Our first game jam ever! We are a two man team, both programming, myself (Nathan McDonald) and partner in crime (Brad Crowe). I’m still in college and he finished recently, this is our first time on the Ludum Dare scene were hoping to at least finish with a working prototype.
We are working with:
Mac/Ubuntu Linux
Eclipse
Java with Slick 2d
Photoshop/Illustrator
Git
Audacity
Good morning! Brad here. Nathan and I are just finishing up for the night, and are happy with our initial work. When I say work, I mostly mean planning. We’ve planned the ALL the things!
We are very eager to do more development, but fatigue has gotten the upper hand, and we’re giving in for a few hours. We both have a very solid idea of where everything is going, and all of the work involved. I’m confident that we can proceed full tilt after some well needed rest.
We have been faithful in our streaming efforts, though almost nothing except status and planning updates have been displayed on the screen. BORING! Tomorrow (er.. today?) will be way better, I promise. http://www.twitch.tv/spotlightcoding
Overall, we’re satisfied with our first game jam progress. Here’s a taste!
Our game involves an overly-ambitious thief named Rob:
A very rough obstacle/planning/discussion sketch:
OH YEAH! Earlier I took some battle station pics, but was too into some planning with Nathan to share. Here’s my baby:
Loving what I’ve been seeing from everyone so far! See you in a few hours. 😉
Hey everyone! Brad here again.
Today went well. Nathan didn’t wake me up like I assumed, so I slept in until around 2:30pm, while he was up at 10am.
Our sleeping schedules are completely out of sync, but I’m going to attempt to align them once again, so that we can continue to collaborate. We learned a lot today. It’s the first time we’ve worked with component based entities, and though it’s taking some getting use to, we’re loving it so far. I believe the work we got done today will make the rest of development go super smooth. What work you ask? You can take a look at our repository here: https://github.com/spotlightcoding/Robber
So far, Nathan built a floor, and the standing image of the main character (Rob, the thief). Nathan created gravity, and left and right movement, as well as the ability to jump. I added some basic collision detection for the floor entities and created holes that allow the player to fall to their death. Currently death isn’t very dramatic. It just consists of not being able to move any longer (ultra realistic! Yeahhhhh).
Our stream had lots more activity today as well. http://www.twitch.tv/spotlightcoding
Day two(ish) of our first game jam was very fun! I predict that tomorrow will be even more so.
Progress pics:
Rob: the thief
It’s Nathan this time, I thought I should write something since Brad wrote and streamed everything else.
Summary
We didn’t have our sights set too high for the competition. I am in college and I just finished my final projects on the 13th after pulling a couple all nighters so I didn’t get much time to prepare. Our main goals were to come out with something playable. We also wanted to learn a lot about game dev in general and game dev with Java + Slick2d. We are happy to announce we accomplished those goals.
Brad and I have never really worked on a project together before and we are both first time Ludum Dare participants, it was a great experience for both of us on the collaboration aspect and the 72 hours without proper personal hygiene aspect.
Personally I had never worked on a single repository with the same person before, I was new to conflicts when merging so that was great to learn.
On a final note overall it was a great time, we generally completed our goals. We were hoping to finish something with more substance, such has sound in the game, a bigger map with more obstacles, enemies, etc, but we are happy with the result.
All we have up right now is the source, however we will soon be adding a jar and hopefully an applet.
What went wrong
What went right
What’s next