Hello Everyone,

This is my first time entering a game jam of any kind.  I’m excited and a bit scared to be honest.  But I hope to accomplish something!  I’ll be using the following tools:

1. ImpactJS.  I’ve been reading about this engine for the better part of a year, and since I *need* to learn an HTML 5 engine of some sort, this one seems like a good start.  It is also the 2nd biggest risk to me finishing, because I’ve never used this engine before.

2. Illustrator and Photoshop CS5.  I’m more of a Vector artist at heart, because I can’t make the pixels go right.

3. Audacity.  I’ve recently started using this tool, and I can make it make some noises.
The first biggest risk to me accomplishing something is my tendency to “Depth-First” whatever feature/bug I’m working on, and end up missing the forest for one spectacular tree.  It’s been useful at times in the past, but sucks when assembling prototypes.  Game Jams should be a good way to develop my “Breadth-First” skills.

4. Added a new Tool, I’m using BFXR as well.  I still don’t know what I’m going to do for music generation…

NeuronFire

I’m going with the theme and switching from ImpactJS to Perlinspiel for my engine.  I saw Prof. Moriarty’s presentation a couple of GDCs ago and his engine always interested me.  Here are the links for anyone interested:

Main Engine Site: http://www.perlenspiel.org/
GDC 2012 presentation: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015620/Lehr-und-Kunst-mit

Neuron Fire

Stumbled a bunch last night with Game Engines and Debuggers, but things are looking better this morning.  I’ve verified that I can build to a webserver, and the app will run on IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari to some extent or another.

IE Spams some stuff about a Audio file.  Not worrying about that now.

Here’s the screen shot:

First Screen Shot from NeuronFire’s LD26 compo entry.

NF

See What I did there…

It’s coming along, unwanted voids are missing.  All that’s left is to start adding more branches and foliage to be cut away!

My wife said my previous attempts resulted in objects that looked like a “wolf hopping around.”  I’ve got the trees procedurally generating, and she was able to see the wolf nearly every time.  Enough so that she wasn’t able to tell it’s a tree.  This is probably why wolves are such competent hunters, they apparently look like trees!

A bonsai, now with some foliage.

NF

I’m not sure if I’ve overcome my “depth-first” tendencies or if I’ve actually tackled the most difficult part of this game.  I’ve got just over 18 hours left, and I need to sleep for some of this, so I think I’ll work on some sound effect and bgm music generation for another hour, then sleep.

NF

Wow… That was a lot of fun!  I got a reasonable amount of sleep, but still ended getting stuck in a “depth first” trap on both Saturday and Sunday.  Sunday’s involved a mechanic of removing dead branches if the user clicked on them.  I spent a couple of hours trying to refactor enough code to get it to work, and ended up only with better looking code, without any extra functionality.

Saturday was a similar issue, I spent way too long monkeying about with branch construction rules and how the state of the board should be represented given perlinspiel’s constraints.

I’m really happy with the way BONSAI turned out and I’m glad that I switched to Perlinspiel from ImpactJS.  I still really like ImpactJS, but the constraint of a 32×32 grid for the game really focused my efforts on the theme at hand.

If anyone wants to check out the backlog for the game, I’ve left the pivotal tracker page for this project open:

https://www.pivotaltracker.com/s/projects/814143

Anyways, We’re all tired!  So congrats to everyone who entered!  Get some rest and enjoy a week or three playing with the entries!  You’ve earned it!

NF