Hello, I’m Steve and I’m a gamemaker.

Been planning on doing a Ludum Dare since, errrm, forever but real life or naked over ambition always gets in the way.  I know lots of the competitors of past compo’s from the Retro Remakes and general indie scenes.

This time around I’ve decided I can spare at least 10-15 hours over the weekend around family commitments so I’m going to knock something together.

As I have the beginnings of a cross-platform game engine written in C++/OpenGL but it’s not in a shareable state I’m going to default to my basic prototyping tool PyGame.  All I can say it’s it’s a welcome relief from all the Objective-C I’ve been writing recently.

So expect a simple game that runs equally badly on Windows/Linux/OSX.

Language:  Python
Libs: PyGame (and it’s prerequisites) with maybe Box2d
Software Tools: OSX, Windows XP, Adobe Fireworks (trial), SFXR/CFXR, Audiacity, text editor.

I have a few ideas for some of the themes but I’m totally at a loss for most of them.

I’ll be tweeting my lack of progress as @steve_parkes and blogging on http://zx-81.com

1 red bull
1 mountain dew
2 pints of pepsi

And I’ve ended with with the basis of a really boring shooter called “The NME is the weapon” which basically will only interest people of a certain age who like derivative shooters based on a single weak pun.

To improve matters I added lots of other weak puns based on popular song titles so if you want to see a level based on the combined premise of a Donovan song title merged with some classic Sultan of Pings FC lyrics and understand why shooting 23 sheep on a level called Wednesday 3am will trigger a 3am Eternal event you are in the right place.  With added Sinclair ZX Spectrum style palette choices.

Man I’ve really limited my audiance.  Still it’s got a level where you throw Doner Kebabs at Chavs who wouldn’t like that?  Once what each of them are explained the concept is universal I’m sure.  Think of them as Burritos and Red Necks or local equivalents where available and everything still won’t make much sense.

Baby is still asleep, eldest son is on the 360 and Wii and my perfect girlfriend is making a massive pizza that is about an hour away.  I can spare about 5 hours tomorrow to finish off.  What can go wrong?

Apart from the concept is alien to most people, the gameplay sucks and I have no gfx or sfx done yet

I knew I could only manage 10-15 hours this weekend and planned accordingly but I’ve managed about 3 hours on day 1 and it’s 10pm.

Teething 10 month olds, demanding 12 year olds and the rest of family life have conspired against me.

I’m so far behind it’s not really worth continuing because the same happened with this LD as with all the others.  The final theme left me cold when a few of the others inspired me.  Happens everytime it’s just this was the first one I entered offically.

Still my idea for a shoot-em-up based around my teenage years going to gigs, drinking too much and chasing girls fighting off the evils of the real world with a copy of the NME and too many puns was fun to play with but ultimately not worth finishing.

I can’t enter the jam as I’m fully booked up on Monday

I had a crunch finish about a week before the December LD (and think I will this Dec as well) and missed the last one totally due to having a pile of builders rubble and dust instead of a house so I think I’m doomed to never finish an LD game.

errrm maybe.

Since I started a game for the first, second and third LD’s and still haven’t finished one yet I don’t exactly have high hopes for finishing this one.

Two kids (14 and 2) might get in the way (they did the last time I tried a couple of years back) as might real life but as I could do with a quick break from another project and a jam should freshen things up again.

Engine: Unity3D
Extensions: wut?
Content creation tools: sfxr and whatever bitmap editor I happen to have installed on whichever machine I’m on.

Now vote for something interesting guys not stuff that suggests a clone of something ‘cool’ in the current scene.

Yeah, go on then.  If we pick a good theme I’m in.

Mmmmm, evolution.

I must admit I voted for this in every LD I knew I couldn’t commit to but never actually wanted to make a game with this theme so I didn’t vote for it this time.

Ideas

First Idea – AKA The one you should throw away
I didn’t see the theme until 6am BST (4 hours after it was announced) and my first thought was.  PANTS.  They only went and did it.  This quickly mutated into a racer called Genetic Drift with tracks bred from track DNA in 3D.  Since I mostly work in 2D this was a stupid idea but I worked on it for a couple of hours.

Second idea – AKA normally the best one 
An answer to “What good is half an eye” an eyesight simulator that goes from simulated complex vision right now to about a millionth of a human eyes resolution on a flat patch of skin.  Proving evolution of the eye by de-evolving one as the levels progress.  I quickly ditched this as I’m not your science teacher and if your science teacher can’t teach you stuff like this then it’s time for a revolution.  As any 16 year old should be able to tell you the leap from a single receptor for heat to one for light is a tiny one so don’t let politicians and people who believe they can talk to magic men in the sky tell you otherwise.

The Deadline
Right now we are 10 hours in and I’m giving myself 1 hour to have a completely formulated idea or I’m out.

Perhaps I should draw on the bloody infected insect bite on my arm that has led to a bit of a fever for inspiration.  Bloody evolution.  Who picked this?  Oh yeah, previously it was me and +300 odd people decided it was time to get their revenge for all the ‘interesting’ themes I’ve picked for them over the years.

1pm BST deadline and I’m hungry will I make it?

Wait what am I saying, it’s all your fault :p

The theme just didn’t inspire me at all.  Shame really.  I had firm ideas on about 5 themes that I could have lived with but 3 of the themes I absolutely hated actually inspired another idea that would have been perfect unfortunately none of those got voted in and Evolution did

Apart from the two ideas I bought up in a previous post everything, and I mean everything, I came up with was derivative and/or too vast in scope for one man to do over about 12-14 hours available to me at the weekend.  So it’s with a heavy heart that I’m bowing out of LD yet again.

At some point I’ll have both the time and a doable idea for a LD but this isn’t that time so yet again it’s fairwell and good luck to everyone involved.

Until next time.