Am I poorly prepared or well prepared for LD #38? I’m not sure. At the one hand I now have – besides my usual graphics and coding tools – a great collection of sources for procedural generated sounds and music. Adding this to a game without properly adapting it will sound awful but this is way better than me trying to come up with some music while I actually should rather work on coding. When I decided to aim at LD, I was not yet sure if I would aim for the compo or the jam. Furthermore I had the plan to wait for the topic announcement and bail out in case I don’t have a good idea for the given theme.

With this attitude, I would have given up for sure.

Now I decided that I will go for the compo and I will take that theme, regardless of what it will be. I’m not sure if this is the first step to become an enlightened game developer or just a madman. Probably the latter. But I don’t care. I’m definitely in.

Oh dear, less than four hours until the contest starts... what should I do until then? Learn a new development system? Quickly implementing a game for warmup? Learn to play piano?

Ok, I'll just have a beer and calm down :-)

Prototype is already playable, but still a lot to do!

I just went to my cellar trying to find a squeaky wheel I can record. I probably looked like a madman. The good thing is that the compo ends soon, getting back to normal. :-)

let's go to bed!

Apparently, I suck at making gifs...

LD compo submission: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/little-mouse-planet

Full playable game (browser): https://frodewin.itch.io/little-mouse-planet

Be a mouse on a small world, raise some plants, eat, sleep, get killed by a giant cat!

LD compo submission: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/little-mouse-planet

Game is playable in browser.

I finally added the cover image to my game Little Mouse Planet. Who wants to play it? Runs in browser, so no installation necessary.

LD compo submission: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/little-mouse-planet

First there was an idea of a little mouse on a little planet (you see that the title is ambiguous here regarding what is meant to be little). Here is my first drawing:

So far for the theme, but the game needed a challenge. Since people like kitties, I added a cat

When I decided to stick with the mouse idea, I started fleshing out the character

After scanning my mouse drawing (the one on the right side), I redraw the mouse in vector graphics and reshaped it a bit to look cuter (basically squeezed it in height a bit). I did this in a similar way for the other objects.

Then I did the coding. In Scratch this means moving a lot of blocks with your mouse. The rotating engine turned out to be not that complicated, in overall I needed just a sine and cosine function.

The sounds were recorded from common household objects and some were voiced by my little daughter. It turned out a cable reel made a decent sound for the well and I spilled some water on plants to get the watering sound.

After all, I got my game just in time for the Compo. I'm actually surprised, how much it matches the game design draft:

What do you think? Find the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/little-mouse-planet

The game Flappy Typing combines the fun of a learning game with the usefulness of a casual game, garnished with an upsetting sound track.

The game is for the Commodore 64 platform, but you can play it in the web browser. Many C64 games were known to be hard, so is this game. Can you beat it nevertheless?