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Ludum Dare 23 - The First Twelve Hours

tl;dr - screenshot at end, code at github.com/citizenparker/the-two-of-us

More like my first four hours, as I really enjoy sleep. =)

As you may know, I’ve been participating in this weekend’s Ludum Dare competition. I say competition, but I should really say “quote” “competition” (quote quote quote) as I am really only competing against my inability to make games and personal inertia. It’s largely inspire by the “Punk’s Not Dead” entries at Rock Paper Shotgun.

In other words, this:

sparker: I don’t anticipate getting anywhere or building anything great. At most I plan on being able to look back on my work, sigh, and say “Well, that happened.”

sean Lofty goal. You can also treat it more as a kickstart to your game

sparker: Bah

sparker: I can 100% guarantee completely abandoning whatever I build, almost on principle

sparker: Also, I pledge to provide no more than 60-90 seconds of content that a jury of peers would consider “fun”

So, a recap on the few twelve hours then, yeah?

This year’s theme is “Tiny World.” I struggled a bit coming up with a theme I liked. For creativity, I always follow the rule “Write down 5 things immediately and then throw them away.” This turned out to be a struggle and I lost the first 90 minutes to this. However, I’ve landed on something I like, a silly platformer where you set out to destroy the world with increasingly destructive weapons because “this world is too small for the two of us. Sorry, everyone else, but you have to go.”

I’m violating the first rule of Game Jams by learning my tools on the fly, but so far it’s going well-ish. Gosu has been refreshingly easy to pick up and run with. I have some viewport and scaling issues I need to resolve today, but I have bullish confidence. Chipmunk has been a bit more challenging only because documentation on the Ruby bindings is largely lacking, incomplete, or out-of-date. Brian Marick’s quote “An example would be handy right about now” keeps running through my head.

I think my goal post-LD may be writing a tutorial on building a platformer in Ruby with Chipmunk. I’ll have to land on a coding style and structure for this that I’m pleased with. Currently that’s not the case.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Goals for the next four hours are as follows:

• Movement
• Shooting a basic gun
• Killing and being killed

Code at github.com/citizenparker/the-two-of-us, and screenshot below!