Hey folks. Sorry for not posting more during the competition. I guess I was too busy making a game! But the good news is, that game is finished and you can play it right now!
Stampede at Crooked Thorax Ranch
I also wrote a mini-postmortem about the production process.
I ended up combining two of my ideas. One for the tower defense game with enemies that grow as they approach and the other for cowboys that ride on bugs.
Enjoy!
The theme for LD23 is Tiny World. After handling an unrelated work call I got cracking on ideas. I think a lot of these are pretty good!
So this year I’m doing my first Ludum Dare game competition. I’m very excited and have been trying to get my system ready to go before the theme is announced at 18:00 Pacific time. I’m running down my pre-flight checklist now.
My loadout:
Note the inspirational collages and ferret poster
(note: I’d love to put a link to every single one of these but that’ll take a long time and you can google them yourself.)
Software:
Libraries (probably won’t use all of these but they’re in there just in case):
You can follow me here or on Twitter @mimshwright
This may be a little off topic but since I love video games and logic, I thought I’d take a moment to share some thoughts I was having.
I just read this post from Kotaku talking about the new proprietary memory card that will be used for the PSVita, Sony’s upcoming gaming handheld. The tl;dr version: Sony’s making a new type of memory card. They will only work with one gadget. They will be expensive.
This is not the first time that a gaming company, especially Sony, has asked us to pony up for a proprietary storage medium. Sony has virtually cornered the proprietary format market: MiniDisc, MemoryStick, BetaMax, even those little cassettes that go in your answering machine. All of this, I must assume, was in the hopes of making one that lasts and becomes a standard. Well, they kinda did with BluRay even though it’s appearing at the twilight of physical media. But I digress. Microsoft’s also in the game with their custom XBox360 hard drives costing about twice the going rate. In fact, every non-standard CD-ROM or cartridge is also a proprietary format when you get down to it.
Anyway, this post isn’t really about storage being proprietary. It’s about storage being expensive. The companies create this proprietary media then sell it to us. We’ll have no choice but to buy it so they can charge whatever they want. That makes sense I guess. So to sum up their thinking…
There’s one glaring flaw here. If I may be so bold as to illustrate my consumer-centric logic…
To look at the same argument conversely…
To try to turn this from pure gripe into something useful, I will just say this. Don’t make me your willing customers have to work hard to spend money on you. Always be aware of decisions that benefit your company by punishing your customers.
This is not just a video game rant. The online world is also fraught with similar follies. One phenomenon is discussed in this great post about the Mobile App Splash Screen Anti-Pattern by Martin Sutherland. Another example is any site that makes me create an account before I do even a simple task. Virtually every restaurant website ever made has made me endure a Greek techno slideshow and download a PDF menu just to find their hours and address.
Don’t let this happen to you, or to your clients! Always Be Closing! And let me buy more video games, dammit!
This is just a quick little flow-chart. A project I’m working on includes a ‘Simon-says’ type game. I thought I’d share my notes on how the game logic will work.
Update: Here’s my quick prototype (before skinning)