI clone in a Saturday from scratch, no matter how much talent one has, and certainly not if they spend half of it shopping and surfing B3ta), I think my major failing is this: someone much wiser than me once said that people frequently end up hating (and, in my case, feeling enraged and powerless about, and ctrl+a->shift-deleting…!) their own work because they’re comparing their own ‘behind-the-scenes’ with everyone else’s finished product.
I’ve decided to try to take this advice to heart this time.
There’s something slightly sad about the fact that that’s a rare enough occurrence with me that it merits its own post here (especially in the midst of about a billion successful LD entries by others), but the truth is, without Ludum Dare, I probably never would have had the idea for this in the first place, much less actually attempted to act on it, so a big thank you goes to the community at large.
As for the project itself, it’s this thing:
EDIT: The game itself can be downloaded from here (Win32-only, but is known to play nice with WINE).
*(To be fair, it does need a second round of polishing.)
…or “A Fail In The Desert”.
Yep, I’ll have time after all, and the weather here* isn’t any good, so I’m in, and maybe this time I’ll actually complete an entry**.
Toolset:
I’m looking forward to it!
* Abu Dhabi, in case you care. As I write this, it’s 107F outside and climbing, with more humidity and airborne dust than the laws of physics should allow.
** I seem to be dogged by whatever mental malaise causes one to look at multi-million-budget console titles, look at what I’ve done, shake my head in frustration and anguish, shift-delete the project directory and drown my sorrows in a tallboy of chocolate milk.
Still gonna finish on time, there was just a lot of not-glamorous ancillary work that had to be done first.
I sorta kinda had something running by the deadline, but the truth of the matter is that I absolutely hated – and still hate – the way it looks and plays. I ran out of time, cut features willy-nilly, didn’t even manage to get screen transitions or good-looking particles in, made my own artwork (go play it, you’ll see why this wasn’t a good idea), and ran through about seven different ideas before I finally settled on something I liked – but by then, there wouldn’t have been enough time to finish it, thus the lame rubbish below. I had originally planned to simply highlight the directory, press Shift+Delete, and never look back, but my girlfriend, wonderfully kind and supportive as she is, convinced me that it was worth rescuing and posting, so here you guys go.
Test Subject #17 for Windows
Test Subject #17 C source (requires Allegro 4.2.x or 4.4.x, AllegroGL and DUMB)
The obligatory screenshots:
Right, postmortem.
The good:
The doubleplus ungood:
And there you have it.
I commented this on my previous post, but in case anyone missed it and cares to know, I’ll be starting from this previous entry, minus all the assets*: http://illegal-instruction.org/games/test_subject_17_src.tar.gz
*for the mods: is reusing a font texture cheating? It’s not a particularly attractive font, I just want to make sure I can actually display text at all…
Too many false starts, too many social obligations, some things I’d rather not remember right now and incompetence all conspired to make this one not happen. Kind of a shame, I actually had a story and some art, and I may revisit the theme in the future.
Good luck to everyone still in it, and good on everyone that finishes!
A.I. is hard…who knew?
Trying to explain to a computer how ice hockey is properly played…
My original idea was a demake of the NHL series, but it turned out that getting AI players to correctly play hockey in a weekend almost certainly would have been beyond my admittedly limited skills.
So that’s canceled.
All’s not lost, though – I have a friend helping me with art and voice acting, and we’ve switched to an alternate set of themes: MSPaint As Level Editor and Monochrome. No screenshots yet, but soon!
Tags: #MiniLD60, MiniLD, monochrome