This will be my first Ludum Dare, and my first ever event of this kind.

I don’t have high expectations for actually finishing, but it will be a good exercise for getting into the full development process. I’ve worked on a successfully released (non-commercial) game before, but my contribution was pretty narrowly focused, and given the dozens on unimplemented game designs I’ve made over the years I thought this would be a good way to start producing more.

I’ve (re)learned how to use git, and got myself set up on github. A few months ago I started learning libgdx (and Java in the process), and will be using the newly released version 1.0 for the competition. I built a few infrastructure components (a re-implementation of libgdx’s Game and Screen classes, a custom entity framework, and renderer for simple geometric shapes to use instead of placeholder graphics) that I’ll be using. You can see them in the first commit here. I could go into them in detail at some point if anyone cares; it was from exploring another user’s Ludum Dare entries that I discovered the value of using an entity framework so maybe it would be of value to someone else if I explained my decision to roll my own.

For content I’ll use GIMP or Inkscape for graphics if necessary, Tiled for maps/levels if appropriate, and bfxr for sounds. If I have time for music I’ll probably try one of the generators people have made available.

Looking forward to it!

I really didn’t expect to have anything presentable after wasting about a quarter of the 48 hours trying to decide what to do (and more than another quarter on sleep), but after bailing out of the IRC channel to keep from getting discouraged by all the successful people there I plugged away on the game mechanic I had in mind, and when it turned out to be kind of fun I knew I had to submit something, even something horribly, obviously incomplete.

And part of that incompleteness was not being prepared with someplace to host a compiled version, so anyone not adventurous enough to build a libgdx project can safely skip over the eye-gougingly marvelous abomination that is: Splashy Bird! Yes I did feel like the world needed another riff on Flappy Bird! This one’s different! You play a white spherical “bird” diving Beneath the Surface of the water to catch blue spherical “fish”. Use your imagination!