So, around 7PM yestedey – someone on the IRC channel posted that Ludum Dare was hosting a mini-compo. I’ve been following LD but never had the chance to actually participate in it. I fired up Netbeans an started coding a console that draws text, I found a proper console font (PC Senior, great 8×8 font) then started drawing some text. After a while I noticed that the colors didn’t look very appealing so I got Solarized color scheme (Brilliant one) and edited some colors of it. Made some color constants for my use and started gathering up some Screen and Main Menu code

I ended up having a tiny menu with a nice “shifting” effected title. At first, my idea was to have a dodging reflex game or whatever they are called. Then thought that I’d rather do some shooting action and merged both together. Not sure where the name came in to my mind however. I continued thinking, and got the idea of a difficulty menu, Easy-Normal-Extremely Hard. It affects pretty much everything, spawn rates, damage, health, everything. The difficulties also stand up for their names, Easy is casual fun, Normal is a little challenging and Exteremely Hard is.. Extremely hard I guess.

The biggest problem was that I wanted to sleep early and started rushing the coding a little so I jumped into the actual game. I wasn’t sure how to do the architecture at all so I just started putting some game objects in the game class (Player, Censors, Bullets)

Non-stop programming action continued and my code started getting fattier and fattier (In a good way). I continued coding and by the time I thought I finished I noticed that a lot of bugs were present and it was around 10.30PM as far as I know. I continued fixing and went to bed in 12PM. I wasn’t quite confident of my game as there were still bugs and a lack of content. When I woke up about a hour an half ago I directly started up my laptop and noticed that the charger stopped working (Probably my sister, will question her when she wakes up). It has replacable tips so I got another one and started working. I fixed the remaining bugs, changed powerup hitboxes, edited movement on some constructive comment (by Drabiter), added a speed powerup. You still can’t win though, not sure of any win conditions still – so PIPA has 100% chance to pass unless you keep up until forever (Will think of a win condition soon)

By the time I started writing I also noticed that harder difficulties increased powerup spawn rate, well v3.1 soon I guess!

This is my 3rd LD (counting the minis) and I’m pretty excited as this is my first REAL LD!

I’ll be working on a game where you are a ship, you shoot down asteroids, and protect a planet!

I feel like moving too fast!

In my LD23 compo entry, I used a piece of base code I wrote a long time ago and used for my previous MiniLD submissions

The code is to provide the user a nice terminal feeling

http://pastebin.com/8NUvdp6t

The actual screen code is in the paste and the required font image is below

http://i.imgur.com/EH3RZ.png

The code has font and box drawing functions and supports full ARGB color (with Slick2D)

To use the code, init function must be called before any rendering or update. Along with that render function must be called in the render loop.

To have custom screens, the developer should extend the class and override the place function to draw fonts and stuff in the good old terminal style

Hope you enjoy it!