So, new jammer here, this is the first time I’m participating. Maybe this will force me to finally finish a game that I start to code.

The weapons of choice are:

code: Python, and C if necessary.

art: GIMP, Inkscape.

sound: sfxr, Audacity, Hydrogen.

Everything on Linux baby! It’s not fun if it’s not hardcore!

I’ll try to stick a fighting game in my entry (unless the theme is pacifism or anything like that ) ,  because I started one many times and never finished, and that would make a good code base, or at least functional one, to expand later.

Now I’ve seen the necessity to test your stuff  before entering the competition.

I started making a small program (it’s not a “game” yet) and was pretty much finished whitin a hour and half, then I decided to port the little thing to Windows and of course it was a nightmare of over 5 hours tweaking the stuff…

The program itself is a pygame script,  and a folder with some images. But, oh boy, does this poor excuse for a OS called Windows make things difficult to deploy.

On linux pretty much I can drop the compressed file and it will work, but I had to mess with cx_freeze, py2exe, and nsis to create a file that is too big for what it does (10 meg for a walking stickman) and I’m not sure if it works on all flavors of windows out there.

But in the end I’m happy that I found this problem in my workflow.

You should too make sure you can make your software work and your tools are ready for the competition.

PS: Remember, I’m a linux programmer and I had all this work to make sure our friends on other platform could play my game, just sayin’ 😉

My game is a single-hit sword fighting game.

At this moment I have a AI that is dumb as bag of rocks, some blocks that can hit each other, one of which you control, and some background.

Tomorrow I’ll make actual sprites for the duelists, music and sounds and maybe local multiplayer.

This is way, way harder than I tought, half of the time I spend fixing bugs , I don’t think I can deliver this in the deadline, but I’m half-dead at this moment, gonna sleep, see you guys tomorrow.

This is the post-mortem for my game for LD28, that don’t even got a name.

Right off the bat I hated the theme, was expecting the ones that got better voted in the preliminary rounds, and had better concepts for them. When this was announced I had nothing, a blank, motivation was low a this point, so I just went to sleep. (Compo starts at midnight in local time)

When I settled in a concept (a single hit fighting game, with samurais), competition was entering the 10th hour, then I started coding, that was not the bad part, and the game was coming together fine, about the 20th hour I had a two blocks fighting each other in a black void.

Then I decided to look at other people’s games on the site. Everybody was making amazing stuff, everybody except me of course. There ware 3d games, 2d games with amazing pixel art, great concepts.  Did everybody started making the games prior announcement of the theme or I just plain suck at game development?

When I decided to talk to people around about my concept and someone said my game was really similar to Samurai Gunn, and I gave up. The game is almost identical to my idea, and much better than I could hope to produce.

I guess I wasn’t ready for Ludum Dare, have to work on my skills, specially in making art and coding faster.

See you guys in four months.

Last time I didn’t finished, and got quite frustrated because of that (post-mortem here)

This time is the time, I’ll end this competition with a playable game, whatever that game is!

The tools are the same I chose last time:

• code: Python, if necessary C
• art: GIMP, Inkscape
• sound: sfxr, audacity, hydrogen

And everything on Linux, of course.

Good luck to everyone!

PS: Se tiver algum brazuca por aí deixe um alô!

Tags: linux