Hey, I’m a developer and a gamer but not a game dev. Still, I’d like to give this a shot and barring illness, nuclear war, the zombie apocalypse, etc I shall dedicate myself 100% to attempting something worthwhile next weekend!

I’ll use Haxe/NME/HaxeFlixel because that seems a simple, solid platform – total kudos to those guys.

Graphics will come out of my trusty old copy of Photoshop CS2 and go through TexturePacker, audio is going to be some combo of LabChirp, bfxr, Audacity, the Wolfram music generator and solmire.com (midi-to-mp3).

During the course of my frantic learning spree in the past week I’ve managed to hack together a base I can work off (so I don’t spend my precious 48 hours figuring out how to do simple crap, which would certainly happen otherwise but may indeed happen anyway) – in compliance with the rules, that is here.

Now I’ve posted, I have to do it…

I have escaped to an empty house, and acquired fuel for the weekend…

During a spot of attic archaeology, a giant old Wacom and functional recording equipment were unearthed – and miraculously made to work with a modern computer.

Tragically I have little idea what I’m doing with any of it, so just expect my ‘game’ to be a lonely block that moves left and right, with little to do.

Plan: Sleep for a few hours, wake up, check the theme, spend an hour or so having terrible ideas, sleep again (WORK SUBCONSCIOUS WORK!), wake up, make game.

Tags: deskphoto

Progress update: I have an awesome idea, but I am definitely overreaching. Will try to simplify in order to actually complete something!

Creative process insight below, game story hastily circled in red.

My hero is a scruffy human, pitting himself against invading upper middle class OCD minimalist aliens. Here’s some sketches, and the first player sprite..

So I have my protagonist, and my minimalist alien enemies with some very limited AI.. I have collision detection, I have pathfinding, I have interactions with objects, a bit of audio and a small percentage of necessary graphics.

Github lays it all out here.. 12 issues closed, 25+ to go (for perfect completion) 2660 lines of code so far.

I wish it looked more impressive!

…then it should be state machine. I ignored that part of my brain yesterday and now I’m dealing with amusing but unexplained emergent behaviour. Time to refactor refactor refactor.

So it’s morning here, I’m showered, I’ve had breakfast… The countdown says 18h 49m to go, which is equivalent to 3-4 days of ‘real world’ work, should be OK!

Maan… I’ve been playing the damn game all evening instead of coding – evidently a problem with doing games dev!

It’s submitted, there are still things I want to do before the deadline though (making legs move, fixing AI logic bugs) so I’ll be here with my generic-brand red bull substitute for a couple of hours more. Hands are shaking, graah.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20877