It’s been a whole year?! The last time I was able to do this was way back at LD18. I missed the last two due to working overtime to get milestone builds out. Ah, game development.

I’m very much looking forward to cranking something out for LD21, and this will be my third Ludum Dare. I’ll be using Unity, almost certainly working in 2D (but using modo for 3D if necessary), and any audio needs will probably happen in Reason+Record.

My last entry, Fail-Deadly, was a bit subversive, and in the year since I’ve been thinking a lot about that, so I’m probably going to take a similar angle for LD21. That could mean subverting a genre (as Fail-Deadly with RTS) or maybe tapping into the antithesis of the theme.

Also, this is my first actual post on the site: I’ve participated in Ludum Dare twice before, but never posted or journaled or liveblogged or whatever. I pretty much just kept my head down and quietly made my game. It’s because I’m antisocial, you see. But maybe I’ll try and break that habit this go-around.

My usual approach to Ludum Dare is to spend Friday night on pure concept design, Saturday on all the tech stuff, and Sunday fleshing out content (graphics, sound) and tuning and polishing the game.

I like to do the very first stages of concept design on paper, because it doesn’t tempt me to start dicking around with code or task lists or any of that before I’ve figured out what I even want to do. So here’s what I came up with last night:

I’ve spent today writing all the code that makes that stuff work. Since I haven’t spent any time on graphics yet, it’s a little underwhelming:

But! There’s a fully-functional 2D shmup there, with procedurally-generated enemies and behaviors, and the scaffolding for having those enemies mate and produce offspring which combine and mutate their traits.

I’ve got an art style in mind too, which should start showing up tomorrow. No concept drawings or anything though, largely because I’m terrible at that sort of thing. 😛

All the game mechanics are in and (reasonably) tuned. It looks like so:

By “it looks like so” I really mean “it looks like butt”, so now is the time to begin an epic CONTENT BLITZ to cram in as much graphics hotness as I can muster in the next four or five hours.

This one’s really coming down to the wire…

So I’m working in Unity, right? Been testing my game in the editor all this time. Finally got around to making a standalone build (for submission) and it’s all “this build was made with a beta version of Unity and will only work on your computer” and I’m like “why am I using a beta version of Unity WTF” and now I’m basically racing to see if my computer can download the latest non-beta fast enough to let me install, update the project, make the build, and submit in time.

That’s ONE way to finish off a Ludum Dare, I suppose. 😛