Hi all,

I’ve been following LD48 for a long time now.  This will be my first time participating.  I’m trying to gather the motivation to get started on a personal game project I’ve been wanting to do.  I’m hoping that having the pressure of a 48 hour compo while publicly blogging it will get me doing something, and that the momentum from that will carry over to my personal project after the compo is over.  We’ll see.

I’ll be using Flash (FlashDevelop, Flex SDK) as my platform of choice, and most likely FlashPunk.  Depending on the theme, and how I decide to abuse it, I may be using Box2DFlash.

Maybe Photoshop and possibly a camera for art, though I’m leaning toward procedurally generated, abstracty art since I’m a better coder than artist.

I might record and tweak some sounds (in Audacity), or just use sfxr.

If I get around to it, I’ll throw together a music loop in FL Studio, and maybe even dust off and tune the guitar to sample some riffs.

All of this is subject to change, depending on what I decide to do with the theme, and what tools/platform/development process will best suit that (it’ll almost certainly be Flash, though).

I don’t have any kind of engine or base code yet.  I’ll probably practice putting together a quick project in Flash this week, and if anything resembling base code emerges, I’ll post that here in the interest of rules compliance (but anyone would be ill-advised to use it).

I’ll see you all in the trenches, may the best geek win, etc., etc.

I’m thinking of making a very simple gamelet as a warm-up before the weekend.  I’ll be using Flash for my LD game, and I haven’t done any start-to-finish development on anything in Flash yet (just contributing to some collaborative development at work).  I know I’ll run into a lot of things I’ll need to look up and figure out how to do in Flash, so it seems like a good idea to do a dry run now, and get those questions answered before they come up this weekend.

The concept and “gameplay” of the gamelet won’t be important; it’s just hitting all the API calls, etc., that I’ll likely run into when doing the real game this weekend.

Anyone else doing anything like this?

This will be my first LD, and I’m curious how many cumulative hours out of the 48 that people typically spend actively working on their game.  Sorry if this has been discussed to death, but I wasn’t hitting on the right search terms to dig up any discussion on it.

Where do I submit this thing?

Is that close enough?

Okay, I think I’ve got an idea.  But it’s going to require me to draw a whole lotta different sprites, which is unfortunate since I’m much more of a coder than artist.

Tags: screenshot

Tags: screenshot

This has been breakfast and lunch, so far.  I should probably do something about that.

Also a shot of my workspace, since I haven’t done that yet.

Tags: deskphoto, foodphoto

Finally got around to a real lunch.  Beef pot roast, corn on the cob, green beans, and cucumber.

Tags: foodphoto

Tags: screenshot

Tags: foodphoto

Tags: cute, fuzzy, useless

Shooty stuff, and enemy groupings in queue.

All done, and I’m pretty satisfied with the final product.  I managed to make a game that fits the theme, but without throwing enemies at other enemies, taking control of enemies, etc.  I think the way I used the theme is unique, so I’m pleased with that.

Would have loved to put more bad guys in, etc., but for the 20-some hours I spent on it, I feel good about it.  It’s a Flash game, so click the picture and have a go!

I wrote a little script to scrape all the ratings for all games and put them in a comma separated value file.  You can open this in any spreadsheet app (Excel, OpenOffice Calc, etc.).  It’s here, if anyone’s interested:

http://www.spampudding.com/ratings.csv

Tags: ratings, stats

After getting slammed with a couple of troll rating votes (people who rated an entry with 1s across the board, while all other votes had decent ratings), I was curious about how much this was happening overall in the voting.

I ran some numbers, and put a report here: http://spampudding.com/troll.txt

The format is username and how many troll rating lines they received (1 or 2), followed by their average ratings in each category, followed by what their average ratings would have been without the troll votes.

These five entries were hit the hardest, each losing a quarter of a point or more in at least one category due to troll votes: http://spampudding.com/trolltop.txt

Assuming all votes were logged, I’m wondering if maybe the admins could go through the database and see if it was the same couple people making these votes.

Got my gameplay concept for my game worked out.  The game is called Disco?Very!

Got the first still frame sprite done.  I’ll need to make several animation frames for the different dance moves.

I also have part of the music track done.  I have it looping correctly in FlashPunk, and confirmed with some tests that I can sync movement to the music.  That was something I was concerned about.

4:30 a.m. here, so I should probably think about sleeping.

Tags: Disco

I’ve got some basic playability in Disco?Very! now.  You’re the guy on the right.  Use left/right arrow keys, combined with shift, to do moves, and follow the other three dudes.

Click the picture to try it out.  It’s Flash, so click inside the window once it loads (or keypresses won’t register).

Still have a lot to do (more music, more moves, levels, scoring, etc.), but the basic gameplay function is there.

Tags: Disco

With each Ludum Dare, I am progressively more blown away by what people can do in a couple days.  There are so many cool game concepts.  I’m really fried for the first couple days after the compo, so I don’t get on and rate games right away, but just from the little perusing I’ve done, there are a lot of amazing entries.  I’ll be back to rate and comment once I can see straight.