I’ve got way too much time on my hands right now so I think it’s time to get some Ludum Dare going:

I’m a Jack-of-all-trades, & master of none; I’ll be using GM:S for programming, Paint.NET for art, sfxr or something for sound effects. Probably throw in some nice procedurally generated music or some shite, who knows?

Going to go for a content-less adventure game, I think. Doing some procedural generation will be a nice challenge.

Above all, though, I want to test my resolve to actually finish something for once.

Written a nice schedule, figured some stuff out, so this should be a good time!

Well, the basic stuff is in place. Time to add some nice stealth mechanics and finalize graphics.

So I woke up this morning sick, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to finish. Damn it.

Instead, I have attached above an accurate, in-game representation of my condition.

Hello, fellow game folk!

I’m going to have a go at this – my last attempt at Ludum Dare ended in vomiting, so here’s hoping this weekend goes a little better.

I will be using:

– FlashDevelop to write Haxe code using the HaxeFlixel framework because it’s really easy and nice and everything just works

– Paint.NET to draw some sick art

– Brackets for other code editing like JSON files, because the interface looks so damn good

– SourceTree to manage builds and push to GitHub

– Tiled Editor if I need to build levels which I will because my procedural generation ability is severely lacking

– Some other tools to do music and sound, probably bfxr or similar, but I’m not sure yet, which is troubling.

– Tweetdeck and Facebook to make sure my productivity is zero throughout.

My personal code / libraries / whatever are available at https://github.com/xxnxT/LD48 – I’m going to pre-emptively add some more .hx files as the week goes on for basic stuff like Character loading, Tilemap loading, and Dialogue boxes. Feel free to do with these as you wish. A large amount of the code is similar t[o the HaxeFlixel demos, which I believe are MIT-licensed and available here.

I’m initially just going to target Flash, because it’s easy and I’m lazy. My main goal is to make something polished, and maybe a little pretty. I’m a shitty programmer though, so that might be asking too much.

Going to be doing the whole 48 hours on a three-year-old Toshiba business notebook which is sans hinges and is made of disintegrating plastic. It’s going to be amazing.

Follow my cries of anguish and frustration throughout the 48 hours here, on Twitter.

A serene garden… But what lies underneath the sand?

Unleashing an arrow maelstrom on an unsuspecting doppelgänger

So yeah, here’s the sum total of my efforts, pretty buggy and unpolished, but hey, that’s what all-nighters are for, right?

So my entry, SUPER ROBO GARDEN ARENA is done. It’s still pretty not-finished, but it’s at least a little bit fun.

Postmortem to come.

Entry here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=25909

Play directly here: http://nxt.itch.io/srga

Little bit of a gameplay GIF.

This post was originally posted on my Tumblr.

The 29th installment of Ludum Dare ended over a week ago now, but I’d like to write a post now, reflecting on how the weekend went.

The game I made, SUPER ROBO GARDEN ADVENTURE, can be found here.

It’s a top-down action game, with pixel-tastic graphics. To start: here’s a broad outline of things that went well and things that didn’t go quite so well.

GOOD STUFF:

– I made something almost finished, by myself, in forty-eight hours.

– The thing I made looked pretty decent, IMO

– I managed my time pretty well, all things considered.

– I wrote my first proper game in Haxe / HaxeFlixel.

– I learnt a whole lot about lots of different things.

– The most important good thing that happened over the weekend, however, was the Skype Call I was part of. More on that in a sec.

– I had an absolute blast!

NOT – SO – GOOD STUFF

– The game I made had no clear direction because I sat around scratching my head with no viable ideas.

– The game is mechanically weak. I totally made up all the mechanics in the last few hours.

– The game doesn’t have any music, because I’m a lousy musician and I’m not comfortable with any music software.

– The game is buggy. Obvious stuff that should have been fixed easily was left too late, and stuff was forgotten in the final rush.

– The game hasn’t got any tutorialization – this isn’t so important, but it makes it harder for people.

– The game’s controls are sluggish and animation is slow to change because of unoptimized code.

The best part of the whole weekend was the Skype conversation I was a part of. Folmer Kelly, a gamedude I admire a lot, tweeted out his Skype name inviting people to be a part of theme discussion. I quickly responded and added Folmer, just because I could, and joined a group of people who I think all assumed that I knew some other person. The chat quickly evolved into a place to share ideas, get feedback and show WIP. This was really useful, because it inspired me to keep going (I guess because I wanted to prove myself) and produce something good. The chat, post-LD, has evolved into a general developer chat, which is really cool, and I’ve met a bunch of really cool and talented people.

My goal for the next Ludum Dare is to produce something more thematically and stylistically interesting; I want to innovate a little more. I trapped myself into going for one specific genre this LD, and I think that was because I was unconfident about my programming ability.

Anyway, I can’t wait for the next one!

I finished ‘Constellation’, a relaxing little game about transporting a strange assortment of goods between star systems.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=25909

Here are some screenshots:

Let me know about any balance issues.