Will this be the one? Shall I submit a game to Ludum Dare? Is the time for lurking in the shadows and envying all the finished games finally over? Stay tuned to find out.

I’m still on my summer vacation and nothing major is planned for the weekend, so the conditions should be pretty optimal. I have dabbled with gamedev before, but haven’t got a lot to show for it. Hopefully after the weekend that has changed.

I have most experience with Flash and the Flixel library so those are what I’m going to use. FlashDevelop is my IDE. It’s been a while since I last did anything with Flixel, so now is a great time to refresh my memory about it and ActionScript.

This should be an interesting weekend, good luck to everyone.

So the compo starts at 4 am local time. I decided to sleep past that and try to get a solid amount of sleep. After breakfast, shave and shower, I put on my gamedev-pants and checked the theme. Connected worlds, eh?

I started writing down ideas and words related to worlds and/or connections. I’m thinking some kind of game where you try to connect people from different social groups together via some puzzle mechanic. Or maybe a game about connecting worlds together in space. You are building intergalactic highways between planets or something.

I have some catching up to do, so let’s get down to it.

I started by having grandiose schemes about a game where you connect different types of social circles together. Premise was that you are hosting a party and are trying to get everybody to connect with each other. I had a tough time thinking of a game mechanic that would work and be fun at the same time. Maybe something with people being cards or tiles that would have different symbols for interests and personality traits. Then by connecting matching attributes you would create connections between persons.

I started writing some code and drawing bad art, but quickly realized that I don’t have the technical skills to do this. Also my art was pretty horrible. Back to the drawing board it was. Next idea was something about a dude laying down cable in an effort to connect cities. Again this idea was pretty quickly scrapped after brief time of coding. I wasn’t sure how to develop it or what the challenge would be. So it was clear that I need to do something simple. I don’t have enough experience and knowledge to just start hammering on a game. And not enough time to learn what would be needed.

In the end, I decided on the ever so popular match 3 genre and started making a Bejeweled clone. This way I wouldn’t have to worry about the mechanics and the Internet has a lot of suitable art that I could use. Swap the gems for planets and it’s kind of like connecting worlds… Pretty weak, I know.

No prizes for innovation or originality are in the horizon, but overall I’m pretty happy. I was worried that I would lose focus after a couple of hours, but I actually got a lot done today. Before starting I was considering uninstalling Steam and blocking Netflix, but neither was needed. The basic mechanics are there, so I can spend tomorrow polishing the game.

The changes of me submitting a game are pretty good, which is awesome. This would be my first Ludum Dare submission. That would be a huge win in my books.

There’s a lot of really interesting games being made, can’t wait to play some of those. Keep it up!

Well, I’m done. Made a match 3 game about planets. Nothing special, but there is some resemblance to an actual game! If the assets were better, I think it would be pretty decent.

Still, I’m just happy that I finished. Last few hours were pretty stressful, so now is a good time to take a real break. I’ll write a detailed post-mortem later. Making games is friggin’ hard, sheesh.

But if someone asked me if I would do this again in four months? Absolutely.