In preparation for the 23rd Ludum Dare, my first ever, I decided to paint a pretty picture in Paper. I figured that the most visible posts on the site are the ones with a lot of pictures, so get ready for a lot of pictures.

Background

I’m (almost) 17 and proud to be entering the Ludum Dare competition. I’ve loved games since before I can remember and have loved designing them ever since I could hold a pencil. Luckily for me, Ludum Dare coincided with a class i’m taking this year about Hemmingway, where we were each assigned to prepare a Hemmingway passion. I chose competitive game design (note: read that in a dramatic hellfire voice).

Unluckily for me, I have an APLIT practice test for three hours this weekend, so I won’t be able to last minute rush everything like everyone loves to do.

Tools

• Hardware: iMac, Macbook, iPad, Cosmonaut
• Software: Paper, Flash Builder (euch),  Photoshop, PyxelEdit, cfxr, GitBox
• Framework: FlashPunk
• Livestream: Justin.TV
• Timelapse: Terminal
• License:CC BY-SA 3.0

I’m ready for my first Ludum Dare! (dar-ai? crazy)

Tags: deskphoto

Journal

Well, I’m 3 hours in and I think I’m doing pretty well. I’m taking off some time to write this journal and let ideas percolate for a while.

It glows like a jewel.

I found a game concept pretty quickly. It’s not the most original or awe inspiring, but it seems fun to make. You’re the president of a space contracting company and it’s your job to create mining lanes to new worlds back to Earth. Of course, you must deal with space pirates and asteroids damaging the cargo ships, so not only do you build mining stations, you also build defense stations to protect your interests.

(concept)

You start by harvesting the moon (destroying it) and as your company grows and grows, the worlds look smaller and smaller. You end up crushing planets hundreds of times the size of Earth, a tiny, tiny world.

I don’t know what the end goal is, but whatever.

Watch me on Justin.tv!

Status

In a Lonely Sea of Stars is coming along well! I finally decided on the entire point: you’re still a space contractor building transport lines to harvest energy from stars, but the ultimate point is to find one other planet with intelligent life and establish a trade route. That’s going to be really hard. It’s going to be very far away and things like asteroids and space pirates (the evicted USSR living in space) will impede the expansion of your company.

The little light in between the star and earth is a mining ship.

Play it

The game is (and has been) available on github. It’s not really “playable” but it does work a little without user input.

 Or you can watch me make it:

TIL that exponential scrolling is really, really confusing. And simpler than you’d think. That actually took 4 hours to figure out. I wasted so much time. Shoot. Only a couple more things to implement, though, so I should be a-ok!

Difficult math.

There’s not much to it, yet, but zooming is fun!

Legit screenshot:

(click for larger)

 Or you can watch me make it:

In a Lonely Sea of Stars is coming along really, really nicely. After spending 4+ hours developing the scrolling code, everything’s pretty much working out. I just completed (somewhat) the transport code, so when you build a harvester on a sun, a mining lane gets built and 10 harvesters get sent out. I have to make it filter out as you zoom out, but that’s all later.

I’m still having trouble with radians and atan2 (those two things never, ever work for me), but it’s functioning pretty well.

Send out the transports! (click for larger)

There’s no tutorial yet, so I’ll sum up: use the scroll wheel to zoom out and click the green ship to place harvesters on suns. Right now the turret (purple) does nothing, so just leave it alone. Oh, and nothing costs money yet.

 Or you can watch me make it: