I’m considering doing this, but weekends are always a somewhat busy time for me, so to get a head start I’ve been thinking up ideas while doing the more mindless farm work. So far I’ve got 11 game ideas that can be slanted to fit about all of the first 60 themes. But I don’t want to break the rules. If it comes to that I can just do my own personal 48hr sprint in my slow time of the week, instead of joining in on Ludum Dare, but it would be fun to do it with everyone else…

So…is this within the rules?

Thanks.

OK, I filtered the milk and set it to chill, stretched the mozzarella and put it in the molds, washed and boxed all the eggs, vacuum sealed the cheddar we made yesterday and set it to age, cleaned up the kitchen, and stoked the fire…now I’m going to nap until it’s time to kick this thing off.

Good luck, everyone!

D’oh! I had nice simple ideas for the Unicode snowman and for Artificial Life, but Entire Game on One Screen took me by surprise and I unwarily started making a game about an ant surfing down a pile of sand being sifted through an archaeological screen. And…it’s looking more and more like I’m not yet a good enough programmer to code software 3D and triangle collision *and* faux rigid-body physics from scratch in 10 hours, even if I’ve simplified them all as far as I can…

But I’m going to press on…maybe I’ll pull off a miracle…and there’s a semi-reasonable chance that I’ll finish in time for the jam deadline…

I keep falling prey to my strong ambiguity about game jams: are they a great exercise? are they a complete waste of time? I’ve started twice and then quit halfway through because “why am I wasting my time on this?” But I keep coming back around to thinking that it would be a cool thing to do, at least once. So we’ll see what happens this time.

I’m also a market gardener and Sat/Sun are the busiest days of my work week. But I should be able to spare 8 (or even 10?) hours of the next 48. I bet I can make something simple in that time.

So here goes nothing. The house is clean; I’m clean; we finished installing the new dishwasher and it seems to work. Everything around the farm is in good shape for tomorrow. Now I’m heroically going to bed before the theme is announced so I won’t be tempted to destroy my productivity by staying up all night making games…

See you on the other side!

Man…every time I think I manage to muster the focus to finish a game in the 8-12 hours I have available on weekends…but it hasn’t happened yet. I think I’ll at least get this one in as a Jam game. I’m starting to spend less time fighting with Box2D and more time getting things done. It’s theoretically a flying vampire hand…thing…with a sword. And a white glove. Yeah…time to sleep now. Click the image if you feel like toying with it for a couple seconds.

It will have to be a jam game, but I might actually finish this one…haven’t gotten bored yet. Helps that it’s a thinly-veiled excuse to play with a new algorithm: the new flocking stuff published a year ago July by Daniel Pearce et al. Got the movement and the flocking working (and programmer-art trees), so that leaves me the rest of tonight and tomorrow for actual gameplay… Here’s what I have so far: http://www.arestlessmind.org/starling-burst/1-movement/