Hello All,

This will be my first foray into the Ludum Dare competition.

I have been developing software as a professional for about 3 years now. I graduated with a Computer Science degree back in 2010. I’m also a hobbyist musician (https://soundcloud.com/hyperbox).

Video games are one of my main inspirations for getting involved with software development. I’ve had a few game projects in the past that never saw fruition, particularly an XNA game and then one for a system called Sifteo. After taking a break for a year, I’m looking at this competition as a great way to get the gears turning again, and to exercise some of the research I’ve been doing on game engines for the past 6 months.

My weakest skill relating to video games is definitely graphic art, but I do have an eye for aesthetics, so I’m hoping I can get crafty enough to compensate for that shortcoming.

For this competition, I will be using the following:

Platform: HTML5 Canvas

IDE: Netbeans

Libraries: Custom engine built upon EaselJS and probably more.

Sound: Reason

Graphics: Pixen

Playing the entries for past competitions has become a little hobby of mine, so I’m delighted to be a part of it this time around. Looking forward to checking out the inevitably awesome submissions for LD27!

~Brian

https://bitbucket.org/bstegmann/seed/

This is an open source JavaScript game engine that I’ve been working on. It uses CreateJS. I will be using this for the competition.

Why go through the trouble of creating a game engine from scratch? Mainly because I want to create something custom for myself as I intend to make more HTML5 games in the future. Plus it’s a great way to practice the knowledge I’ve been obtaining from this amazing book called Game Engine Architecture by Jason Gregory of Naughty Dog, and also another book called Learning JavaScript Design Patterns by Addy Osmani. Also, it will hopefully save me some time during the competition so I can focus on the game itself.

It’s missing some key components that I hope to add prior, during, and after the competition. Mainly: collision detection, a game model system, and a rendering system for game objects. I’m sure I’ll discover additional features to add as I go along.

If you have jQuery included in your project, here’s an easy way to automatically pause your game if the user changes tabs or the web browser window loses focus:

$(window).blur(function() {

//pausing code here

});

Voila!

Tags: canvas, focus, html5, pause, tip

What’s on everybody’s coding playlist today?

Currently I’m listening to “The Nothings of the North” by Ametsub. Really good ambient kind of stuff with tight little beats.

That was definitely a great experience. I realize now how the personal effects of something like Ludum Dare to a developer is vastly more important than the actual competition.

Despite falling quite short of my original concept, I’m extremely satisfied with how far I got in 48 hours. I have a good idea now how I will structure my game engine, as I add some of the slop back into it as good re-usable components. Ironically, I spent very little time on music and sfx. Wait actually no time on sound effects at all… oh well.

The rundown of this weekend:

Friday Night: Got the concept down. Then World’s End and, very appropriately, a local pub with some friends. Awesome movie btw.

Saturday:

• Getting the day/night cycle timing right
• Debugging tools
• Developer images
• Collision Detection
• Initial music
• Win/Lose conditions
• Wisps & Plants

Sunday:

• Pseudo-lighting for the night scene
• Enemy
• Animation sheets for everything
• Tweaking the game logic (# of stuff generated depending on score)
• Testing
• More music (at 10 till 9, haha)

My initial concept actually involved having a little compound where you farmed during the day and then adventured out into the night. Your speed would prevent you from going to far at first. I had some additional power-ups and enemies in mind as well. After a few cycles of prototyping I realized that this would take more time than I had, so I went with a day/night collection game.

What’s particularly great about this experience is I now have a pretty decent javascript engine to use going forward. There was quite a bit of development during this game that I will be able to re-use for future games and future Ludum Dare competitions. So next time I’ll be able to focus on the game a lot more than the engine.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=24792

So I’m beginning my rating spree and I notice that the entry pages have two comment boxes. When I added a comment to the top one, it didn’t show up on the page. But my comment showed up after I entered it in the bottom box. Is there a difference?

Hello All,

My friend SineRider and I got together and made a remix of the music from my entry for LD27. It’s quite over the top compared to the subtleness of the game, because music. The best way I can think of describing it is “galaxy rock” or “slow trance.” Free download, so enjoy!

Tags: music, remix

Here’s my farty javascript game engine

https://bitbucket.org/bstegmann/pulsar

http://www.brianstegmann.com/pulsar-api/

If you like music-based experimental games, give my entry a try. It’s quite calm and has an air of mystery to it.

Play Totems