This is my first Ludum Dare. I am quite eager to participate, and although I did not get much sleep last night, I am hoping to stay up for quite awhile this first night. I am fresh off of ‘winning’ National Novel Writing Month (in which winning is automatic if you write 50,000+ words of a novel, whether or not you actually finish your first draft), and I am finding that creation contests assist me much in motivating my muse to go outside and play, so to speak!

When it comes to game creation, my go to genres/styles/whatever are text adventures (the Quest engine works for me) and classic, turn-based JRPGs (I enjoy various RPGMaker engines, and I hope to do my best to avoid the pitfalls of relying too much on default assets and genre cliches.) I am expecting to make one of the latter, and if I have any time remaining, work on one of the former. My Monday is jam packed (I’m both a teacher and a student, and the semester is not over yet), so I am aiming to be productive tonight, Saturday and Sunday, football or not.

Best of luck to everyone!

… for this sort of event makes me realize how alternative, for better or worse, my brain works. I’m seeing a lot of excellent artwork and design principles for puzzle and platform games, and here I am writing brief, snarky comedy descriptions of rooms and hoping that my conditional logic will be tight enough to make this game playable when time’s up. Ha!

• The Quest engine, while an easy way to create a text adventure, does not support exporting its files (.quest extension) to HTML and JavaScript very well.
• Although I can’t publish my version of my game (the only realistic avenue would be to release it to the Quest website, which I am not ready to do given that I plan on building my game more and more), I have a game of sorts, and I have greatly improved my ability to manage my time and conceptualize the logic of trading and using items and altering story while not bending the fabric of my game’s universe. It’s nice to have a game, even if it’s not in an ultimately publishable form.
• When you really need sleep, it’s a lot easier not to wish you could stay up all night every night.

Hope that everyone had a wonderful time with this event!