Okay, so this is my first Ludum Dare. I’ve wanted to participate for a while now, but circumstance kept getting in the way. I’m still new to all of this, but let’s see how this turns out. Feeling jittery right now, can’t wait to start!

C++ and SFML, Paint.NET, sfxr and something for music if I have time.

No clue how this will turn out, or if I’ll even finish what I want done. But I’ll give it my best shot. Hopefully I’ll have something enjoyable and worth (re)playing.

Okay, everyone else seems to be making posts about their progress, so here I am making one. It is a bit far into the competition for a first post, but I’ve been preoccupied.

This is my first ever LD, and it’s been lots of fun, but very hectic. I had spent a very long time Friday thinking of ideas for 1000 Kittens, and needless to say, I was rather upset when the theme was announced. I spent 4 hours tossing around ideas trying to think of something. The problem with this theme is that there are so many interpretations, but for me, none of them were feasible and/or fun enough for LD. I went to sleep, woke up today, and a theme hit me.

It’s a bit of a stretch for evolution, but it’s a game where the hero is trapped in an arena and forced to battle. The twist is that his suit evolves based on the battle, giving him special abilities.

Not the most original theme, I know, but I still think it could work. I’m not in this for the competition, I’m in here for the experience and the fun of LD. This is the second game I’ve worked seriously on and I’m very proud of what I have so far.

I’ve taken too many breaks today, but all the same, I’m a bit burnt out. I’m going to be dreaming in integers and type conversion warnings.

At the moment, I have a simple environment set up for the arena. I plan on adding more soon. I can move my character around screen, jump up and down, and collide with objects. I’ve also started adding some of the special abilities.

I still need to add enemies (of course) and their AI (this will be interesting…), more abilities, a better arena, and a few touch ups to make the game look and play better. Oh, and I’d better not forget sound and music. It’s rather lacking in that category, at the moment.

I have a lot of work ahead of me, and I’ve barely started from what it looks like. I can tell I’m running out of time, and I really want to get this done. Something says I’m going to be very tired by the time I submit this. Still, I’m having a great time.

To all of the participants of LD: every now and then I’ve been checking back to see how everyone else is doing, and it blows me away what some of you have done. I am absolutely amazed with what everyone else has done. I look forward to playing a lot of these games later.

Anyways, that sums up my post. I suppose you might see another one tomorrow. If I’m not asleep or dead ^.^

This has been the most intense weekend of my life. I’ve never had an experience quite like Ludum Dare before. While I still wish the theme had been different, I had a lot of fun doing it. This shows me how easy making a game can be, but also how maddeningly difficult finishing it can be.

[Game]

This is the second game that I’ve ever made, and while it’s very basic and has a handful of problems, I’m still rather impressed with what I finished. I hope to compete in Ludum Dare many more times, and I hope to improve a lot every time.

I don’t really expect my game to do all that well, but I look forward to playing and rating everyone else’s games. Some of them look amazing.

I think I’ll write a postmortem in a few days so I can straighten out what I did wrong as well as prepare for future competitions. More than anything, I’m looking forward to the Ludum Dare 25. Hopefully, I’ll be jamming with friends next time!

I will count this as one of the best, yet most stressful weekends of my life. Thank you to all of the competitors and admins who make LD what it is!

My friends and I will officially be entering Ludum Jam this weekend! I entered Ludum Dare 24 and had quite the experience. This time, I decided to bring some friends along. Looking forward to a great competition, a great challenge, and great games!

Tools: C++ with SFML, sfxr, Paint.NET, Online Pixel Art Maker, GIMP, and probably FL Studio.

So yeah, let’s get this started! I’m sure the theme will be great this time around! (Because Evolution gave me some pretty low standards haha!)

Also: If I ever get around to working on a framework before the competition starts, everything will be found on my Github page.

Well, I personally have had a very enjoyable day one in the jam. I’m not sure if I can speak for the rest of my team or not.

We got off to a very slow start today. Half of us were gone for half the day and we didn’t have a formal idea until around 3pm today. With that said, we didn’t get much work done today. Our two artists got some sprites done and I worked on programming a bit. Well, I suppose a lot has actually happened today, but there isn’t much obvious progress. I’m hoping that we will have everything finished by tomorrow, which I don’t think will be too unrealistic. Looking forward to seeing how everything turns out.

The game idea is crazy, stupid, funny, and hopefully fun to play. It’s working up towards a 2D platformer style game (I can almost hear the groaning as people read this) with a villain that antagonizes innocent bystanders.

Not much in the way of screenshots, so here’s a picture of the main character.

Just looking at all of the entries into Ludum Dare is amazing. We can’t wait to start playing some of these games. However, we need to finish our game first.

I’m the last person on my team still awake, but I will be going to bed soon. School seems to be a major problem. To be precise, an eight hour problem. After I get home from school, I’ll be rushing to finish a level editor and both of our artists will be hurriedly finishing additional levels. As far as I can tell, we have all of the major mechanics finished and we just have to finish the art, levels, and a few finer details of the gameplay experience. Unfortunately, with the time being taken up by school, tomorrow will be a mad dash to get everything finished. Still, all things considered, I’m very happy with how far along we are.

Our working (and possibly final) title sums up our game pretty well: “Dr. Ludum’s Exploding Goats”. Our game is a 2D platformer style game where you play as the evil Dr. Ludum. Your job is to plant goat bombs and blow up innocent bystanders. Points are awarded based on the length of the fuse on the bomb- er, goat. When the fuse runs out, the goat explodes. You had better make sure you are nowhere near the goat when the timer hits zero. It would hurt, I kid you not.

I certainly don’t believe our game is as good as some of the others I’ve seen out there, but I’m still very impressed with what we’ve accomplished so far. This has definitely been a fun and worthwhile experience.

Bit of a development diary: I ran into a roadblock today when I moved from a static map to one loaded from a configuration file. The problem with my setup is that it’s basic C++ with SFML without all of the useful utilities you come to expect from other things. Java has been pampering me far too long with Tokenizers. In the end, I found a useful snippet on Stack Overflow that I added to my code. I know it isn’t exactly good practice, but it’s working for now, which is all that matters for the moment.

Also, just a friendly reminder that all of our code is available on my Github page.

Anyways, I think I’m going to head to bed. I have a physics test tomorrow that I haven’t studied for in the slightest. Hopefully I won’t be tired and clueless tomorrow. After that, we’ll be making a mad dash to finish the game for the jam.