Ludum Dare is pretty much the best thing ever. But we all know that, right?

Tools:

• Framework: OH god, I don’t know what dev framework I’m going to use. I’m probably going to develop on top of Haxe/HaxeFlixel, but that could fall apart if they seem lacking for some reason. Regardless, I’m compiling to Flash. Python, as much as I love you, porting you to other platforms is a nightmare.
• Pixen: There’s this great pixel editor called Pixen for OSX that I’ve been using for the last few LDs. I recommend it to anyone who needs a good editor.
• FL Studio: Aw ye. I’m not skimping on audio this time. Beware.
• Sublime Text 2: Sublime Text 2 is a phenomenal editor, and its support for autocompletion with Haxe is sick!
• SFXR: Indispensable in generating those chirps and tweets.
• Git: For those moments when you’re like “Oh God, what happened, it was working like 5 minutes ago…”
• Coffee: SO MUCH COFFEE
• Goats

How can you say no to that face??

• Wait, what was I talking about
• Goats
• Huh
• Goats
• Goats
• Nevermind I’m ending this list

Goals:

• Above 4.0 in audio. I’m so much better at audio production than I was the last time I actually did audio in a LD game.
• Improve in graphics. Baby steps here. One of these days I need to drill down and really improve my graphics, but for now I’ll be lucky to get something passable.
• Beat all my previous submissions in overall. YEAH THATS RIGHT. AND NOTHING IS GOING TO STOP ME!!!!!

I’ll be committing all my code here regularly: https://github.com/johnfn/ld25 Follow me! I’ll also be putting up base code there, if I ever get around to it…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2012 at 11:29 pm and is filed under LD #25. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Going to be a super-ambitious top-down (first time!) moody story-based game. Why would someone become the villain? Is it really as black and white as the word villain indicates?

Here’s hoping I can pull this one off.

After a nice rest (about 8 hours!), I’m back into the fray. I’m going to get kicked out of my university in about an hour and a half, which means I can’t use my external monitor any more, so I’m going to take advantage of it as much as possible until then. Which means…
MORE MUSIC!

I still haven’t written >100 lines of code. Uhh oh.

I now have 3 songs. 1 is more-or-less done, 2 need a little tweaking.

Going to say bye to my beautiful external monitor now and head out into the cold city to scrounge for food and a coffeeshop to continue work in. And maybe by the grace of God I’ll actually write some code.

Philz Coffee, the coffee of the gods:

Sandwich from Plutos. Incredibly delicious. Also, so large that I only ate half. Saving the rest for dinner 😀

What? What’s that you ask? How far along on the game am I you ask? Given that it’s already been a full day  you say?

…

…

…

UHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

My game engine is too slow. It can’t render everything I have on screen.

I’m working on optimizing it.

I think it’s going to take at least an hour or two.

Oh no nononno so badsobad sobad.

 // holy freaking christ
 // hack levels are currently off the charts
 public override function collidesRect(rect:Rect):Boolean {
 return true;
 }

That’s right. It ALWAYS collides with the other rect. NO MATTER WHAT.

This is legit code that is staying in my game.

Believe me, it’s better not to know.

This is the closest I have ever come to totally failing a Ludum Dare.

Except that one time when I didn’t submit.

But we don’t talk about that time…

(oops, forgot to submit this until I woke up! heh.)

5 hours to go and a big TODO list.

uh oh

Where is the heads up display?

It’s visible. It’s at position (0, 0). It has the front-most depth. And it has a parent.

SO WHY CAN’T I SEE IT???

Edit: as soon as I posted this, I figured it out. It was visible, but the stuff inside it (its children) weren’t. Rubber ducky debugging FTW!

Oh yes, I’m in for the LD. Was it ever a question?

Tools

• Haxe + HaxePunk – although I’ve used Haxe a lot, I don’t know my way around HaxePunk that much. What’s that you say? I’m committing the cardinal sin of LD by not being familiar with the framework I’m using, you say? cough
• Sublime Text 2 – Can’t beat it. This is the only real part of my tools that’s stayed stable over the Dares and years. Too good.
• Pixen – LETS MAKE SOME PIXELS!!!
• Ableton – for music production. Although I’m still not satisfied with my music producing, I think that I’ve gotten a lot better since the last time I had a game with music in it.

Things I need to remind myself (i.e. the list of stuff that dragged me down in past LDs)

• Keep a todo list; otherwise I forget to do important things
• Plan early; otherwise scope creep will happen and I’ll be overly ambitious.
• Do music early; I run out of time otherwise.
• Make easy levels; easy levels for me are hard levels for you.
• Get a beta tester; otherwise God knows what could be wrong with it. 😀

See you on the fields of battle

Language: Haxe

Library: HaxePunk

Link: https://github.com/johnfn/ld26

Currently it does nothing special except load a Tiled map file. That’s not too hard.

Also it includes FancyText.hx which allows you to have multi-colored text. Nice!

As LD26 continues I’ll be developing on this repository.

Struggled with the theme for the last hour but I have an idea that I like. Here it is:

Having recently become a huge fan of the art tradition of minimalism, you’ve decided to make the entire world minimalistic. You do this with a special gun, the MINIMALIZER. It can minimalize color, or minimalize health (like a normal gun, I suppose), or minimalize movement, or what have you. But of course evil enemies are standing in your way! Go show them that minimalism is actually a good theme after all!

Looking pretty ugly right now but I’m alright with that:

Got a fair bit of features working in the last few hours:

• Health
• Gun
• Minimap
• Moving and collisions

Not a bad start!

Here’s my plan for the day

• Go running
• Grab breakfast
• Stake out coffeeshop
• Write 10,000 lines of code

Q: Isn’t that going to be hard?

A: Yeah I might have a little problem with staking out a coffeeshop, coffee is pretty popular around these parts.

Woot! I don’t really like all of it, but I’ll change it if I have time.

(That means that I won’t have time to change it.)

I’m tending towards robotic enemies because I don’t have to animate them. 😀

NOT A GAME AT ALL!!!

Obviously from the state of the graphics, the game has a long way to go. Also, if you were able to test it, you’d deduce from the gameplay that it has a long way to go too. Also it’s possible to deduce this from the music. Which leaves the question,

WHAT EXACTLY HAVE I BEEN DOING FOR THE LAST 24 HOURS???

We’ve got some rudimentary combat, with three different enemy types! Also, did I mention I have UPGRADES. Because I totally have UPGRADES. Everyone likes UPGRADES and UPGRADING their UPGRADABLE abilities, right?

Good!

Graphics still suck though.

Just got up.

Still got a lot of work to do.

Course this is nothing new. In fact pretty much every LD has gone this way…

I did write a song for the game though! http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/533161 I think it’s pretty groovy 😀

Sounds a little like a game too. Here’s the tune I wrote.(Again – what can I say, I’m self-aggrandizing.)

Doesn’t really play like a game though. 😀