This is my first LD, so the goal is clear — finish ANY game. I woke up in the middle of the night to see the theme, had some weird dreams about explorations in complexity theory and then woke up again an hour ago, without any idea what kind of game to do. But now i think i have at least a rough idea, what to do — some kind of mind exploring game.

Now i see, that lot’s of people have already got some content to show, where i still have just a fuzzy idea, but i’m listening to Gangpol und mit – Exploration raisonnée du verger and ‘m going to do my own rational exploration of flixel.

I think i will use Flixel for programming, maybe as3ds for datastructures, Flan for tilemaps, Allegro sprite editor and paint.net for sprites and Sfxr + musagi for music and sounds. Besides paint.net, I haven’t heard about any of this programms until a week ago, I never learned actionscript or programmed in flash, so it will be pretty funny frustexploration weekend for me… 😉

It is already 6 hours, since i woke up, but my progress is still not a bit materialized.

This is how my table looked like, when i started working on thist LD:

Nice surprise i’ve got already for breakfast was an rotten apple which looked really nice on the surface. Maybe that was some kind of warning…

But other 2 apples were allright, so i was able to prepare some meal, still not able to get brighter idea, what i want to code today.

I used three hours between breakfast and lunch to get brighter idea how the game should look like. It will be a mind exploring platformer, where the person will walk in his head through some memories. But I still don’t really know, what will be the fun part of the game and what goals should a player achieve…

Last two hours working on concrete problems, playing with my sandbox application i programmed in last two days, trying to find out, what is possible to do in Flixel with sprites, text and so on…

… still no line of code, design not at all complete and some possibilities of flixel are still mystery for me. But i’m not at all affraid, ’till now it is plain fun. Hopefully it won’t change into hell.. 😉

My plans for today:

Make at least a basic game classes and functions, try it on a tiny one-screen level, and start working on artwork, at least at conceptual level

Btw. can someone tell me how to change my profile picture in this blog and why i can’t see any of my comments to other blogs i write here, even if i post them seccond time, the system sends me a message, that i already posted the same text before… :/

Aprox. 20 hours from last post. Almost all of the time spent on debugging and deleting things that didn’t worked out like i thought they will and discovering posibilities of flixel. But at least, the biggest bug was found, triggering actions kind of works (even if it needs some changes) and i can start thinking about ‘level design’ and actions needed to be done. 2 hours ago i didn’t hope, that i will be able to finish at least anything, now i have some hope, but am affraid, that it won’t be that much fun as i hoped before.

In the evening i needed to pause searching bugs for a while, so i started to think about the main charakter(s)…

Found out what size the characters should have and used this measure for another debugging session…

Without greater success i tried to eat some chocolate and when it didn’t helped, i fell asleep.

Taday i’m a bit further, even if it doesn’t look like that from this screenshot…I’m 12 hours after my optimistic schedule, so now i have decided keeping the programming part simple and trying to get at least some graphics working…

This weekend was awesome! But also exhausting. I already thought, that i will not be able to finish anything — mainly because my plan somehow ended by a game playable just by 3 handed people, able to walk and interact with the game with keyboard and use the third hand for triggering sound effects and other things with mouse. But thankfully I just dropped almost all of this ideas away and worked last 12 hours almost solely on design and graphics. And i was still able to post my game just 3 minutes before deadline, so maybe i should have done it sooner…

Some random thoughts:

I’m sure that i’ve written the ugliest code in my life — i see almost only hard-coded text, switch statements (which i don’t like at all) and misuse of the language…

It was first time, i have tried to do some animation and it looks really unnatural, but i’m still relatively satisfied with it — next time it will be better. But first i have to find better sprite editor — paint.net isn’t really build to work with animations and dos-like allegro sprite editor is also not THE ideal program for me…

Besides animation, i also never tried to compose some music or create sound effects. I was looking toward it, but i didn’t manage to have time to do sfx, so this is my goal for next compo — create game that is not mute 😀

Preparation! I spent most of the time to learn to work with allmost everything i used. But it will be better next time…

I was happy to take part in this competition, and ‘m looking forward to play some of games created here… see you next time again

The game is here

After my last (and the only one) successfuly finished ludum dare i had big plans that next time i want to do a non-mute game. Then i was twice unable to create any game, while i had ideas too complicated to implement in two days (as for example a hand painted point and click adventure with mad scientists unable to do their great discoveries without the help of the player). So my plan is simple:
To finish any game, probably a straightforward platformer. Making it non-mute would be a nice bonus.

I will use Flixel 2.50 (because i like to try the new stuff that was added since i last used it more than one year ago), FlashDevelop, Inkscape in combination with a bamboo one tablet (because i’m more interested in drawing than programming, what might change after the announcement of the theme) and some other programms which i haven’t installed yet (maybe Gimp, Dame, paint.net, sfxr …). As i’m terribly unprepared i will probably spend most of the time by learning all these tools i haven’t used for a long time/ever, and the rest of it by reading the blog posts of other Ludum Darers (what i really enjoy), but i still hope that besides that i will be able to produce in this two days a binary by-product.

Plan B — Unity + Blender.

I give up. I can’t say that I liked this theme (actually there were just a few in the finals I liked less), but it is not a main reason why i have to give up (after all with a small qualms of conscience any game idea can be masked by this theme). I made a mistake of not knowing the tools before the compo, so I spent most of the time by reading of documentation and sample projects of flixel, by trying to learn to use the Dame level editor for the things I needed to do. My idea was that you get a camera (or set of cameras) and you use them to understand the level in a better way by seeing distant parts of it on a split screen and than using this knowledge to your advantage. Maybe I will once try to refine it and use it for some game, who knows.

But for now, I wish all of you the best – I’m looking forward on a lot of the games and can’t wait until i will play them.