With less than an hour to go, and still several things to implement before the game is really a game, there’s no way I can make the deadline.  Dang it!  Hopefully can find lots of time to work on it tomorrow.

I went with an idea that needed a ton of backend work to even be playable and testable.  That is one big thing with Ludum Dare – it seems like it’s really important to get the “core gameplay” done in a day.  I should have just gone with a really basic top-down or sidescroller!

Hopefully I will be able to somewhat finish “Lair”, a game where you build traps, possess monsters, and cast spells to stop heroes from infiltrating your lair.  I at least got the basic UI done, about 75% of a tutorial, and pretty cool “hero AI”.

Haven’t had time to do a Ludum Dare for like a year.  Excited to get back into it!

I’ll be working with Unity for this one.

4th Ludum Dare, though this is a terrible weekend for it to be happening… so much going on!

I’ve always used Flixel/FlashDevelop, but I’ll be trying out Unity for this LD.  Hopefully it’ll go well!  Need to get Visual Studio to replace the terrible MonoDevelop.

3rd Ludum Dare!  Have the entire weekend to myself for once, so hopefully it’ll be a good one!

I’ll be using FlashDevelop, Flixel, and maybe the Flixel Power tools for coding.  Not sure what other tools I’ll use, but probably Paint.net and stuff.

Looking forward to seeing what other people create!

Having been in a bit of a “gamedev slump” for the past 2 months, it was really great to participate in this ludum dare.  I think that I did a MUCH better job than my first entry, and it’s great to feel like you’re “getting better” at stuff like this.  This is just a quick post-mortem of my 48-hour compo game, Super Time Shoot.

The theme was much better for me this time than the last one (Minimalism).  I had a lot of fun brainstorming ideas, especially using other interpretations of the word “seconds”:

-A dueling game where you have 10 “seconds”, as in people who fight for you.  I scrapped this because it was pretty much a game with 10 lives, but it was a fun thing to think about.
-A silly game where you went back for 10 “second helpings”.  I imagined a frogger-like situation where you had to go from your table to the food a bunch of times.
-A sort of turn-based strategy game with 10 moves, each representing a second in time.

-In general, if you’re talking real-time seconds, mechanics to implement the theme would be either something happens every 10 seconds, you only have 10 seconds to complete something, or the game only lasts 10 seconds.

I wanted to make an arcade game, since it seemed relevant to my platform of choice (Flash/Web), simple to execute, and fun to play.  So… I ended up with Super Time Shoot, a mix of 2 of my favorite games, Geometry Wars and Super Crate Box.  Every 10 seconds you get a new weapon, and the goal is just to survive as long as possible.  It’s a top-down shooter that uses WASD to move and click to fire, very basic stuff.  I used FlashDevelop with the Flixel framework, Audacity/Wavepad/bfgx for sound, and I generated all in-game visuals in-game (no image file assets).  I think that Web is the best platform for Ludum Dares, since it’s super-easy to get people to play and download, and it’s very quick to put up.  Not to mention that developing with Flixel is EXTREMELY easy.

I had a lot more planned, but I didn’t get started until Saturday afternoon.  I wish I could have fit more weapons, more powerups, more enemies, more unlockable-type things, music, high scores, and better graphics, but that’s the entire challenge of the 48-hour comp!  As it ended up, I had 3 enemy behaviors, 6 weapons, and 4 or 5 level layouts.  Maybe I’ll make the game a bit fancier and try to get it up on some web portals.

Check out the game here, and see the screenshots below.  How high of a score can you get?

2nd Ludum Dare!  I’ll be using:

Flash Develop
Flixel
Paint.Net
Not sure for sounds

10 seconds seems to beg some sort of arcade-type game.  Either something happens every 10 seconds, or you only have 10 seconds for something, or… something else.  Could maybe have an ability that’s limited to 10 seconds of use?  A game that takes place over 10 seconds of “game time”?

I’m leaning towards a basic arcade game where you only have 10 seconds to survive, you can do something to increase that time, and the game gets harder every 10 seconds.  We’ll see where I go from here.