Ludum Dare – Tangent Writes

2024-10-022024-10-29

Realms Half-Post-Mortem (from LD39)

I started writing this in September 2018, and didn’t get very far. It’s clear I will not finish it. That said, I do want a record of its existence here, so I’m publishing it now.

To describe it in one word, ambitious. An asynchronous web-based multi-user dungeon, that looks and feels like a terminal. Everyone starts in nullspace with 1 health. Kill players and take their souls to power up the other Realms to access them.

original welcome prompt — The original welcome message on Realms

As you can see, things were running perfectly well with no errors what-so-ever. Items were implemented, characters could see actions of others using a jury-rigged event system, and there was even a dummy that could be used to create souls!

Probably my biggest achievement was in flexibility I managed. That, or the fact that I put in a way to send me messages with the report command.

As with many of my game jam entries, I was overly ambitious and failed to deliver something complete. That said, I think it was at least an enjoyable experience to briefly search around in this pseudo-terminal.

2018-09-302024-10-03

My First Ludum Dare (#32)

Grand Theft Papercut

This was the 4th Ludum Dare that I wanted to participate in, and the first where I actually did. I was inspired by my recent discovery of a GameBoy GTA game, and my unconventional weapon (theme) was a deck of cards.

It was also my first time making anything tile-based, and it worked very well for my experience at the time. Even better, it was the first time I had the capability to load and save, and the game was also the map editor for the game. Very much something I’d like to do again sometime.

You can go play the prototype here.

2018-09-262024-10-03

A Years’ Late Post-Mortem (LD34)

Opcode-Powered Shuttle at the end of LD34

The Beginning

Suddenly it was time. I didn’t plan or prepare, I hadn’t coded in a little while. I decided the jam would jolt me back into coding, I also livestreamed most of my development to force me to keep working at it.

The Story

The first evening and morning worked great (Ludum Dare starts at 6pm in my timezone). A few hours on the idea, several more designing the controls (in retrospect, I spent too much time deciding on the structure of the opcodes). At some point, I hand-drew graphics, but threw them out because I could not get my scanner working.

I built the graphics for a few things, started placing them in-game, and decided I needed to rewrite everything. I quit streaming, took a laptop out to a Starbucks, and spent a few hours doing just that. It was a good break, good exercise (cycling a few miles), but wasted a lot of time.

The 2nd evening involved more streaming, things moving and generating.. Now for the game part, the 2nd morning, I didn’t stream because I was fully in crunch-time-mode over the last few hours. I focused on a communications system (which was broken, badly coded, and led to me releasing a game-crashing bug).

The Result

I decided to make something with a huge scope. All my time went into working on UI components and controls. There is no game, but a few mechanics to build a game within.

Positives? I got back into coding for a bit, I got to check out a lot of others’ games because I made sure to rate a bunch of them, and I felt more on track with my life.

It did burn me out though, so much so that it took a long time to write anything about it.. and even longer to actually publish it!

Want to play it? Click here.