Surprise! Warmup Weekend!
Teacher just walked in, said good morning, and started handing out a pop quiz. You panic. You start regretting that you stayed up late playing games. The exam is next week, and admittedly, you’re not ready for either.
Warming-up for Ludum Dare is nothing new, but here’s us encouraging you to do it.
Between now and Ludum Dare 22’s start time, you should really make sure that your tools work. Make some art, import it, and draw it on screen. Make some sounds, import them, and play them on cue. If you’re using a new development tool, learn it.
Mr McFunkyPants proved it. Look at his top-3 “what went wrong”. If you’ll indulge me, you could attribute all 3 to poor preparation. Or to keep up the schooling angle “You didn’t study!”.
Bullet point summary:
- No rules or limits. This is practice.
- Learn your development tools! Write some code, run it.
- Make some art, get it on screen, make it move.
- Print some text to the screen. Print some text to a log (if applicable).
- Make some sound, get it in game, make it play.
- If you’re motivated enough, make your experiments in to a game!
- Make something that should take “hours”, not 2 days.
- Then package it up, put it online.
- No time or day limit. But if you have no other plans this weekend, why not?
- If you’d like to work with a theme, try this tool
If you like what you’ve done, feel free to share it.
Don’t worry, the quiz wont affect your grade. But be warned, the exam is all-or-nothing.
Great! I really needed this
Awesome, my plans were to polish off a game I’m finishing, and to practise for LD48 anyway – so I shall upload whatever it is I create this weekend!
Aaaand I was just thinking of a prototype idea I might already have source code example for. Neato.
I know I’m not ready which is why I timed my vacation to start one week before the LD so that I have a full week to do nothing but getting ready. muahaha!
I’m going to try to use this to force myself to work on a project. I don’t think I could settle on something that would only take hours though… But hopefully I can settle on a project that can get mostly done before LD.
Warmup = good idea. Especially for a first timer such as myself. Also gives me an excuse to stay a reasonable distance away from uni work, which is making me a dull boy.
Nice idea, will see what we can get done this weekend.
awesome. Motivation to get the “what will I use” question out of the way early.
But my dog ate my homework!!! LOL
What is the theme?
Whatever I think.
Very good idea, I’ll see how quickly I can throw together a quick prototype
When it’s done, it’ll be here: http://sandbox.lakehomegames.com
My challenge is to finishes several parts of my current project and begin the tests of the beta version. So I can participate in LD with a clear conscience.
Alright, let’s do this! I’ll probably just do some random stuff to get a little more experience with FlashPunk.
Perfect, we are just having a Super GameDev Weekend at our hackerspace
https://metalab.at/wiki/Super_Gamedev_Weekend
Ha I *nearly* did this last night! But I stayed up late playing games instead. bah
Time to prepare for the competition by pretending it’s already here!
Keeps giving me “quantum physics.” How do you make that into a game? I can only hope the actual theme won’t be that.
The idea is brilliant.
The ‘playing games’ video made my day.
And my theme is: … Cale.
Cake! I don’t even know what Cale is..
This is an awesome idea! Definitely gonna try make something.
My theme is ‘Trust’.
Thanks for this, I was just making notes on how to prepare for next weekend and then this pops up.
Of course now I’m stuck on how to make a game out of this. I’m going to wrap some content and levels around this tomorrow but for now here’s the prototype for you to play with:
http://bmcgames.com/death/
In case anyone has the opposite problem from me here’s the flash code, go nuts:
http://bmcgames.com/death/death_src.rar
I can’t seem to comment on my submitted entry.
How will I give patch notes for my awful “game” now haha.
Really glad we’re doing this warm-up weekend. I’ve spent about 6 hours trying to get the SpriteManager (community resource) working in Unity3D, and have failed miserably :p The 2D support in Unity is miserable (and that’s being kind). I’ll probably write my own routines for sprites between now and LD22.
So, I haven’t even *started* yet… Well, not on an actual warmup game, that is. Apart from uploading videos and making noise, I’ve just been doing what I’m planning on continuing this week; cleaning up and getting my “tech” ready for the actual event.
Looking ok now, though; might still come up with something for the warmup after all, but that’d have to be REALLY small…
I must have submitted after the deadline but here is a link to my warm up game about a kitten and butterflies:
http://www.monkeydev.com/unity/kitty/
Still too tired after the long crunch, too much Kobo II related stuff going on etc – so unsurprisingly, no warmup entry. I’ve spent the weekend refactoring, cleaning up and bughunting instead.
Will keep working on that, and release a public package of my tools + executive ASAP. Any deadline on that, BTW?
Man I like my warmup game much more than the game I was thinking about making for the compo proper. Gives me a good idea for the competish!
Submitted mine. I’m very proud of it, although it pales in comparison to some to some of current entries.
I predict that everyone who participated in the WARMUP will do far better than average on this weekend’s main Ludum Dare compo. Well done, people!