Here we go, jammin’ it up with a PvP 10 second minigame-off! Gonna be writing it in Python. Glhf!

With 16 hours left on the clock, it’s time to turn in for the night and wrap everything up in the morning! The Ludum Dare has been an awesome experience, and it’s taught me quite a bit about game development as well:

• Given a deadline, I can finish a game.
• All-nighters are great, but only if you don’t have anything important the next day. Elliot (my partner) and I made the mistake of not sleeping between Friday and Saturday, and lost a bunch of productivity.
• Preparation is key! Making the game isn’t hard at all once you make sure you know what you’re going to be working with. It’s learning to master the tools that’s the hard part.
• Going cross-browser sucks. I spent 3 hours today just figuring out how to distribute on Macs (thank goodness I already knew what to do for windows, or I would kill myself).
• Making art is fun! Given the right image creation programs (in my case, flash), it’s actually really fun to create something artistic for a game. Hence the showing off my art at the top of this post, I don’t consider myself arts-y so it’s kind of a big deal.

Back to the game though, it’s gonna be good. Elliot and I have been doing nothing but this for the last 52 hours and we’re still not sick of it yet, so we must be doing something right!

Well, this was my first experience ever creating a game from start to finish and releasing it to the public, and I have to say i LOVE the feeling! The sense of accomplishment when you release a game can’t be beat. At this point, knowing people are going to be downloading and playing our game is a great feeling, and it convinced me that working through the slumps and ending projects is always worth it in the end. At this point though, I’m on hour 72 of game-making, so I need to take a quick breather before I start thinking about it again, but I promise to add a post-mortem with some lessons I learned from the whole thing in the future.

After a long Monday of expecting to be done but always finding something new to fix, we wrapped up Kickbox and are ready to release it! Try to imagine QWOP + Slime Volleyball, all packed into an exciting game of “soccer”. Every 10 seconds, something exciting jumps in to change the game. So grab a friend and play Kickbox to your heart’s content!

Link: http://thomassteinke.net/kickbox/