After two nights of hard work I’ve finally torn the guts from an old android project and laid out the framework in a usable fashion. I’ll pop a link below so you can take a look if you like – it’s a framework for Android/Windows development based on LibGDX. It’s a bit of a mess given the amount of time I’ve had to organize it, but it should work.

https://github.com/dtConfect/DrillerLib

I’ll be participating in the competition this weekend, after I’ve taken some much needed rest. I participated in a jam last year with a couple of friends, but this is my first time going at it alone. I’m hoping with experience, and a decent framework to start with, I can do something much more interesting this year, even though I’m two men and 24 hours down. Luckily Monday is a bank holiday here in England, so I get to work right up to the deadline and spend the next day recovering.

Now that the theme has been announced it’s time for a cupcake, a cup of tea, and a little brainstorming before bed.

IDE: Eclipse
Platform: Windows / Android (maybe)
Language: Java
Libraries: LibGDX
Graphics: Photoshop, Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch (if I decide to do any non-pixel work)
Sound: SFXR
Music: Undecided
Motivation: Cupcakes and beer!
Junk-food: Thai
Ear-candy: Electronic, Rock, Metal, Alternative Chiptunes, K-pop, Anime Soundtracks, NES Soundtracks, Ska – everything basically.

Got me some duck in plum sauce. It’ll take me about as long to eat this as it did to peel the film off, so I’ll keep this brief.

I started work about 12 GMT today, having slept on the theme once it was announced. Wasted quite a bit of time trying to work out a problem with Android development, but I gave up on that for now, so it’s just gonna be a PC affair. I’m a bit behind, but I have a rough plan for the rest of my time. Still the idea I have is quite ambitious, so we’ll see how that turns out tomorrow ^^;

Back to work.

It’s 03:49am here in the UK. Time for a pizza by my reckoning. This jam is not going well. I grossly underestimated the complexity of what I wanted to create, and stumbled a bit when I first set out.

Still, I’ve put a lot of effort into putting together what I have so far, and I’m not about to throw it all away when I’m almost ready to make the fun stuff.

This Dare has gone poorly. There’s no way my original concept will be finished by tonight, and I can’t afford to let it leak into tomorrow for the jam entry either. I’m just gonna forge away and see how far I can get anyway.

At least the food has been good so far.

The celebratory beer has been opened – though it’s more bitter than I had hoped for. I finally caved around the four-hours-to-go point. We’ll put this one down to inexperience – I’ve participated in a Jam as part of a threesome once before, but I’ve never gone at Ludum Dare alone until now. My idea was overly ambitious – well beyond the scope of the bizarre, simplistic concepts I was throwing around before the theme was announced. Yes, the theme threw me, but I’m done making excuses. Yesterday was a lot of fun, and it’s been a good lesson to me about just how much you can get done in a short time if you really apply yourself. Today… well today has been ups and downs – I think my biggest pitfall was spending so long spriting and working on the player mutation graphics, but that was the core of my idea! I’ll lay out my concept for you below and you can think what you will. I’m going to take some much deserved recreational time now.

1. Boy is in bed, mother tells him she’s sorry it’s so hot but she doesn’t feel safe leaving a window open because who knows what creatures are living in that forest across the bridge.
2. Mother leaves boy in room, something opens the window – curtains blowing, boy out of bed.
3. Player walks to window, climbs out or closes it.
4. If the player closes the window, they go back to bed and the game ends.
5. If they climb out, they start the game proper.
6. The game is a load of top-down obstacle avoiding levels, with some enemies later on.
7. The player encounters statues along the way which he can use to mutate himself and gain an edge, but this is never necessary to complete the game.
8. Depending on the player’s mutation choices, events change towards the end of the game.
9. The player often spies a masked creature moving around in the levels.
10. When the player catches up with this creature at the end, based on their mutations, it will either a) be a boss fight, b) give the player a mask like it’s and talk to him c) look and the player, then leave
11. If the player beats the creature it will drop it’s mask. If the player takes the mask the game ends
12. If the player talks to the creature and decides to stay with it the game ends.
13. Otherwise, the player must return home.
14. The boy’s mother will hear him return. Based on the player’s mutations a) the boy’s father is a boss fight, b) the boy kills both his parents, c) the boy’s mother kisses him goodnight then leaves, d) the boy’s mother screams, his father runs in and shoots him, e) the boy’s mother screams, the game ends.

I’ve participated in two Ludum Dares before.

The first was a Jam effort with a couple of other guys, which was a lot of fun and something of a success in it’s own way: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8218

The second was a solo effort for Ludum Dare #24. I was overly ambitious, spet too long on the art and a complex paper-doll-ish system, quit with four hours remaining, and drank beer instead.

But it was a lot of fun, and even with the stress of working life and impending Christmas all around me I’ve committed to trying it again. Immediately.

So HERE you will find the public git repository of the really terrible and horridly embarrassing mess of an SFML 2.0 framework I’ve pieced together in a tiny fragment of the last two weeks. It’s still open to sweeping changes because I’ve had little-to-no time for designing and testing, so I do not recommend you try to use it. I put it together from ideas I’m familiar with so that I’ll know where I stand on Saturday morning, because I have no experience with SFML itself, and don’t want to be screwing with that.

Bad framework or no, it’s working so far, it’s familiar, putting it together so quickly has forced me to get to know SFML, and I have been thinking about nice ways to implement different systems a lot along the way, even if I didn’t feel I had time to experiment. That’s a job for later.

Other tools I will be using, notes, etc:
Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch Tablet – I suck with it, so it’ll keep my art rough (I tend to be a perfectionist with pixelart)
Otomata (http://www.earslap.com/projectslab/otomata) – If I have time for music. I’m not a musician, so this will have to do
SFXR – For sound effects. The classic one. The newer one makes me dizzy
Visual Studio 2010 (which I’m swiftly falling out of love with after this last week)
Windows 7 (my favourite OS)
Linux Mint (if I find time to port during or after the comp)
Dust – The huge collection of it I just found under my keyboard…huh…
GitHub – Source control. Can I keep a live public repository of my LD comp game while I work? I don’t see why not. I also don’t know how to use git properly so uh… let’s hope things go smoothly.
Junk food – To eat when I’m hungry
Coffee – To drink when I’m tired
Beer – To look forward to when I’m losing focus but not drink too much of because I have work the next day
Digital Camera – To take pictures of all the food and coffee and beer

Good luck all!

Here in the UK I’ve slept an hour over my alarm, took a shower, set up my VS projct, compiled some test code, put some laundry in the spinny white thing in the kitchen, and sat down with some berry-flavoured water, some brioche and lemon curd.

I brainstormed a lot of ideas last night but none of them seem to be gameplay oriented, so I’m still not sure what to make. I’m not saying it’s a bad theme, but it only seems to inspire stories and scenarios in me, not interesting mechanics.

Hey ho, here’s the first of my tradition LD food pics. Nothin’ special.

Despite my better intentions I have again found myself six hours in with naught but a tile system. I don’t even have anything interactive yet. I really need to get used to writing these things quickly.

Visual Studio has been a might pain in the toosh today, randomly crashing, failing to compile until reset, giving me constant bogus intellisense reports… I’m starting to think doing a jam in C++ was a terrible idea.

Next step will be developing a JRPG style turn-based battle system. I’ll just do it on the console initially to save time, but I have no idea how that’s going to be structured yet. So much pressure, so far into the Jam, and nothing to show you yet apart from my lunch.

It’s store-bought Thai Red Curry.

It’s not great…

This Jam is going worse than the last one if I’m honest. Countless struggles with Visual Studio bugs, the general slow, demotivating process of writing a tile system in a framework I knocked together in the late hours of the previous week, and frustration with other roadblocks I’ve encountered. It’s not been a pleasant ride.

What you see below is barely interactive. You can move the camera, and the tile your mouse is over is highlighted by a red outline. The likelihood of doing my original idea justice seems slim and I’ve spent the last two hours or so just trying to think of another way to continue from where I am. I’ve drawn a blank, so I’m going to sleep on it. Whatever I do I will be disappointed, but I said I was going to finish something this time, and I fully intead to do so.

Things I’ve learned so far (and in my previous jam attempt):
1. Don’t roll a tile system out during the jam.
2. Singleton managers are best for fast development. None of this constantly accessing parents’ parents’ managers lark.
3. Pick a SIMPLE idea. Do not forget this when looking at the list of uninspiring ideas in front of you and deciding to try the only interesting one. Pick a SIMPLE one.
4. Don’t use C++. Not unless you’re really confident with the code-base at hand, and have a stable installation of an IDE to use.
5. Don’t start the Jam burnt out. Staring at code at the office all week and my messy framework afterwards didn’t put me in great shape at the start.

I vowed I would not fail two Ludum Dares in a row, but here I sit again, four hours to go, with the realization that while what I have could be brought to some stage of completion, it would not be in any way fun, and I would not enjoy finishing it.
I could write a long, ranty post about what went wrong at this point, but I’d only be echoing a lot of other posts, so here’s a description of my concept instead:

What I’ve got at the end of it all:
My concept was a reverse, SNES-style RPG, ‘Willful Encounter’, where instead of ‘random encounters’ you control ‘willful encounters’, pitting monsters against the heroes without warning. You would receive tokens for every tile the ‘player’ walks his party across, which you can spend creating a group of monsters to assail him. Stronger monsters would cost more tokens and different environments would give attack and defense modifiers to different monsters.

An expansion of the concept might involve detailed AI controlling the movements of the player’s party, the ability to spawn loot to attract his attention, and the ability to select a sub-set from a vast array of creatures at the start of the game.

But with only four hours to go I have yet even to implement the battle system, and the monster party construction. These are essentially the meat of the gameplay, and could only be finished in a really rough un-fun form in the time that remains. So what do I have?

• Tile loading from an image
• A player party that walks north to your tower
• The ability to initiate a battle
• A nice transition to the battle scene and back
• Battle environments based on the player party’s location
• The beginnings of a really terrible battle system

Oh, and good luck to the rest of you!