As a little experiment, now that we’ve all spent a few weeks judging other people’s entries, here’s a question for you: how would you rate your own game?

Try to forget everything you know about your game and pretend you’re seeing it for the first time, then judge it like you would any of the other entries. If you’ve done any post-compo work, make sure you’re playing the original. Be honest. Apply the same criteria you usually apply when judging other peoples work. What do you think of it when you look through the eyes of a player instead of the creator?

If you’re comfortable to, post the ratings you gave yourself here. It could be fun to look back on when the results come out: you’ll be able to see how much of a gap (if any!) there is between what you and your audience thought of the game.

I’ll rate my game in a comment below.

By the way, I can’t take credit for this idea: Jeremy Nikolai suggested it after LD 24. I just thought it was a cool idea & wanted to bring it back this time around.

I’m in, for my 4th attempt! I’ll be doing the competition, trying to make a WebGL game in 48 hours.

I’ve got my own basecode library. I’m working on a renderer to go with it and probably will be right up to the deadline. If I can’t get that going in time, I’ll resort to Three.js.

Tool-wise, it’ll be the following:

• Graphics: Nuke, Paint.NET and my digital camera.
• Music: GarageBand on the iPad.
• Sound effects: Audacity.
• Project management: pen and paper (sometimes the old tricks are still the best).

And right now I’m really hoping the theme turns out to be “10 seconds”…

I’m in!

I missed LD 25, with the best theme ever, because I was on a 22 hour flight that weekend. I swore to myself then: never again. Never again shall I miss a Ludum Dare!*

This time around I’m planning to try something in 3D. I’ll be using three.js for graphics, Physijs for physics and my own state machine framework for the game logic. If that doesn’t work out, then I’ll be falling back to hand-coding a 2D game in HTML 5.

As far as tools go, it’ll be some combination of these:

• Coding: Vim, Git, Chrome’s Developer Tools, Gnu Make and Dropbox for hosting.
• 2D graphics: Pixelmator, Sketchbook Pro, Nuke.
• 3D graphics: Nuke’s ModelBuilder and possibly Modo (if I can get a license sorted out in time) or Blender.
• Music: GarageBand
• Sound effects: Audacity, the mic in my webcam and whatever things I can find around the house that make the right noises (a pro setup this aint).
• Planning/project management: pen & paper.

And coffee. Lots and lots of coffee. Can’t wait!

* Unless there’s like, you know, a reason or something.

Hey everyone,

I’ve written up a post-mortem for my 48 hr competition entry, Invaders: Evolution. If you haven’t played the game already, you should: it’s fun. Also, it’s in HTML5 so all you have to do to get playing is click that link…

The first offensive against Earth could have gone better.

There’s a post-compo version now too, with a few bugfixes already in & more on the way. For, you know, the fans (hi mum!). Hope y’all like it.