I decided to write a little postmortem about my first Ludum Dare while it still was fresh in the memory.
It how ever got bit longish so I posted it to my own forum and decided to link to it here (so I don’t whore up all the front-page).

So if you’re interested you can check it out in here.

There’s some screen-shots from the progress included =)

I finally got around fixing some major bugs that were discovered when I was about ready to submit the game (most of which were Windows related…).

While the game is nothing to write home about I reached my goal and finished a “game” in time from scratch (with almost 8 hours remaining on the clock) so I’m rather happy.
Had great time and will definitely enter again, most likely with more ambitious game designs =).

Cant wait to try out all the great looking games!

Oh and the game can be fetched from: here
(windows and Linux version available)

To my great surprise I’ve gotten ahead of schedule as on my checklist of necessary features to make the game playable only remains one little thing.
I also got around improving the graphics (still very much WIP tho) which made quite an impact.

On the other side of things I’m running critically low on carbonated water and cigarettes which both are mandatory to get any coding done… Off to the shop I head and after that its time to add some new features to the game to make it more interesting.

(I’m starting to get little worried that the puzzle approach I took, doesn’t fit the theme so well after all as “escape” brings to mind hurry and haste and my game is rather relaxed even tho the main character is “escaping”)

And an updated screenie:

Screenshot 2

Woke up at around 06:00 brainstormed for around one hour and got the game plan written down. Being my first Ludum Dare ever, I decided to go with extremely simple game concept as my only goal is to actually create something playable.

Escape as theme gave kazillions of ideas, but most of them were just simply out of reach in such a short time span. In the end I decided to go with simple puzzler as it seemed like concept I can actually finish and could be enjoyable.

On actual progress I’ve coded some of the basic logic and the “engine” can load maps from external files. In hindsight I probably should’ve slept few hours more as the first hours of coding was just pain and I made more typos than actual code =).

Here’s a screenie what I actually have on the screen so far… nothing much, but the underlying code is flexible enough so adding new kinds of objects is quick and painless:

screenie1

I’ll be giving a go entering Ludum Dare 48h #21, which will be my first entry ever. (crossing fingers that I’ll actually get something playable done in such a short time)

The tools I’ll be using are: C++ (Eclipse being the IDE of choice) + SDL/OpenGL with my (very) WIP Framework, hopefully it’ll turn out to be usable even tho it is in very very early stage. I’ll have my trustworthy BlitzMax as back-up in case things get too hectic.

And for “art” I’ll be using: GIMP, TuxGuitar and SFXR