This is my first Ludum Dare, first attempt at finishing a game, first game even. Ive dabbled with Unity, Godot, Haxe, and many others in the past, but I usually never get past a few hours of dev and fiddling.

Going to attempt something small but finished for the first time.

I am just getting indecisive about which tools to use. I have Unity Pro through work, I have Godot, LOVE, Haxe, Raylib (raylib-go specifically) and all the many others setup. And I don't know which to use. For me the visual method of using Unity or Godot has never fully gelled, I always get stuck fiddling with UI nonsense, addons, assets and settings than making a game. And as a programmer, choosing a language/framework is a never ending battle of choices and comfort.

Hopefully I find something comfortable, so I can focus on making of the game and not playing bingo with tooling.

As I thought might happen, 4 hours in, I have and Idea, and I am still fighting with what I want to build it in. I have Unity, Godot, Raylib-go, Love, Pixel, Engo, and Heaps (haxe) all installed and setup, and I am still no closer to making any games. Looks like I might just do the Jam with Compo rules. There should be a Compo Jam, which is Compo rules with Jam timeline, for those newer to this, but want to follow the stricter rules. Probably going to spend the first day just picking tools and languages.

Well, after a bunch of hours agonizing last night, I finally took advice from others and started trying to build something in Heaps/Haxe. Which is pretty cool and easy to work with. But at the same time, after having fiddled with Unity/Godot before, doing all the manual spritesheet cutting, and frame control became too time consuming and tedious.

So I decided to stop and start using Godot to see what I can accomplish with it. I got a character spritesheet on itch.io and animated it, and added all the controls. Then I found a Voxel collection made in MagicaVoxel with the original files. And found you can export Isometric tile sheets with it for each voxel. After some fiddling, I got useable map tiles that look amazing. I am honestly super impressed with MagicaVoxel, both in the 3D but also the 2D output looks amazing. Added some rough collision and have what is below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH72iNXq4i8

It looks nothing how I envision it, but with some custom art, and some more tinkering, I can get it there. I think my idea had too much story/build up to make it in 48 hours, let alone 72, at least at my experience level.

It doesn't qualify for Compo since I am using 3rd party assets still, the goal was to make my own, but I was slowed down so much by figuring out how to build anything, I decided to not worry about it unless I actually made any significant progress.

At this rate, I have no illusion on actually finishing anything in 72 hours. In the sense of getting something that has a gameplay loop. But honestly I knew that would be a thing, so I didn't set hard expectations on myself. I'll treat this as my practice round for LD49.

Now I might redo this all in Unity, and see which I prefer in terms of capability and ease of creation. So far, I finally figured out Godot where it doesn't seem unintuitive to me.

I am also debating attempting to do this in 3D, but who knows.

TLDR: Not going to finish, but still learning tons, and have something to show for the weekend so far, so not a complete waste.

Anyone happen to know a way to see the entire theme List or my entire voting history?

I saw a theme that triggered a great idea for a game that I wanted to work on outside of LD, but 15 themes after it, I had lost the idea due to distractions, and I couldn't go back to see the theme that triggered it.

Seems I miscalculated some things. I am going to have LASIK eye surgery tomorrow for the start of LD. I probably might have to skip it entirely or just do it for myself on a different weekend. While I should be mostly fine by Saturday, my eyes will probably not like long sessions in front of a computer for a few days. And I'll be walking out of the LASIK center as the event starts.

Has anyone done something similar where you kind of do it for yourself on a different day?

My tentative setup:

• Engine: Unity or Ebiten
• Art: Asperite + Stable Diffusion
• Sound: BeepBox/SFXR/LMMS

Last time I had poorly timed a LASIK surgery, didn't finish.

This time, I am doing EXTRA right out of the gate. With only 1-2 hours a day to work on this and a toddler running around, there is no way I can do Compo or Jam.

I have some non-farming ideas which I am still deciding about. I am also indecisive about tools. I recently got into using Crystal, and quite enjoying the programming language, but the tools are still not quite there. There is a SFML binding, and a Raylib binding, and an ECS tool, but other than that, I don't have many options. Might just use Unity or Ebiten this time around and do Crystal stuff next time.

My tentative setup: * Engine: Unity or Ebiten or CrSFML or Raylib-cr * Art: Asperite + Stable Diffusion/AI * Sound: BeepBox/SFXR/LMMS

I have attempted a last couple few so far, and haven't really gotten far on any. But I always try. Between kids, minimal free time, etc. I will be aiming for Extra to have time to build something. It is not feasible for me to do Compo or Jam because I would at most have 3-4 hours total.

We shall see if I get any good results. I will probably be using Godot, Unity, or Heaps. Not sure atm, will be testing some more tonight.

Just a friendly reminder, as I have seen people agonize over the theme choice. You can mix and match themes that work with the chosen theme. OR per the rules, you can also choose to not follow the theme, you just cant enter certain categories. It is not ideal, but an option.

But for example. Shelter, Sanctuary, and Underground have a lot of overlap, so minimal tweaking between ideas. Keep the light on could be mixed with Signal, Folklore, or the above 3.

You can even take Shelter, Sancturary, and Underground, mix it with Keep the Light On, and throw in Strange Machines. And you've got yourself a variation of Dome Keeper, a Tower Defense, or something.

Strange Machines can mix with Tiny Creatures and Overgrown? Who said the machines couldn't be Biomechanical?

Salvage can be thrown into the above things, and include a crafting or digging aspect.

Sure some ideas aren't novel, but if you then take out a thesaurus or find other ways to play with the words, you can come up with some unique things.

Just wanted to remind those that are stuck, that it isn't black and white and you can play with things a bit more.

Well, my first night of about 2 hours is done (doing Extra). I made a bunch of sprites and setup the movement and coin pickup (mostly just getting mechanics working). Lots more to do, but I feel I got some good progress. The gif is a bit slower than the real speed of movement, mostly due to video -> gif conversion.

I've seen many posts about people giving up or not being able to make it. It is OK! Many of us won't. But here are a few suggestions to make it worthwhile.

• If you can't make it in the 48hr for Compo, just aim for Jam
• If you can't make the 72hrs for Jam, keep going and just post it for Extra, which is 3 weeks.

Why? Because one of the best things you can do for yourself is finish something. Not only will you have finished something, but it will give you experience of how long things take, where you can save time, build up shortcuts, templates, or anything else.

So that come April or next October, you can have a better plan of attack and something to look back on from previous attempts.

And many of you are learning something new, be it first time game development, a new engine, new tools, or how to work on aspects out of.your comfort zone (art, audio, etc). So it's worth seeing it to the end.

The goal is to have fun, learn, and grow.

So another 2-2.5 hours in, and I finally managed to add item pickup/drop that wasn't buggy. Mostly learned how to use signals for everything, and it all worked out after I cleaned them up a bit and how they were being triggered.

Doesn't feel like much of a difference from yesterday, but it's progress. I also added some UI, and Gold counting on pickup. Most of it is for debugging, but it still helped a lot in figuring out all the bugs in the signals and pickup logic.

So I only spent about an hour and a half today on this. A bit tired, so didn't feel like spending more time.

But! I got my chests working. You can now store items into the chests. In this case, it just increments a counter, as the item itself doesn't matter. Most of it was again hooking up signals and handling an additional case in the interact action.

But also the chests keep track of their counts, and I set timers up to create items randomly. The example is sped up for testing.

I know these updates are simple, but this is probably the furthest I've gotten to making something playable.

One long term goal is after I am done with Extra, I will try to port this to FNA, Heaps/Haxe, Unity, and a few other engines and frameworks, to see what I actually like working with, at least for 2D.

Finally, the gif of the current state.