I may as well make it official: I’ll be doing my first LD Jam this weekend for LD26.

This is new territory for me. I’ve never made a game before, and the last thing that even came close was almost 20 years ago. Games were the reason I learned how to write code. Despite never writing a game before, I’ve spent a lot of time learning about the components of games and how they are written. I’ve experimented with the technical components involved with graphics, sound, and control, but I’ve never managed to put them all together into something I can call a “game.”

This weekend changes that.

Location: Calgary, Canada

OS: Linux (Slackware)

Languages: HTMl5/CSS3/Javascript/PHP

Servers: Apache HTTP, MySQL, MongoDB

IDE: Emacs or Eclipse, based on however I’m feeling at the time.

Graphics: GIMP

Sound/Music: No clue. Cross that bridge when I get to it.

I’m not setup to be able to stream my desktop, or even capture video of it. But I’ll be posting regularly (I hope) to Twitter, Flickr, and Tumblr to document my progress.

A peek at my setup for this weekend and some of the tools I’ll be using for testing. 😉
This is where I’ll be spending most of my life for the next 72+ hours.

Tags: gotkube, LD#26

Approaching the last 24 hours in my first LD Jam, I’ve learned a few things:

1 – I underestimated the amount of work involved in writing something from-scratch with a 72hr timeframe.

2 – No matter how much you think you know something, there’s always more to learn, and better ways to do things.

3 – Anything worth doing right is worth putting the time into.

I doubt I’ll have anything resembling a ‘game’ 24hrs from now, though what I have written so far is turning into a foundation on which future projects can be built on.

This was my first attempt at anything resembling a game in many years, so I didn’t have any expectations beyond simply doing my best and seeing it through, which I will continue to do, likely far beyond the LD26 Jam deadline.

This won’t be my last stab at LD.