Wasn't sure I would have time, but I guess I'm in :) good luck everyone!

Apparently I'm making some sort of psychedelic racing type thing, I think. Honestly I'm not sure what this is turning into

It looks better animated of course :)

Trippy racing game taking shape, still not sure what other genera to mix it with yet though :-/

OK, I know what I'm making, thats good with only 8h left! Now with 100% more collectibles this game will be a mashup of a traditional bar/pub fruit machine and a racer.

Like all good fruit machines we have a flashy demo mode

and once the game starts, drive around to collect fruit and match 4 for the chackpot

So its done, that was fun! post mortem will probably follow once I have had some sleep I think this is the game link https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/$86131 but I don't know how the new LD stuff works

Good luck to all those finishing off!

After some much needed sleep I have uploaded a windows build to my game page.

Feel free to drop on by and give it a spin :) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/spint-to-win

Hey, running out of space sounds fun, I'm in! Good luck every one!

Bob's Budget Bomb Dissposal is finished. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/$109377

A game about decommissioning audinace on a budget! This was a lot of fun, and the first time I have used (or even tried to use) Phazer.js, a very nice HTML5 framework. Enjoy!

Not sure I like calling these write ups "post-mortem", that implies the project is dead. I think Bob's Budget Bomb Disposal deserves at least a post-compo update.

Day 1

A Rocky Beginning

Like a good game jammer I did my homework, spent some time preparing and practicing with my chosen tools and frameworks: SDL2, C, OpenGL. I even had a few half baked ideas for cool effects and mechanics I wanted to try and work into the game, I could picture how it might look and play .... then the theme was announced.

None of my ideas were even vaguely useful, not one, eerg. That's not to say the theme was bad (looking at you LD41) but yeah this wasn't a good start. Since the theme now comes out at 11pm Friday in the UK I decided to sleep on it and see if anything useful come to me.

Rising nice and early, full of energy and ready to go, an idea comes to me: Bomb Disposal, on a budget. Imagine a game where you work in a second rate bomb disposal yard, where health and safety checks are taken care of by bribery and turning a blind eye, that seems like it has potential to be amusing. I imagined some types of bombs would react badly if you stacked too many of them in a small space and bad things would happen if deliveries didn't have room to drop off, your yard would slowly start to fill up with dangerously unstable ordinance and you would have to franticly dash about trying to get rid of it before something exploded. Yeah this could work!

So who would use a budget bomb disposal service? Well, despots in charge of impoverished dictatorships of course. That lead to other ideas, maybe working in amusing miscellaneous things, like "lost" financial records, the remains of political candidates, incriminating evidence. All the sorts of things might "accidently" find their way into a disposal plant that didn't ask too many questions.

Isn't it amazing how, once you have a core idea down, all the other stuff just seems to fall into place!

A Rocky Beginning 2

Ok, with the idea nailed down it was time to get to work and see how much of this I could actually build in just 48h. I got coding ...

OK this isn't going well. I am actually quite good with C/C++, compilers etc. Its what I do for a living, but today the fates had other ideas. After several hours of fighting with my supposedly "prepared" tools and libraries I gave up and threw it all away, eerg 2. Well if I'm going to go down I may as well learn something along the way, so I downloaded Phaser, a HTML5/Javascript game framework that I had sort of heard of but never even looked at, and certainly never used before, what could go wrong!

It turns out Phaser is a pretty cool framework and I started knocking stuff together with it quite quickly. My process for doing jams is to spend half the time working on code, getting all the mechanics and logic down using placeholder art:

I then like to spend the second half of the time doing an art pass and polishing the graphics and effects, followed by bug fixing and last minuet stuff. But wait, you might be thinking, what about sound! .. yeah there is a reason my games all have terrible sound in them, it something that always gets lumped into "if I have spare time" category. Don't do that! sound one of the most important contributors to the mood and theme of a game! I really need to do better next time.

Day 2

I had most of the basics down, proximity detection, collision detection, bomb spawning, even a nice glow on the delivery bay to show the player stuff was incoming. This was going well, but I still had to a starting screen with instructions and some logic for a failure condition. I was starting to really feel the time I lost at the start now, working with an unknown framework was also slowing me down, it was time to cut back.

I dropped the proximity feature, it would have been a nice extra level of depth to have bombs start fizzing and glowing dangerously when they were too close together, but it needed a lot of work yet and I just didn't think I had time. Better to spend it on making the core features work solidly and look nice. I also dropped the animated art I had planned for the processing machines, instead going with simple trap doors that would stay closed until they were ready to process more bombs. Finally I also dropped the joke items, focusing in on just creating a selection of bombs. It's really important when coming up with designs to classify things into "essential" and "nice to have", your never going to have enough time so you need to know what to cut when your tired and the end starts creeping up on you.

As for art, I tried something new this time, rendering stuff using blender. I set up a really simple scene with a camera and light directly above the object I was modelling, then rendering stuff out to 2D and pulled it into gimp. In gimp I did a paint over to add texturing and fine details. It seemed to work well, producing passable (if you don't mind the 90's era "pre-rendered" look) art relatively quickly.

Conclusion

Overall this LD when OK, I am pretty happy with the result despite the poor start. I guess the ability to doggedly continue despite setbacks is just as important as skills with art or code! Phaser is a pretty cool framework that I will probably use again. Rendering stuff in blender also saved quite a lot of time, so that's a keeper as well.

Like I said at the start, I think Bob's Budget Bomb Disposal deserves at least a post-compo update, to add back in the bomb proximity features, the miscellaneous joke items and the planned machine art work. I also want to adjust the controls based on the awesome feedback I have had so far, thanks to everyone who has left comments!

Try it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/bobs-budget-bomb-disposal