After reading through the contest rules again, I realized that my use of some prerecorded sound effects is a violation of the rules. Oops!

This was an oversight on my part, since I rarely do anything with audio, but I regret giving false impressions about the quality of my work. I’ve removed the offending sounds from my main entry and moved them to a ‘non-compo’ version, but since I’ve already received a fair number of ratings, I’m afraid this disqualifies me from the competition proper.

Apologies to anyone I may have unwittingly deceived, but I hope you enjoyed my game anyway! Next time I’ll go out and record some bird sounds myself, somehow…

This turned out to be a very fun and interesting Ludum Dare for me, and I took a very different approach from the past two that I’ve participated in. I had a few ideas for various themes, but nothing for the one that was chosen, of course! So, I spent Friday night just thinking up concepts, didn’t write any actual code until Saturday morning, took lots of breaks, and focused on tweaking details rather than adding features. I’m pretty happy with the result, though I’m not sure how others will like it:

Be Still

Yep, it’s minimal.

I drew the character and other sprites in Paint.NET, built a simple skeletal animation using Spine (which is great, but I had a hard time exporting with clean borders on my images), then put it all together with a mash of Crafty JS and some extra jQuery/CSS bits. Compared to developing in XNA (as I have in the past) this made it much easier to get something up and running and to tweak it quickly.

I think my greatest success this time was picking a VERY simple concept to start with, then spending time on the details and fussing around. Compared to my previous entries, this one has a lot more polish.

Conversely, my biggest lack was content. I could have been more ambitious, spent an extra 6 hours coding, and come out with a deeper player experience. Guess this will have to wait for a post-compo version… Practicing with my tools beforehand would also have been a good idea, but being comfortable with JavaScript and DOM manipulation in general gave me a pretty solid foundation at least.

Now it’s time to play some games, and see what great ideas the rest of you came up with!

No idea what platform or framework(s) I’ll be using, but I’ll come up with something.

In the past I’ve built in XNA, but with that rapidly becoming obsolete I’ll probably do something JavaScript based. Mmmmm, JavaScript….

Does anyone have recommendations for good 2D JavaScript game libraries? (HTML5 Canvas or otherwise)

Definitely ready for my second LD, had tons of fun in the first one. Depending on the theme I’ll either be using:

JavaScript + CSS + HTML5

-or-

XNA / Visual C#

-with graphics by-

Paint.NET + Photoshop + Inkscape (as appropriate)

-and sound by-

Never done sound before, so maybe SFXR?

Just finished up my submission, on time and even somewhat complete!  I feel like I did pretty well for my first Ludum Dare, though I was classically short on time and long on ambitions.  I had to cut a lot of features so the game’s progression doesn’t scale the way I’d envisioned, but it’s at least playable.

The game’s biggest lacks (in it’s current state) are:

1. Poor progression for bots/towers
2. No sound
3. Inconsistent fonts and sprite resolutions (I’m not an artist)
4. …and of course, a general lack of balance and polish, because I’ve barely had time to play it and tweak numbers.

Despite all that, I impressed myself with being able to turn in something reasonably complete and playable on time, that doesn’t seem to crash (fingers crossed!) and might even sometimes be… fun?

Looking forward to playing everyone else’s entries, and already thinking ahead to the next LD!

Now, I think it’s time for some R & R.

Total LD novice here.  I’ve got a lot of experience starting games and little to none finishing them.  We’ll see if I can buck that trend this time!

Depending on the theme, I’ll probably be using XNA, paint.net, and maybe even something for sound.  sfxr is good I hear?