Alright, I’ve never done one of these Ludum Dare’s so I have no idea what I’m doing, but I’ll give it a good try!
This is the library I made myself for my first LD. It’s very basic, just a simple menu shell around a stubbed out class that could be turned into a game. It also has an asset loader to make it really easy to add fonts, images, sounds and music to your game and reference them. Finally, it wraps the setup and shutdown of SDL, SDL_ttf, and SDL_mixer. It has a sample game (not really a game at all) that I made to test the library.
Thanks to doches for hosting this for me.
Here’s my first ludum dare meal ready to devour on my desk.
In addition, my wonderful wife made me this plate of cookies for the weekend, they’re fantastic.
After awhile shooting blanks, I came up with the idea of defending a wall from an invading horde. As the horde approaches and dies, they build up a wall of corpses. If the wall reaches the top, the invaders pour over and you lose. So you have to reduce the piles of corpses by whatever means necessary… we’ll see what I can do there.
Here’s how far I got in a couple of hours before having to go to bed. Some laughably bad programmer art here, especially since I made a mistake and left a swatch of white in my sky background. Doh!
Now I’m off to bed for a good night’s rest.
Good luck, everyone!
Got up a couple of hours ago and made myself breakfast. Here is my food in progress:
I ended up with enough food for both breakfast and lunch, which is nice. Unfortunately for the competition, I had to leave right afterwards for swimming lessons with my kid, so I’ve only just returned. Here’s hoping for a productive day!
Tags: motivational, poster
My wife left for a trip this morning, so she helpfully bought me this to snack on for the weekend:
(sorry for the blurry photo)
At least I’ll be snacking healthy for the first half of the competition!
Here’s what I decided to whip up for a late lunch, early supper:
It’s a package of cous-cous with some fresh mushrooms and some pine nuts added to it. Took less than 10 minutes to make and tastes great.
Well, I had a demoralizing bug that wasted 4 hours of my time and almost made me give up, but I finally managed to make some progress. Here’s my latest screenshot:
I’ve got guards moving on the wall, and enemies that move faster on land and slower when climbing. Still no actual gameplay though, so I’m not very happy with my progress.
I’ve finally managed to get some gameplay going. You can throw rocks at the approaching enemies, and when they die they turn into bloody corpses.
I don’t think I have enough time to make the game fun, but I’m hoping to at least get the game finished enough for a submission. I need an instructions screen, win detection and display, and lose detection and display, which is hopefully an attainable goal.
I only have 90 minutes until I have to leave for basketball.
For lunch I made some spaghetti with pesto and pine nuts and cheese, but my camera is dead so I couldn’t take a picture of it.
I want to make sure that this version is playable, so that it can be my backup submission if I don’t have any more time after basketball.
There’s no instructions in the game yet. Left click to throw stones at advancing enemies. You lose if the enemies breach the top of your wall. You win if they all die.
EDIT – Removed old link and old final tag.
I’m back from basketball and I have less than 3 hours left to do any more polishing I can fit in.
Good luck everyone!
Well, I managed to get quite a bit of polish in two hours, I think I’m done with it now. The real game was supposed to be about surviving many waves of enemies, but I just don’t have time to make that happen.
Here’s the game.
For people not judging the game, I have an expanded version here.
Tags: final
I was glad to have finished an entry in my first LD, but I had two main regrets: not having music, and not getting the multiple waves of enemies that I had planned on. I had written most of the code and planned for the waves of enemies, but 45 minutes before the close of the competition, I felt I didn’t quite have enough time to pull it off and make it feel polished.
I have taken an extra 2 hours to work on my game after the competition, and with it I have made several waves of enemies, rock upgrades, wall upgrades, and corpse cleaning. The gameplay is significantly extended, so give it a try!
I didn’t have much time to balance the new waves, so it might be a bit difficult.