I told myself I would enter Ludum Dare 41, and I have. I intend to go solo for this one.

It appears to be obligatory to say what programs you're going to be using. That's a problem for me, because I'm not really sure. My first choice would be Unity, but my Maya license ran out, I'm not paying £5k for another one, and I really don't know if I can learn to use Blender from scratch in four weeks. My second choice would be PICO-8, but does that count? Are there restrictions on what you can use?

My final choice of game engine will probably depend on the theme that gets picked. In any case, this is either going to go spectacularly well or spectacularly badly, but I can't wait to finally give this a go, and I hope I at least have fun while I'm inevitably wired off my face on caffeine.

I'm going to try and create a bullet hell dating sim in PICO-8 (working title: Love Is A Battlefield). Win over your date by literally showering her with affection, while avoiding pitfalls like... well, I dunno yet. Still working on what the enemies will be. I know the bullets will be little pink hearts, so there's that.

I'll see if I can post teasers as I go. Wish me luck!

On a more serious note: the bar in the top-right is the typical "love meter" you get in dating sims. It depletes over time, and depletes faster if you get hit, but increases as you destroy enemies. If it empties, it's game over; if it fills to the top, you win.

Used gen8's Anime Face Maker as a reference for the face sprite. Once the basic mechanics are done, I'll see if I can make her expression change depending on how full the love meter is.

I think next up will be the text engine. There'll definitely be some dialogue displayed when the love meter fills or empties, but I might throw in some random lines during gameplay as well. I just hope they don't get too repetitive or obscure too much of the screen.

I should probably be spending less time hacking together the cutscene in which the boss appears, and more time hacking together the code for the boss itself. Either way, this is gonna give me a major headache... I've never attempted anything nearly this complex in PICO-8 before. I can do it, I reckon, but I'm gonna end up with horrible spaghetti code that will make seasoned PICO-8 developers want to scream.

Pic related, it's the boss: It's a heart encased in metal, because metaphors.

On the other hand, things are going great for me. Dialogue system: Done. Game-over system: Done. Main menu: plain, but done.

The boss battle still needs to be tested, and is missing the cutscene at the end. Realistically, I have about about seven more hours today, and maybe four hours tomorrow because I have work. I honestly think I can get the game done in that time. It's maybe 80% feature-complete? Just the boss battle left to go...

Killing an enemy will sometimes cause Karen to say something positive, while getting hit by an enemy or bullet will sometimes cause Karen to say something negative. (Yep, the woman's name is Karen now.) The boss also speaks occasionally while changing patterns.

Speaking of the boss, I just need to finish it and get the ending screen working, and this thing is ready to ship! I think I can just make the Compo deadline!

After a few last-minute hiccups, my bullet hell/dating sim fusion is finally complete!

I am so proud of myself for finishing this in time for the Compo deadline. I've never entered a game jam before, I've never built a full game in PICO-8 before, and yet here I am, about 38 hours after I started, with a complete, working entry. It lacks a little polish, maybe, but I don't care. It's good enough for me.

A full playthrough should only take about five minutes, so if you have time, please check it out: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/love-is-a-battlefield

Looking forward to playing through everyone else's entries! Tomorrow, that is. Right now, it's midnight and I have work tomorrow, so I gotta go pass out. Good luck, y'all!

I was reluctant to publish any changes to Love Is A Battlefield while judging was still ongoing, but the issues people were reporting with the boss fight were so severe that I felt I needed to do something. So here is my compromise: I've fixed the boss fight glitches, left everything else untouched, and uploaded them as version 1.1. For those who would prefer to play the game in its original state, V1.0 is still available to play. I will not publish any more changes until after the judging period.

For those who haven't played Love Is A Battlefield yet, here's the link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/love-is-a-battlefield

I'll write up my post-mortem tomorrow.

What a week this has been. LD41 was my first-ever game jam, and my finished entry, Love Is A Battlefield, is my first published game under my "Altrix Studios" banner, and the first published game I didn't make at university. (My scene creators on Newgrounds don't count.)

First of all, a massive thank you to everyone who's reviewed Love Is A Battlefield and left such kind words. It's especially amazing to see people whose games I followed all jam long, coming over and leaving positive reviews on mine! Honestly, I was happy just to get it out the door on time in an almost-entirely-working state, so the feedback is just the icing on the cake for me.

So, what have I learnt from those 48 hours?

What Went Well

• First of all, I think I got a bit lucky with the theme. It was one of the ones that caught my attention back in the Theme Slaughter round, and I was glad to see it win. If it had been one of my less-preferred themes, I might have struggled more to get off the starting blocks.
• My warm-up really helped as well. As practice for Ludum Dare, I spent most of April working on a PICO-8 demake of one of my uni projects... that happened to be a shoot-em-up. Love Is A Battlefield was coded entirely from scratch, and ended up being far more complex, but that practice run meant I had a good idea of what I was doing.
• Speaking of PICO-8, it was definitely the right choice of engine for me. No compile times, no tabbing between different programs, graphical constraints that helped disguise my mediocre drawing skills, and code length limits that forced me to scope small. I'll almost certainly be using it for any future Ludum Dares I enter.

What Went Badly

• In hindsight, I actually caused problems for myself before the event had even begun, by staying up late on Friday and then sleeping in on Saturday morning. If I'd gone to bed normally, and gotten up normally, I could have had 2-3 hours of extra development time, which would have really helped with the next thing...
• Testing. I just did not test this game enough. On multiple occasions, I went ahead and hacked in hundreds of tokens' worth of code without testing any of it, and then when I finally ran the game, I found I'd made half-a-dozen typos or introduced some silly glitch. The boss battle in particular was so glitchy that I had to post an update fixing it, after I told myself I wouldn't do that. The fixes took me literally fifteen minutes. I would have found them if I'd bothered to test things properly.
• I made a minor slip-up as well when submitting the game - I forgot to put the controls! Thankfully, from playing a few other PICO-8 games, it seems I wasn't the only one... but still, it's not great to wake up in the morning, excited to read your game's reviews, and the very first one just says "I couldn't figure out the controls". Oops.

What Comes Next?

I'm already working on a "DX" version of the game, to be released after judging ends. It'll take into account all the feedback I've gotten so far, and will have more polish, more features, and fewer bugs. I'm also working a more relaxed puzzle game, based on another theme idea I saw during the Slaughter, so I might post about that too.

Again: thank you all. This has been a wonderful introduction to Ludum Dare, and I absolutely intend to have a go at the next one as well.

~F1

Over the course of the jam, I followed anyone whose game caught my eye and I wanted to play... and then I never actually played a bunch of them! Oops! I'm rectifying that now, and I'll try and get through as many of them as I can over the course of today and tomorrow. If you want me to play your game as well, feel free to link it in the comments and I'll get round to it if I have time!

Feel free to play my game as well, if you haven't already: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/love-is-a-battlefield

When you consider that over 3,000 games were submitted, and around 1,900 got ranked, that's a phenomenal result for my first-ever Ludum Dare. Thank you so much to everyone who played and rated my game - and congratulations, as well! Everyone worked so hard, and submitted such amazing games.

My results in full:

(you guys really did hate that shooting sound effect, huh?)

I'm aiming to release Love is a Battlefield DX before the end of the month. Look forward to it - and look forward to LD42! I know I am.

I have a holiday booked for mid-August, so I might miss part of the voting period, but I should be available for the jam itself, so yeah, I'm in. This'll be my second Ludum Dare after LD41, and I'm hoping it goes just as well at the first one.

I'll most likely be using PICO-8 again, but if I decide I need the extra screen space, I'll use TIC-80 instead, having discovered it during LD41. Good luck, everyone!

I'm off to bed now, but first I have a game idea that I just wanna throw out there quickly, see what people think of it.

Basically, it's Asteroids, but every time you destroy an asteroid it leaves a hole in the background that you can't fly through. You have to be strategic in where the asteroids are positioned when you destroy them, or you'll literally run out of space to move through and become a sitting duck. There might need to be some kind of mechanism to stop players from sitting around for minutes until an asteroid appears in just the right place... maybe I can use UFOs for that. Also, special asteroids that heal the background when shot?

I must admit, I'm having a harder time with this theme than I did last year. Still in the "spitballing" phase. But yeah, would this work> Don't wanna go ahead and try it and then find out halfway through that it won't work for some reason.

Had fun getting vectors to work in PICO-8, but I've got the basic controls of my Asteroids game in place now. 16-frame rotation, wrapping, and lots of vector-y goodness.

Making the player shoot be easy. The per-pixel collision detection required for the whole "chunks of space you can't fly into" mechanic? Not so easy.

It's Asteroids, but shooting the smaller-sized asteroids creates a hole in the space backdrop. You can shoot through it, but you can't fly through it, so between the holes and the constantly-spawning Asteroids, you're literally "running out of space" as the game goes on. The green asteroid will erase any holes it's on top of when you shoot it.

You may be wondering, "Isn't that the boss from your LD41 game?" Why, yes it is. I've decided that each of my Ludum Dare entries will contain a reference to my previous entry, and so every time an asteroid spawns, it has a 1% chance of being Karen's closed-off heart instead. (Speaking of Love Is A Battlefield, my current aim is to release it during September. August will be a busy month for me.)

To be honest, I'm not too happy with this right now. I feel like it's too difficult, and the collision detection is too buggy and imprecise - note the heart disappearing when the player respawns, because it thinks it's overlapping. I have the whole of tomorrow to try and implement a pixel-perfect collision detection system, but I don't know whether I'll be able to, especially without killing the game's performance.

For now, I have the menu to implement, and that'll be easy enough.

I've got a fair amount done today. The menu system's working - I think - and tomorrow it'll mostly just be a matter of getting the collision detection to work properly, recording the player's high score, and polishing everything up.

Oh, and I have a name and logo, too:

Good luck, everyone!

I'm still not very good at it.

Collision detection now works properly, but it still uses square hitboxes because I honestly just can't be bothered with per-pixel collision detection. Hitboxes are Good Enough™. The bonus enemy has been shrunk down to 8x8, and I've added a new red asteroid to complement the green one:

I now have plenty of time left for polishing, testing, and bug-fixing, before releasing it later tonight.

I felt like AsterVoids was still missing something graphically, so I threw together a simple particle system and...

...looking much better now. Even better, I can easily reuse it for future projects.

I have one little Easter egg that I want to throw in, and then I reckon that'll be it.

With two hours to spare, and after a whole lot of polishing, AsterVoid is finally complete! It's been uploaded to the PICO-8 site, and will be uploaded to Newgrounds shortly (my first submission there in six years!)

Anyway, check it out: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/astervoid