Hello, and happy new year! Got busy and didn’t get to updating on things such as Ludumdare. First I guess I will talk about what happened on my first attempt at doing a game for Ludumdare.

First off I just want to say that I didn’t manage to finish a game for Ludumdare :(. However I learned A LOT which is a huge positive. When the theme was announced I honestly could not think of an idea for a game. I had a few but I didn’t like them so I continued to brainstorm for awhile. After hours of brainstorming I finally came up with an idea: stranded alone on an island and trying to find parts to your boat to then leave. I was going to have the player have to go through a few dungeons found on the island in order to find items to progress through each dungeon as well as items to repair your boat! I was thinking about the old NES classic Star Tropics for this game as sort of inspiration. So after coming up with the idea I quickly went to work on some art for the character, and setting up a game loop as well as animation code running. All of that actually didn’t take too long, and then I went to bed.

I ended up sleeping in unfortunatly as well as having to do some things around the house the next day. When I got to work I made my biggest mistake, which was not pre-planning how to work in all the systems. I ended up spending A LOT of time, too much time, playing with how to design my levels etc. I ended up turning a image editing program into my level editor, using the first 2 bytes as the (x, y) co-ordinate for the corresponding tile in a tileset, and the next byte for starting location and other data. This didn’t end up working very well and made editing the level a huge pain as all the colors from 0x000000 – 0x0000FF) are all just shades of blue and if I made a mistake on a pixel it would wouldn’t obviously wouldn’t work right. I managed to save time by randomly generating a lot of the tiles on the map(grass, beach/water), however the ammount of time it took to edit the levels is what I believe lead to my demise. It also didn’t help that the main island level was HUGE. But again, that led to the next problem, I started making my level and after spending a ridiculous time on it I realized, oh crap I forgot to set aside a byte for solid(collidable) tiles .. having to redo the entire map and changing one byte in the data for tiles I wished to be collidable would have been annoying(now that I think about it I could have just made a program to do that >_<). I ended up doing a quick fix by creating another image file that was basically just contained the solid areas. I didn't like this solution at all and it caused me to back out of the competition as I was just under a day left and had none of the gameplay systems done and still had to do more levels//art for enemies etc. So what did I learn? When making a game in 48 hours, should first plan out the systems before creating the content. Also sticking to smaller levels/simpler to design in scope. I also learned tho that I can do A LOT in the limited time-frame, because to be honest if I had another day or two I could have probably completed the game. Also I did get slightly better at doing pixel art(yay!). Another thing I learned is I need a better brain storming methods for ideas .. I really couldn't come up with a fun idea for a short game based on this theme. I have so much respect for those who completed their games. I ended up watching Notch's(creator of minecraft) stream, and got completely inspired by him. I probably learned a lot more just ironically I can't think of the specific things at the moment LOL. To look at what I did manage to accomplish you can check it out by clicking here(requires Java).

Ludumdare also inspired me to go back to my Map Editor project and finally fix the way files are saved//loaded, and the actual library//format of the Tile system. I am almost done that and I believe I made the file format more effecient, I just gotta add in a few more things and get the editor to work with it. Then I should be able to write a few quick libraries in C++/java for loading Map data on those platforms. The new format will also make adding tools such as changing tile to be solid//collidable//spawn point etc. to the editor and to the Map much easier, making it much more flexible tool.

Another update is I am currently helping a local business setup a website for advertising thier location etc! Yay finally some work! Although it really shouldn’t take more then a week. Hopefully the new year brings me a job as I really need some income right now >