My first Ludum Dare and the first Game Jam i do together with my wife.

We started late, around 2pm CEST (8am EDT) because we had a hard week and needed some sleep. We came up with an idea very quickly, a quite small one (around 10 mins playtime). I don’t go into the details because that would spoil too much, but basically you are at Mars Station 23, an underground recreation facility on mars.

My wife does pixel art for the first time, isn’t even an artist but did a hell of a job! See for yourself:

Tools:

• Paintshop & Pixen
• ImpactJS

After 18 hours into the race we have the mechanics ready and most of the characters.

Now we’ll get some hours of sleep and do the environments, levels and the story scripting after that.

I’m pretty confident that we’ll get everything set until 8pm CEST (2pm EDT), would be a primer in a gamejam for me

What a day. As expected we’re quite good in time with the assets and started integrating them.

As i started with the scripting stuff i realized that we have quite a problem with the different contexts in all our callbacks (we used an EventChain mechnism for ImpactJS).

After 3 hours of digging i decided to go for a straight forward classical approach. Now all entites have easy to figure state machines without any context hassles.

4 hours wasted. One should not rely on third party scripts/snippets on a game jam. Especially in JS where the different contexts can become a mess in no time.

We’re back on road now, have all the assets. What’s to be done tomorrow is more scripting, level creation and some spritesheet composition. As the last 24 hours are a working day here, there will not be much time. But we’ll get it out, maybe not with full content but playable.

We actually did it! After the last LDs were not really our lucky ones, with no entry at all, we managed it to complete our game in around 30 hours (Starting late on Saturday).

It was again an amazing experience and we look forward to play and rate your games in the next days!

It’s awesome to be part of such a nice community!

But now => Bed 😀