Its coming up fast, and we’ve held out as long as we can before making this post in case anything crops up to stop us taking part. The team at Pangean Flying Cactus is officially in! This is our first time taking part in Ludum Dare (we planned to try it in April, but school deadlines got in the way), and will hopefully result in the first game that we actually finish as a team! Over the past two years we’ve built many demos and gadgets to develop our skills, and come up with tons of ideas, and now we feel we’re finally ready to produce something with a little polish.

Our Team:

• Dean James – Dean will primarily handle the coding / development side of things, researching and messing around with mechanics and functions to make the game work and, hopefully, remain fun!
• Sam Mottram – I will be responsible for the creative side of the project, creating sprites, tiles and backgrounds, working on level designs, and developing any story elements the game may have. If need be, I will support Dean on the programming side, or work on sound and music development (the area I’m least comfortable in).

Tools of the Trade:

• Engine / Editor – Stencyl
• Graphics – GIMP, PyxelEdit, GraphicsGale, TileStudio (Possibly Krita)
• Sound – BFXR
• Music – Bosca Ceoil, LMMS

Follow Along:

We will be posting updates on development to our official (and brand-spanking new!) social media outlets on Facebook and Twitter, and I (Sam) will be streaming the creative side of things over Twitch on my personal account.

We wish everyone taking part all the best, and look forward to trying out all the amazing games that will surely come out of this. Good luck!

It’s 10:30 here, and we’re already 8 hours behind, but we’re starting our development now! You can follow along at http://www.twitch.tv/mcparradox

We started at 10:30 this morning (GMT) with nothing, and now we have a functional movement / collision / attack mechanic, a whole bunch of tiles to make a snazzy map, and a couple of working sprites (albeit a little oversized). On the whole, its been a very successful day, it seems like we’ve got loads done in very little time. We’ve been streaming the progress on Twitch all day, and will do the same tomorrow. Until then, I’ll be slowly working on new graphics, and posting updates on our Facebook and Twitter feeds. But what you really want to see right now are pictures, right?

Everything was going so well. Just this morning, it looked like we were on track to get a fun, good quality game finished and submitted by tonight, but then it all went wrong. Stencyl started playing up. First, it was my end – Stencyl began refusing to test games, and would do nothing but throw up errors. I gave up on programming at this point, going back to making last minute assets and letting Dean finish up the game. But his Stencyl started doing funny things too – it corrupted the game file so many times that we’ve made close to no progress today, and have been forced to submit a messy, buggy game with no clear goal, and only half implemented mechanics. We had such high hopes, and they were all shattered by a simple bug in Stencyl.

For the next Ludum Dare, we’ll definitely be looking into alternatives to Stencyl – while it is powerful and easy to use, if it makes such a mess of projects as it has done today, we really can’t risk using it for the next round.

For now, we’ll leave you with some pictures of what almost was:

Cordell & Lorri

If you really must try the god-awful game, it’s here.