Category: Game Development

After getting an SDL window to open and close when I tell it to, I decided to take a break for lunch:

There it is. My popular famous and award-winning peanut butter and pickle sandwich. I put cinnamon on it, as well. My lovely girlfriend sent me cookies for this competition, so I had one of those. And I washed the whole thing down with apple juice.

Now to get some progress on the game development before I leave for a Chicago Fire game tonight. There are 32 hours left in the competition.

I’m LD, and I win the fight!

After I showered, shaved, and got dressed, it was time to get down to business. Before any new code gets written, I had to make sure my ideas had a chance of being fun. First stop, paper prototypes!

Here’s a close up of the first pass:

I drew some walls, and I placed a few tokens down to represent minerals, the tank, and the driver. Actually, my initial pass didn’t even have walls really, but moving the tank with the driver, then moving the driver to the minerals to collect them, and then moving the minerals to the tank wasn’t very interesting by itself.

The walls made it more interesting because now the tank can’t move past them.

After a bit, I had a more fleshed out design:

Now I have a concept of monsters, their lairs, movable boulders, and selectively destructible floors.

Hmm…now that I’ve written it out, it sounds like I’m making something that might be too ambitious for this weekend.

Oh, well. Onward!

I woke up hours later than I wanted to, but that’s what you get when you spend the first night of Ludum Dare watching videos of games and playing other ones for inspiration . B-\

I had a simple breakfast:

Knowing that I want to participate in the Ludum Dare 2010 Swimsuit Calendar, I’ve been trying to lose weight. While I haven’t been pursuing my push ups routine in some time, I can still eat right. Go Lean with almond milk, 2 bananas, and a glass of good ol’ reliable orange juice start my morning right.

I came up with a few ideas for this theme:

• Spelunker clone
• Dig Dug clone
• Explore randomized caves
• Dig out your own cavernous bunker
• Use regular flooding in the cave in some way
• Alien cave explorer
• Gold/Tin/Mineral miner
• Hide from killers who are chasing you
• Cube farm caverns

I vaguely remembering a cave level from the NES game Thunderbirds, but I don’t want to fire it up and play through it to completion to find out if I am remembering it correctly. Maybe what I think I remember about it is better anyway. B-)

I have spent some time thinking about these ideas, and what got me most excited was one involving the driver of a tank in a cavern. Think of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the NES, when you could drive around in the van, and imagine that you’re underground, searching for important items. The tank will protect you and can destroy things, but you need to get out of the tank every so often, leaving you vulnerable yet more maneuverable.

I’ll be prototyping some of these ideas on paper to see what is the most interesting.

Caverns, eh? I believe I actually voted for that one. I’m wondering if we’ll have at least one Spelunker clone in the running. It would probably be up for a Towlr award as well. B-)

I plan on starting my night by coming up with some ideas and prototyping the heck out of them. Good luck to everyone!