Hi everyone,

I have been following the LD community for a while but have never actually entered before now.
I’m going to keep this short as I actually haven’t decided on anything specific for now and I’m probably just going to ad-lib it once the theme is announced.

The game I’m going to be making is probably going to be quite lo-fi 2D with 16 x 16 pixel tiles and sprites. I’m considering doing either a platformer metroidvania of sorts or a top-down RPG depending on what the theme is going to be.

I’ll most likely be using Java and Slick2D for the development as I have some previous experience with that. I might go HTML5 though. Depends on what I feel like in 10 hours.

I don’t know whether I’m going to be streaming or not, since I doubt anyone would want to watch me blunder through making a game.
Maybe once I post some screenshots or progress people might be interested in seeing what I’m doing.

Anyway, good luck to everyone participating!

Since LD starts at around 4 AM here in Denmark and I didn’t want to stay awake for 24 hours I went to sleep right after the theme was announced.

I was initially quite frustrated with the theme but inspiration hit me after about half an hour, and I wrote down my ideas on my tablet while lying in bed.

This is what I wrote down verbatim:

World’s Most Simple RPG

• No real story or dialog.
• All objectives presented as “requirements” and “reward”.
• Play on RPG stereotypes.
• Simple graphics (8 x 8 pixels)
• Quest types: Fetch, Slay, Escort, Guard
• Attributes: Strength(physical damage & health), Speed(movement & attack speed), Intelligence (magic damage & mana)
• NPCs: Quest Giver, Blacksmith, Alchemist, Wizard, General Goods Vendor, Generic (Says ‘Hi!’)
• Skill Trees: One for each attribute.
• Weapons: Swords, Daggers, Staffs
• Armor: Heavy, Light, Cloth

Basically the idea is to take the classic MMORPG elements and completely strip them down to their essentials.
For example, instead of a Quest NPC delivering some generic reason for giving you a quest such as: “Please help me, bandits have stolen my jewelry. Please bring it back to me and you can have my father’s old sword!” , you’ll just be presented with “Fetch <Jewelry> x5, Get <Sword> x1”.

I’m going to start working on some art now. I hope that I won’t spend more than 2 hours on that before I start programming. Once I’m finished with drawing some basic spritesheets and tilesets I’ll post them here and then move on to programming, drawing more art as I go along.

Also, I may at any point decide to cut out some of the features of that list as I was quite sleepy when I wrote it and I realize now that it might be a bit much for 40 hours of work.

So I’ve made some progress I’ve uploaded this video to YouTube so show how the game looks in action:

Video!

The things I’ve finished for now are:

• Loading and displaying the world.
• Loading and animating the sprites.
• Entity-World Collision Handling.
• Entity-Entity Collision Detection.
• Targeted Camera System
• Input Handling

Now that I’ve actually written the list it doesn’t seem like much but it took me forever to get it working. Which is kinda weird since I’ve done this a couple of times before and I was able to look at my old games to remind myself how I used to do things like the camera etc. It’s probably because I spent so much time making sure the code didn’t go spaghetti on me, making sure to separate everything and avoid anti-patterns. At one point I deleted the entire code for world loading/rendering because I got frustrated with the horrible implementation for TileD maps in Slick2D. I’ve decided that I’ll make the maps with TileD buy I’m going not going to use it for placing objects/entities. Instead I’m going to have a JSON-file for every tiled map which will contain all the necessary information for that map.

There is still a long way to go though. Seems harder by the minute, but I’m having a lot of fun. ^^

I called it “Minimalia”. I had to write “Minimalia” 600 times while programming it. I hate “Minimalia”…

Get it here: Minimalia

So I didn’t actually finish the game but I did submit what I’d made so far. I lost about 3-4 hours tonight doing some schoolwork. Time I would have used making more levels, equipment, monsters etc. (i.e. making it into an actual game).

The game in it’s current state is like A Link to the Past with only two areas and only two kinds of enemies. There is no goal, you can go from one area to the other and kill green and red slimes.

Screenshot of my submission.

As simple as it looks, there are a lot of implemented features that I just didn’t have time to make assets for.

Implemented features which aren’t actually in the game:

• Equipment – Weapon, Chest, Legs. The character in the game is actually wearing a shirt, pants and wielding a sword, all which are handled as separate objects. There are however no other items to wear so the system is kind of pointless.
• NPCs – Removed them at the last minute because I didn’t have time to finish them completely.
• Stats – Strength, Speed, Intelligence. Currently all of them are just set to zero as I never implemented a leveling system. Except for the slimes. Green slimes have 2.5 points in strength, and red slimes have 5, which makes red slimes hit twice as hard.

Also for anyone who downloads the game and runs it, I apologize for the horrible health bar and game over screen. I was running out of time and I made that in about 30 seconds.  Also you have to restart the game if you die. Sorry.

Even though I didn’t finish I had a lot of fun and once I’m a bit rested I’ll probably go back, clean it up a bit (I’ve filled it with crap code, rushing to make something playable to submit in the last few hours) and then continue working on it, because I actually quite like it. I think the graphic style ended up being kinda nice and very easy to work with. I’m probably not going to attempt an RPG next time though. To much work for 48 hours even for something this simple. Maybe once I’m an LD veteran and a fitting theme comes up I might give it another shot.

Well, good luck with the voting thingamajig everyone! 😀