I went from scratch last time, but this time I want to use some stuff I’ve been working on at home.  It’s a XNA bsp engine from the good old days!  It is mostly a port of Genesis 3D with a bit of borrowing from Q2, so both licenses probably apply if you wanted to use it for something outside ludum dare.  (both are open source of some sort or another)

Anyway it’s buggy and hastily written and not well commented, and rather out of date, but maybe someone will find it useful besides me 😀

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/30152459/LudumBase.zip

I’m in for my third compo!  Had a great time with 21 and 22, though the 22 theme was a stumper.

I’m using the same libs from 22 (quake style bsp collision), but with tons of bugfixes, and I’m including my collada based skinned character stuff in case I get time for that (probably not).

Planning on using quake army knife for levels, paint.net for gui and texturing, max for characters / objects, sfxr and audacity for sound.  Oh and visual studio / xna for code.

Hoping people are more open to exes this time!  I really wanted to go web, but I’ve had a really painful experience with Java, and google native client is a bit too new.

Base Code

Also, I’ve been polishing up my LD21 game for release on XBOX Indies!  Hoping for a Juneish release.

 

Had a great time making “Ant Slayer”, the shrunken exterminator game, finishing about thirty minutes before the deadline with a critical bug fix in the extra hour they gave us.  Here’s my timelapse:

For tools I ended up using 3DSMax, Quake Army Knife, Paint.net with a custom layer saver program, Chronolapse, SFXR, Bryce (for skybox), Audacity, and my own toolset which has an auto-cropper, collada importer with material editing, a bsp builder/lighter/viser, and a UI builder.

What Worked:

• Cutting Risks – I experimented with particles and toon-shading, and ended up nixing both with only 30ish minutes lost.  This turned out to be a great decision.  I’ve written both in the past but I try not to look at old code during the compo.
• Familiar Toolset – XNA and my base code libs are what I use most these days so the familiarity meant I could just spew code like a fire-hose and have it come out decent.
• EZMuze – An xbox indie game (though not really a game) that lets you throw together great sounding music in a hurry.  I ran a mini stereo from an optical decoder over to my computer and recorded with audacity.  I literally made those 3 songs in the 2 or 3 minute chunks of time I was waiting for my levels to light.
• TimeLapse – It was my first time doing a timelapse, and I find it super valuable for reflection on the weekend.  Being tired and under the gun, so much of it is forgotten.
• Prep Work – I took several hours before the compo to do a test app, secure a way to do music, stockpile food and tea, practice making a skybox, and work out relative sizes of things.  My game I work on daily uses meters as the base unit, and my ludum libraries use inches, so I wanted to make sure the sizes came out ok.

What Didn’t:

• Bug Chasing – I blew hours chasing a problem with dynamic lighting which ended up being a very simple logic error.  Pix (the xna shader debugger) wasn’t helping matters as it crashes on load for this game for some reason.
• Wheel Re-inventing – I spent a lot of time on basic code that I have to write for every game I make.  Audio stuff comes to mind but also game state and basic menu stuff took hours.  I should have that stuff in library form so I can focus on the gameplay.
• Virtual Machine – I decided to put my art tools in a virtual machine.  I’ve recently reinstalled and have been trying to keep my development machine clean.  This worked for awhile, but as the maps got bigger it became too slow to be practical.  So I lost some time reinstalling some art tools on my main machine.
• Theme Paralysis – In this and the last time around, I failed horribly.  Ordinarily, as with any game designer or even game player, if you utter a single word of english I can come up with a dozen game ideas around it.  This and last time I was completely stumped and had no idea what to work on.  I just started creating and hoped I would think of something.  Eventually I forgot the theme entirely and just started making fps stuff.  Having slept and had a day to reflect I really regret this.  I’m not sure how many of you saw Chris Hecker’s GDC talk about “An appetite for sameness”, but it really struck a chord with me, and yet here I am, making yet another fps.  It’s more painful when you consider the context of the event, a festival of creativity.

Tags: xna

I’m so ready for a weekend of jamming!  I said last time I’d try to use some form of middleware this time, but I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do.  I haven’t had the time to check out unity or unreal yet as I’ve been converting my LD21 game into an xbox live indie game, so I’m still very much in an XNA frame of mind.

We shall see, have a week to think about it!  Here’s a screeny from my upcoming game.  It is Escape from Cube mountain redone with some rpg stuff and xbox avatars.

Old quake style bsp libraries for XNA!  \o/

Same stuff as last time but with more bugfixes and I spent a bit of time on cruft that I end up writing every game (like trigger events).

Also this version is hacked for cel shading.  I got a really nice look out of mixing lightmaps and a 5 step celshade.  I also hacked up a way to use solid materials instead of textures to save time.

In addition to my BSP libs, I’ll be using visual studio for code, ezmuze2 for xbox for music, sony vegas for getting at that music, audacity for sound editing, sfxr for sound effect creation, old 3dsmax for characters and static meshes, maybe 3dcoat if I want to mess with anything UV related, quake army knife for level geometry, and chronolapse for a timelapse.

I might work on pathfinding today before the compo.  If I manage to get it in I’ll update the zip file.  I’ve got pathfinding stuff just don’t have a way to auto generate nodes yet.

Also there’s a test map in the zip that has examples of how to do fun triggers like level change, switchable lights, teleporters, and pick ups.

BaseCode

 

I wasn’t too bothered by the theme this time.  I didn’t get the paralysis of the last two themes and sort of puzzled out what I wanted to do:

• In a crafty mood, want to do something involving making stuff.  No guns, no shooting this time if possible (last 2 entries were fps).
• Since it is evolution, you could craft to improve yourself.
• I wanted to use the cellshading I had been playing with, maybe I could make it look like the inside of a computer, and you could recompile bits to make yourself better?
• I’ll just take standard dwarf-fort materials and rename them to programmy stuff.

So I took off and finished right at the deadline with zero time for any polish or niceties.  It was a very close thing.  Here’s what went wrong:

BSP Level builders suck.  I’ve used them for the past two entries as well, but between now and then I’ve gotten really fast at max, and if you notice in the timelapse, the stuff I do in max is a blink of an eye compared to the time I spend in Quark.  If I want to use these libs again, I need to figure out a way to compile geometry from max.

A power blink knocked out all my machines and my kukuklok alarm, so I overslept several hours sunday morning.  Also despite being open for days, all the custom stuff I had set up in quark was gone, and quark was completely unusable.  I am guessing some file was autosaving and got corrupted when the power went out.  I had to uninstall and reinstall it.

I lost an hourish to a nasty level leak, totally forgetting that Quark has a really nice leak finder built in.

Rebuilding an entire level just to change some data in the entities is really bad.  I need a way to update just the entities (most of the other bsp engines have this).

My UI system works pretty good, but one thing that consistently costs me time is that I forget what I name the controls.  That means relaunching the tool, jotting the names down in a text file somewhere, then relaunching the game.  Each relaunch causes a full rebuild of the assets due to the messed up way visual studio handles shared content projects.

At some point I realized the names I was using for my crafting stations made no sense.  I had a compiler and a plugin builder.  I decided I’d rename them to compiler and linker, and did it where I thought the names came up.  Then later half asleep I changed one of them to assembler.  After awhile I was completely confused as to what did which, and what the name was.  I don’t even think they are named the same in code as they are in game.

I messed up my libraries and didn’t realize it till about a day in, when it was probably too late to switch.  I think I ended up using the libs from the last ludum dare.  I’ve made a ton of bugfixes and enhancements since then and just had to live without them.

What went well?  It is a much smaller list:

I used EZMuze for music again, this time a peer review early build of the new version coming out.  Got some good comments on it.

The cellshading with solid colors turned out ok, but I did get a comment about eye strain.  It is sort of a way to have lower detail and have the mind fill in the gaps sort of how pixel art works.  In the past I’ve built the geometry up then saved the textures for later, then I never had time to make textures, so my levels were just greyscale.

I’m fairly confident this will be my lowest rated entry yet.  Mainly because of the terribly confusing nature of it, but also because I had no time to normalize the audio and the mining sound is incredibly annoying.

I also had no time to play through the game without just cheating myself a ton of material (and I very nearly left the cheat in), so I didn’t realize how incredibly tedious it is to mine for 20ish minutes for the materials needed to win.  I think Eniko is the only one that had the determination to beat it (thanks Eniko!)

I didn’t have time to test the ending either, but thankfully it just worked.

If I had more time, I wanted to eventually have enemies that dropped materials and recipes.  There are actually 30-something recipes in the game, but most of what you can make isn’t useful.

I was thinking I’d have a boss as a sort of mmo style gear check, but instead of gear you’d need to have evolved yourself to the toughness and strength required to win.

I am not really sure this qualifies as an October challenge for me, as I worked on it through the summer off and on.

I started with my LD21 entry escape from cube mountain, which was a game about making a run to the edge of the map with big crazy cubes chasing you, and ported it to the xbox for the indie games channel.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5649

I took the basic perlin style terrain square and made a better fractal style terrain with an atlas of several different types of ground and rock, texturing on steepness and elevation.  I do a distance from center based vertical falloff with a sharp edge at the sides to give it an island look, and then do a soft particle cloud layer based on elevation in the shaders.

Shadows turned out to be a big pain.  With the soft particles and the main view I had very little EDRam left for the rendertargets.  The xbox only has 10 megs, so I had to make the shadow targets small, which can make the shadows quite blocky if the onscreen stuff is very spread out.  I have two best fit targets for objects and enemies and one fixed size for the avatar.

Also there are no custom shaders for the avatars, so I used some wacky stencil buffer tricks to get it to work with the shadows and soft particle cloud layer.

In addition to replacing the little prism character with your xbox avatar, I made much better powerups and enemies in max and 3dcoat.

To fight back a bit I added magic spells bound to the ABXY buttons and usable items bound to the shoulders and dpad.  The items are researched sort of xcom style, and then once known can be manufactured and used up.  Most of them are consumed on use.

For spells I had this whole big story and a bunch of extra needed art and animation that I ultimately ended up cutting.  But I kept in the idea that you are at a magical school, and you learn a new spell every semester.  As soon as I put the magic in though the game just became too easy.  It was missing the original feel and I wanted to stay true to the original game.

I ended up making a big blue obelisk that covers the island with an anti-magic field.  If you can find it and knock it over, magic is on and you can go nuts with spells.  If you never run across it though you have to rely on your feet and any items you might have.  This turned out to be VERY confusing to people when I was going through reviews, so I will do an update soon to put some onscreen help for it.  Nobody reads the how-to-play or loading screens.

For traditional “Gear” I instead had a wacky idea of putting bonuses on items in your dorm room.  I didn’t think of it at the time but it sort of turned it into a consumerist rpg.  Furniture and microwaves and tvs all give you bonuses to stats.  There’s no hidden meaning or deep thought behind it, It just sort of accidentally happened.

Here’s a shot of the dorm:

There’s a whole bunch of stuff you can collect, this is just the basic stuff.  And there’s a menu option to change the colors of everything so you can make it look however you want.  As a programmer I think I didn’t do a very good job on the art here.  It is very difficult to make a scene match the xbox avatar’s look.  In the Island gameplay it is so distant that it doesn’t really clash but in a close up scene, it needs to have the same style.

It went up on the indie channel tonight after languishing forever in reviews.  The most difficult part of this whole process was not having any feedback, but I got plenty when the reviews started.  I really hope that the future consoles will allow some form of early build testing for normal users.

Here’s a gameplay trailer.  Since I made it I’ve made a few changes to controls and made all the on ground stuff much bigger, all based on review feedback.

And here’s a link to the marketplace:

http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/Sky-Islands/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d80258550c0f

Hope you guys like it!  Cube mountain is my lowest rated Ludum Dare entry, but my favorite of the lot.

I’m super excited to get going!  I’ve made lots of improvements to my usual set of libs and tools, which I’ll post sometime tomorrow.  I made a little test game today with moving push models, some particles, and basic item pickups to test out my stuff:

My tools will be visual studio express C# 2010 with XNA4, paint.net, sfxr, 3dsmax, quake army knife with a custom addon I’ll include with my libraries, chronolapse, bryce, audacity, and my dads old fender acoustic guitar for music.

Leaving it to the last minute I know!

I’ve made some great enhancements to my libs and tools since last time.  I’ve made a quake army knife addon, and can cut and paste particle effects from my particle editor to quark like:

I’ve also added moving brush models with collision and the ability to push or ride-on.  That opens up a lot of cool gameplay possibilities.  I also made an app called GameJammer that quickly updates assets in the xna content folders for me:

There are also several new helper modules for handling triggers, pickup objects, static audio, and particle emitters.  The map builder also now has a full build mode that takes a map all the way to a game usable Zone, and an update entities option which allows changing in level objects around without having to rebuild the map, which is a huge time saver.

Here’s the link:  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/59900676/LD25BaseCode.zip

There were three things that I wanted to have done but don’t:  Integrated pathfinding, a tool for making game specific entities that auto adds them to quark, and a doom 3 style UI surface for like in world interactive video screens and such.  Maybe next time I’ll have those done.

I had a blast with this Ludum Dare, mainly because my tools were in such good shape.  All the work I had done on my libraries beforehand let me focus on content creation for the most part.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=5649

What went right:

Helper classes – I made a bunch of helpers before the compo to automagically handle sounds and particles and static objects in the map.  Saved tons of time.

Update entities – Really saved the day.  Allows you to change entity objects in the map without rebuilding.

Acoustic guitar for music.  I couldn’t remember how to play, but just tried random stuff and fixed it all in audacity

What went wrong:

On map building I only had one major mistake, and that was losing an hour or two to leaks and map errors on the third level attempting to create a windy branchy maze by duplicating and rotating.  Brush maps tend to break when you do that.

I also had a bug where a switchable light set to on wouldn’t be on if you built the map with update entities.  I chased that one for awhile.

Sleeping in small chunks.  Didn’t really work that well.  I usually set the alarm for 4 hours, but only once was actually awakened by it.  Usually I just woke up on my own and got back to work.  I’d always awaken feeling refreshed, but I’d be tired again after just a few hours.

My “full build” button doesn’t actually save the final product.  You have to “Save Zone” after.  Several times I forgot, and couldn’t figure out what was wrong.

My alpha sorting broke!  I was so mad.  I spent a lot of time on that and even tested it in my warmup!

Story – I might have left too much unexplained.  Is the apprentice the lover?  Is the prisoner a man or a woman?  What happens at the end?  Also if the power is out, how did the first door and the elevator work?  Also if you don’t hit the triggers in the right order it can tell you stuff you already figured out, or reference stuff you might not have seen if you missed picking something up or hitting a journal trigger.

Stuff I want for next time:

I’m planning on making a game specific entity class creation tool.  This would allow you to specify what fields and default values an entity would have in a gui, then at the press of a button it would automagically edit quark’s entity file, and maybe even generate some C# code as well.

Pathfinding – I have some basic A* code but it isn’t integrated with anything.

Terrain integration, working on this in another project.  BModel style mini bsps for landscape objects like rocks or ruin chunks, or full buildings with portals that look out and in.

Doom3 style gui screen surfaces.  These would be great for making interesting puzzles.

 

Tags: ld25, postmortem, xna

Seems like forever ago since #25, and I’ve not been idle!

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/59900676/GrogLibs.zip

My ludum libs have some snazzy new stuff like helpers for lights & doors and such, a quick entity maker tool, point and directional shadows for the main character if there is one, Kinect motion capture, navmesh style pathfinding, and animation blending to name a few.

Because of the Kinect stuff (which is a bit dodgy, only works well with mixamo rigs), you’ll need the Kinect sdk if you want to use this stuff, or just tear the Kinect stuff out of the code.  Also the shadow stuff used up the last of my shader instructions, so I don’t have dynamic lighting anymore.

Unless the theme throws me a huge curveball, I’ll use my libs as usual, but I’d really like to have a character this time.  It takes a lot of work to build one and get a basic package of animations for it that I’ve never been brave enough to try it.  I’ve gotten much faster, but it is still very time consuming.  I did a practice run today and in 3 hours I had a torso, arms and down to the thighs.  I think that is still too slow.

So for tools I’ll be using my libs, XNA (VC 2010), a big box of Tetley + kettle, my old electric guitar, audacity, sfxr, paint.net, 3dsmax with an awesome autoweight script, and quake army knife.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/59900676/BaseCode27.zip

Since last time I’ve mainly been working on character customization stuff.  That led to lots of library changes in my collada stuff that I fully expect to break in some horrible fashion this weekend.  If anyone uses this, be sure to use the autodesk collada exporter as it is the only one it works with right now.

Also you’ll still need the Kinect SDK.  I’ll probably have the Kinect stuff removed by next LD.

My past few entries I’ve tried to stick with the Reach graphics profile so my game will run on old crappy machines, and I’ll try to this time as well, but I’ve put a lot of work in on the hidef side, so that’s what I will be developing for.  I’ve got lots of new postprocessing and dynamic light code to try out.

This will be my 7th entry!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/author/kharza/

I’ll be using the aforementioned libs and tools, Paint.Net, Quake Army Knife, Max 2009 with AutoWeight, Audacity, Bryce 7.1, and of course XNA.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/59900676/BaseCode28.zip

The usual batch of tools are there, but I’ve added a couple new ones to help with the initial slog of getting something running.  GrogLibsProjectMaker (starring Captain Picard) generates a solution that aims at the libraries and tools, and makes directories for content, but I wasn’t able to make it generate the actual game project yet.

The other is a handy tool that spits out a big set of solid textures in your choice of palette (Atari ST, Amiga, EGA, CGA, VGA, NES, SEGA Master System).  I’d like to do real textures but starting with just solid colors usually gets me started (never have time for real texturing).

Since last time for the libs I’ve mostly worked on getting better shadows.  You should in theory have unlimited point light shadows, but I only support a single directional.  There’s usually only one sun anyway.

To make this work I moved to multipass for the shadows, and it greatly complicated the alpha sorting.  Since I don’t have a good way to cache results of the actual shadow depth draws every alpha surface will make every shadow in the level draw again.  So yea… that will get slow.  So don’t use alphas much.

I’ve also ditched Reach (the lower end graphics mode of XNA) so I can focus on >= shader model 3.  I was having too much trouble trying to cram all this functionality down into the measly 80 instructions you get with 2.  This is bad because the games I make will no longer run on old pcs or netbooks and the like, but it saves me a lot of headache.

What can you do with these libs?  In my past stuff all but my first and the october challenge are made with these libs, though they have come a long way since that first black and white only buggy dark game

Here’s an image from a warmup I’ve been doing the past couple days just to make sure everything works:

 

As for tools, I use Paint.Net for 2D stuff, 3dsmax for objects or characters (if I get time), quake army knife for levels, visual studio 2010 and xna for code, sfxr and audacity for audio, peavey patriot for music if I have time, and maybe bryce if I have time to do a sky (and the camera can see the sky).

I’m sort of in but I’m so not ready!

I’ve been porting my usual xna set of libs and tools to directx 11 (to get ready for 12, which is going to be awesome) and everything is in a gigantic mess.  I doubt anyone would try to use this anyway but if you do, you might want to use last ludum dare’s libs.

Here’s the zip including the xna stuff as well as the new directx 11 stuff.  Note that a friend at microsoft hooked me up with visual studio ultimate so the projects might not work in express.  That was something I was going to fix but I’ve ended up having to work this week so didn’t have time to fix that.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/59900676/GrogLibs29.zip

So last time I didn’t finish.  I got sick on Saturday and ended up just sleeping most of the weekend.  I had a strange little room with some stick figures fighting and that was about it.  This time I’ve been sick mid week so I’m hoping I’m over it.

Another thing I might have to deal with is stormy weather.  I live in a teeny cute little town with a terribad power grid and even worse internet.  A stiff breeze can knock either out and we might get tornados, we shall see!

I’m using my usual set of tools, but I’ve added an awesome new tool a friend recommended.  Here’s a picture of it in action:

This is the most badass tool for the age old “I’m drawing stuff but I can’t see anything” problem.  It is like pix on steroids, and it is called RenderDoc, and it is made by the Crytek folks.  Can’t recommend it highly enough if you do lots of gpu stuff.

So yea in addition to that I usually use an old Max for characters and statics, visual studio for code, quake army knife for levels, paint.net for 2d stuff, bryce for skyboxes if I have time, sfxr and audacity and my peavey patriot guitar for music/sound, and Tetley for brainfuel.

Oh and here’s a link to my past stuff.  I think this will be my 8th or 9th time doing this.

Past Stuffs

I normally have a really sweet set of libs that let me focus on just the gameplay (or at least that’s the idea).  I’ve been porting said libs from XNA to SharpDX but while doing so I’ve been less concerned with rapid development and more into power and capability.  So this new stuff isn’t really all that great for game jams.

I’m still missing any sort of 2D UI and audio library, but I hope to write those before friday if I get time.  If I do, I’ll update the zip.

Normally I’d have all this done but I’ve been working.  I mean real work too, not making games like I used to.  I’ve been … farming!

Like real farming with dirt and shoveling and mud, not killing orcs over and over for treasure and xp

It’s even a bit more chaotic than game development.  You have random crunch days instead of predetermined months of crunch like in games.  So you never really know how long you’ll be working or when.  If it rains you get the day off! \o/

For tools I’ll be using my old 3dsmax 2009, 3dcoat, sharpdx11, quake army knife, sfxr, chronolapse to record a timelapse, the awesome gpu debugger thing renderdoc, and paint.net if I get my 2D code done.

For code, I’ve switched to visual studio 2010 ultimate and I really hope that doesn’t create problems for express folk if anyone wants to mess with my code (doubtful).

Also I used to use bryce for skyboxes but I sort of realized that the textures are predone, not generated.  Oops.  I don’t have any cubemap support in my code yet anyway.

Here tis

I woke up really early before work and wrote an audio lib and a simple 2D gump lib.  Now I’m going to smeep till 30 min before the compo.  See ya in irc! <3

Basestuffs

As payment for such a boring post, here’s a creepy blinking test anim.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/59900676/Blinku.flv

Oh yea I forgot to mention I’ll be using CBFG, it is a cool sprite font making tool.

So the first night I had the idea of an unreachable area in levels that would have another person (controlled by AI).  You could see them through glass, and maybe communicate via hand signals.  I was thinking of puzzles like levers controlling doors on the other side and such.

After sleeping I thought it was a silly/bad idea and maybe take too long to get going.  So I thought maybe the connected worlds could be the real world and a game world.  So the player could be a gold farmer.  You’d sit and play World of Borecraft and sell items for real world money.

With the money you could buy better food or new stuff to make yourself more healthy or better at the game.

After a while the idea grew sour, and I started thinking about spaceships hauling wormhole construction components between planets, science/magic levels with lots of teleporter puzzles between them, or a cosmic toy breaking sim where you smash planets together for fun.

I’ve thrown em all out, and still trying to think of something but less than a day left.  Here’s a timelapse of my so-far failure:

Tags: timelapse

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/59900676/IAmIn.webm

Very very rusty! I think I finished 5 times in a row and then failed to finish 5 times in a row, so will this be the streak breaker?

Using my usual set of tools: 3DSMax, Quake Army Knife, 3DCoat, Paint.Net, SFXR/Audacity, Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with SharpDX, Tetley, Renderdoc, and the CBFG font tool.

I spent almost all of my time last time trying to remember how to do basic stuff like load a level or a static object. This time I’m including a test program that just sets the basic stuff up so I can copypasta all the mundane stuff and get to the game code (I hope).

Here’s my libs.

And my past work:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/59900676/InAgain.webm

I had about a week off to prepare, so I beat my sharpdx libraries into shape a bit, and this time I’ll have lots of test code to go with it so I know stuff works.

Since last time I’ve fixed a bunch of collision problems, and now handle all of the pesky wedge shaped geometry cases, had a go at some physics but it isn’t ready, made some user preference test code I can copy for this weekend, made a nice pathfinding test program that does a solid job of generating valid data, and documented a bunch of stuff.

Here’s my base code:

Base Code

I’m planning on taking a break on saturday afternoon to go to a fishing tournament in ArcheAge, but I will probably forget.

My base code is not really ready right now. I just implemented streaming terrain with collision via quadtree, but I don’t have the full suite of swept shape colliders done, or biped movement routines and such. Just basic rays. Here’s what 100k rays looks like!

100k rays bury the terrain

So this time I thought instead of struggling with bugs in my base code the entire time I’d use a middleware package and maybe enter the jam instead. Looking back at My Author Page it seems I haven’t finished a single game since I switched from XNA to SharpDX.

So tentative plan is unreal or unity or maybe something 2D. I bought that humble gamedev bundle awhile back and it came with all sorts of wacky development tools.

The biggest hurdle will just be getting back into the swing of things. I’ve been too addicted to games to code anything for a long time.