I think I may give this a whirl. It will be my first Ludum Dare, and I want to do something that can be deployed via Flash. I’m leaning towards using HaxePunk, but I haven’t yet decided. I’m checking out everyone else’s introductory posts to figure out what other tech options people tend to gravitate towards and see if there is another option that I might be able to get moving on faster.

I’m looking forward to meeting/chatting with all of you in IRC.  I don’t know if I’ll finish a game in the 48 hours, but either way it should be a valuable (and hopefully fun) experience!

Needed a break, so here’s a post.

My “game” is coming along, but not as quickly as I’d like, and it seems to be missing the fun (and the game). I feel like I may need to go back to the drawing board and try to figure out a design for this. I was hoping it would come to me while I worked on it, but nothing really has. If you are curious, here’s my current state:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/98668/Acension/index.html

Also, breakfast and lunch:

#gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

Did some mind mapping, ate some chips… And now my game is starting to take on a very different look…

I’m feeling better about this one. I wanted to do a farming type game but I didn’t think I could do a good enough job on the art. I thought of the old Spirograph toy and thought, “what if I used those as the flowers you’re breeding?”. Lots of parameters to mix. I’m working first on the visual parameters, and then I will work on adding things like disease resistance and such and make it more farming oriented instead of just breeding Spirographs.

#gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

Making some progress, check it out! I could probably tweak the breeding algorithm for the next 24 hours and still not be happy with it. I should probably start trying to add some gameplay of some sort.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/98668/Acension/2/index.html

1 day down.

I need to actually try to turn this into a game tomorrow. Right now it has a very weak objective (make things spin faster). I don’t know how far I’ll get tomorrow but I’ll be submitting whatever I have.

Check it out, the flower breeding works a lot better than before:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/98668/Acension/3/index.html

On the final stretch. Here’s a game about creating a mathematical garden.

#gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/98668/AscensionGarden/1/index.html

This will be my second Ludum Dare experience. Check out the timelapse of my first LD48.

And the entry that came out of it, Ascension Garden.

Last time I used HaxePunk which worked pretty well. This time I’ll be learning Löve so I can be playing in Lua, and so I can compare the two for prototyping speeds.

I just got a new keyboard, and got a rush order of some white lithium grease to fix some squeaky stabilizing bars underneath some of the keys which will likely be the first thing I do in this LD48. I’ll be doing a timelapse after I get my keyboard set.

Not quite as prepared in the food and health realm, but this time I’ve got some tactical support. 😉

This should be interesting, at the least.

So I’m taking a different tact than I did for the last (and my first) Ludum Dare.

This time I’ve decided to do more design up front, and to get some graphics up earlier. I’m feeling currently that there are a few flaws in the design, namely that I’ll need to get the numbers set up right in order for it to work at all, and also that it is rather ambitious.

I’ve done some graphics and got a basic sprite animation manager set up, so its starting to look kind of nice.

Currently I’m planning on naming the game Fetch Quest. I’ll wait till I’m a bit further along to actually announce the actual design (once I know one way or the other about if it has a chance of working).

Woo, Ludum Dare!

I’ll be using this opportunity to get familiar with Moai. I’ve already got the windows host built, Zerobrane set up to work with it, and a project folder synced with github and ready for the first commit. My entire experience with Moai to date consists of drawing a single image on the screen sans-game-loop, so this should be fun. My goals for the weekend are to jump start learning Moai and, of course, to make a game.

So without further adeu, I present my entry for LD29:

Title: Unknown!
Theme: Unknown!
Desc: Unknown!
SCM: https://github.com/sclark39/ld29
Engine: Moai
Language: Lua
IDE: ZeroBrane
Other Tools: Audacity, Chronolapse, Pickle, Photoshop, Programmer’s Notepad, Microsoft Excel, Scrivener, Trello, Beyond Compare, TortoiseGit, mIRC, Pidgin, a notebook, and a whiteboard

😉

I can’t wait to fill in all the unknowns. I’m also planning (we’ll see how it goes) to do the October Challenge in June, so I’m extra motivated to do something awesome this weekend and get a good head start on my own personal June challenge.

On my reasoning for selecting Moai: in past Ludum Dare’s I’ve used HaxePunk and Love2D, but I’ve chosen Moai for this one because it is open source, can build a Windows client, and is more easily ported to mobile platforms. I didn’t like HaxePunk much because of the AS language, but it was great that it could be run in the browser and I believe was very portable. I really liked using Love2D, but mostly I just liked writing the whole game in Lua. Love was good for prototyping, but is not designed for production-ready code nor designed to be portable. Although there were some web clients for Love, they were not mature and I couldn’t get either of my past two LD entries to run through it. Not having a web version isn’t great for LD because it adds another barrier for people to actually try my game. I’ve seen a Moai game running in a web host, so I’m hoping to have better luck with this. I’ll have to see if I can get that sorted when submission time comes. In general, Moai is a bit more complicated to use because the rendering is handled by a separate thread, but game code is still all written Lua, which I appreciate; and it should be more realistic to finish a game post-compo if I start with this (and actually still have it be performant on mobile platforms [cross fingers]).

I’ll likely make a time-lapse of the weekend, but it may only be for my use. Depends how good I am at keeping personal info off my main screen.

I’ll be on IRC, GTalk, and Twitter.