Well, I figured I’d give it a go this year. I got off to a bit of a late start, but still 24hrs to go

Not much gameplay at all so far.
Just messing with tech right now. Hopefully it’ll all come together in the last hour or so…

Wow, that was intense! It’s always the same, you figure there’s AGES left, and you have all these plans for different types of enemies, scripted events, attack waves, whatever. And then suddenly there’s one hour left and you have to do this mad scramble to put it all together into something resembling a game.

I’m quite happy with how it turned out. I’m not entirely sure how fun it is, but I certainly had fun making it which I suppose is all that counts. The lasso turned out to be AWESOME. Verlet integration is cool. There was a very definite ‘moment’ during the development, when it went from ‘a screen with two men on’ to suddenly an actual fun game.

And adding some basic AI navigation suddenly seems to make everything spring into life. It’s a shame the “pathfinding” (hah!) is so terrible. I was planning to go for a very “Bubble Bobble” feel to the thing, but I guess I would have needed another week to make that

Pics!

Alright, I’m in. I have a full complement of Diet Coke, the doors have been locked and the pigs are prepared for takeoff.

I’m not sure whether this time’s effort is going to be 2D or 3D, it depends what the theme is I guess. I fancy doing something in the Amiga 16-bit style, like Turrican or Project X perhaps, but we’ll see.

I decided this time I’m going to do one of those video time-lapse recordings. If anyone can recommend any good software for capturing your desktop, please do so

Oh, and lessons learnt from last time – don’t use D3DX…

Giddy up!

I’ve decided I’m going to do it in first-person 3D. I don’t know why I punish myself like that, but hey ho. I was all set to do a 2D old-school game, but then the theme kind of threw me a little.

It’s going to involve the player being stuck in the middle of a forest or something, and there’s going to be zombies. Or ghosts. Not sure.

I think it’s going to involve light as well. The possibility of kittens has not been ruled out.

So here’s what I have so far. Not much to look at yet. I’m planning that it’ll a) look like an actual foresty landscape, and you’ll be able to walk around it. Then the ghosts will come after you. Luckily, because it was dangerous to go alone, you came prepared…

You heard it here first ladies and gentlemen.

I’m going to sleep now, and I think in the morning I’ll try again doing something 2D.

Well hello all!

So I’m entering LD48 this time around. Last time I tried making a 3D game, but it didn’t really work out and I gave up halfway through. I made myself promise that next around, I’d do a 2D game instead.

The theme is tricky. For pretty much the entire first 6 hours I had no idea at all, and was prepared to forget the whole thing. But then, while drunk (when all the best ideas come I find), I had A Plan.

So here it is, so far –

Yes that’s right, it’s a LucasArts-style point-and-click adventure!

I spent the entire of Saturday writing the engine from scratch, and it’s actually not too bad. I’m almost even pleased with it.

I’ve done placeholder art for all the screens. As time allows, I’ll go through and make them suck less, so hopefully it won’t have completely MSPaint-style backgrounds by the end (but time may escape us…).

Hopefully I’ll have a good few hours left to actually finish writing all the dialogue and puzzles :-/

And I’m all out of gum.

I’ll be entering again this time around. I’ve decided I’m going to write something without ANY POLYGONS AT ALL, which I’m sure I’ll have to fight against all the way.

• Programming – C++, VS2008 Express, raw Win32 (none of that fancy framework rubbish)
• Graphics – Deluxe Paint II Enhanced, or Deluxe Animation depending on which I need. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
• Music – I’ll probably knock something up in Garageband and then convert it over into a MOD file. micromod for playback, worked well last time.
• Level Editor – I think I’ll try and write a basic tile editor into the game, I’ve done it before and it’s not really that hard (you’ve already got the tile drawing code in there anyway…)

As for the actual gameplay, well I won’t know until the theme’s up, but I think it’s going to be some kind of physics-based 2D platformer. We’ll see. On the last LD projects I spent so much time doing all the engine/tech stuff, that it leaves very little time for gameplay, story, music, etc. I’d like to try and knock that on the head this time. Although I said that last time too.

Wish me luck chaps. I’ll be making one of those time-lapse videos of the whole thing so you can all watch my failure.