Depending on my inspiration and free time this weekend, I’ll give Ludum Dare a try. I code in C++ and mostly use Vim and The Gimp. I will also use the open source Lol Engine (which isn’t really an engine, just a cross-platform wrapper for OpenGL/D3D and a few other libraries).
Not a very inspiring theme. I’ll see if I can think of something interesting nonetheless…
Okay, I have enemies, bullets, rockets, powerups, a scoring system, and even some gameplay that matches the theme! The furthest I have gone so far in LD.
Extremely happy to have finished; that’s mostly thanks to the reasonable and realistic goals I had set. The game is simple and hopefully fun: SinglShot.
I’m in for the 5th time. It took me quite some time, but I finally got a game mechanics idea I’d like to explore.
I know pixel art is overrated, but I like it, so here, have some early level tiles.
Unlike the last time where I was far too late to submit a decent entry and had to compete in the Jam, my entry for the 48-hour compo is more or less complete.
The themes were pretty inspiring and I managed to follow both! The game, Wesh Grow, uses Thrust / Gravity Force like mechanics, with only two control buttons, one for each thruster. And the goal of the game is to make your spaceship grow by collecting parts. The parts collected affect the ship’s size, mass and thrust power, making it more and more challenging to manoeuvre. The downside to all this is that, as usual, the level design is a bit poor, but also the artwork suffered a bit. I deliberately chose a simple palette and a small resolution so that I would not spend hours doing my sprites.
The game is probably hard to control at first. You get used to it after a short while, but I decided to make the spaceship indestructible so as not to frustrate the player. Here is a video of the first levels for those who don’t feel like downloading and playing it:
The first round was a bit disappointing: many of the themes seem to try to enforce specific genres instead of being mere themes that allow for broad and multiple interpretations. This time I decided to use a lot of the points I got with my Ludum Dare Gold Account in an attempt to downvote them enough to make a difference. I wish I could spend more than 99 points on a single theme but well, it’s a start. 
