While there are other things eating my time and family to factor in as well, I’ll be trying to field an entry for this LD after intending to a number of times before. The tools and libraries I use will depend on how the theme shakes out, but here’s the general list:

Engine: Unity
Graphics: Photoshop CS5, Paint.net
Music: Renoise, Audio Tool
Sfx: sfxr, Renoise
Libraries: Simplex Noise (Peter Eastman/Stefan Gustavson) – ported to C# for Unity

Good luck to all involved!

You’re a DARK WIZARD. Heck, you might even be EVIL. That is, if those pesky adventurers weren’t trying to take back the large floating island you just finished tearing from the world to create your very own cozy little piece of flying fortified lair.  As such it’s up to you to corrupt every bit of your new floating island and it’s local inhabitants, bending them to your evil will. Doing so will require magic and, of course, a bit of adventurer slaying.

Good times! So far I’ve whipped up a small terrain generator to create the floating islands. Here’s a shot from the debug minimap:

All procedural and whatnot.

From this I’ll build the play field. Eventually it will have other features and spawn animals around the place for you to hunt down and corrupt. Oh, and those annoying do-gooder Adventurers will show up in airships. You should probably destroy those.

So far the first bowl of snacks is done and the first energy drink is on the way down now. Hoping to get the play field drawing based on the map before hitting the sack tonight.

Oh, and if you’re lucky, you might even find a  or a rare .

So, dinner break then.

Today hasn’t been what I had hoped. Just about everything has conspired to keep me from fielding a playable entry. I’m only now getting the map translated into a playable area – over 12 hours later than I had planned – and while other art concepting has happened, nothing is finished or even animated. This could be a close call.

In retrospect I should have gone with my first instincts and used a voxel terrain from the start instead of wasting time with quads, and now cubes. Next time perhaps.

Yep. Schedule’s cleared and commitments (mostly) waived for this weekend so I’m in.
As usual I’ll be working in Unity with 2D Toolkit, using Bfxr for sound effects and NanoStudio for music. For art and animation I’ll be using Photoshop.

Good luck all!

Done and done. It’s been a long 48 hours. My game “The Transcendence Experiment” is available here.

Time for a Post-Mortem.

First the things that went right:

Initial design
This would have been great. Player shifts between Past/Future/Alternate Universe to overcome obstacles. Had I stuck with this I think I would have fielded a much more complete entry (and better looking too).

Time budgeting
For the most part this was pretty good. Had I stuck with my initial idea I would have likely had time to spare. I crunched as hard as I could and I’m happy with the volume of work I got done.

Core Idea
I think the core idea is pretty sound and a good take on the theme that may prove to be a bit less common.

And now for the list things that didn’t:

Theme
I was completely unprepared for the theme. I had ideas about almost everything else on the list. I wanted to avoid the ‘Do X in 10 seconds!’ game play that I felt was going to be fairly prevalent. In the end I spent too much time thinking and re-thinking what I wanted to do, instead of running with a workable, compact design.

Overcomplicated design
The original design was going to involve a much more fleshed out world and a series of interactions. In the end all of that had to be cut to be finished in time.

Spent far too much time on systems that were underutilised
Party to the point above, I spent a comparatively huge amount of time on the AI, combat, dialogue and movement systems because the original design called for them.

Art Style
Unfortunately I had to rush through the art, and it shows. My usual pixel art style is fairly time consuming and initially I shied away from it, but couldn’t get anything to look just ‘right’. Sadly most of the elements here are at odds with one another.

Missing features: no GUI, no Title/Game Over screens, No Music/SFX
These sting a bit. I had intended to add them but intentionally left them until last just in case. They didn’t make the cut despite my wanting them to.
So that’s that. It was a good, gruelling time. Good job to everyone else out there!
And now, I’ll leave you with the funkiest Scientist ever: