It wasn’t that long ago (late April, in fact) that I participated in my first Ludum Dare. I really enjoyed that experience, and am really looking forward to Ludum Dare 24 this weekend. I’ll be hanging out this weekend at our Cleveland Game Developers LD48 site, generously hosted at the Shaker Launch House space.
I plan to work solo, and entering my game into the compo, again, but one of these times I’d really like to get into a team and work on something as a group. For the weekend, I’ll be blogging on my page on the LD site, so be sure to check there and see how I’m doing.
I’m trying to think about my goals for the last LD48, and how I’ve grown since then and what my new goals should be.
LD 23 goals:
- Finish a solo project in 48 hours. Achievement unlocked!
LD 24 goals:
- Blog my progress as I go, self-documenting the development process. Last time I blogged a little bit, this time I want to take that further.
- Post playable builds as I go, not just at the very end. Last time I saw other people doing this, and I felt envious as they got feedback from people playing sneak-preview releases of their projects. I was super impressed that they managed to release something playable so quickly, but I have some ideas about how to accomplish that.
- Produce builds for Windows, OSX, and HTML5 to reach a wider audience. Last time, I was still using Game Maker 8.1 Professional for my project, which limited me to Windows. This time I’ll be using GM:Studio. This will be my first project targeting multiple platforms, so kindof a new thing.
- Use fellow CleGameDevs people for feedback and encouragement. We used IRC for this, and had our first night at a common space, which was good. I just want to do this more.
- Play and rate more entries. Last time I did play a lot of games during the rating period, and played even more after the rankings were posted.
Incorporating music into my game will probably remain a future goal, for now. I’ve experimented a little with FamiTracker, and may attempt to produce a little music for my game, but I still think becoming a chiptune artist is a far-away goal. I think music is a really important element of videogame design, but it’s probably better to have no music at all, rather than bad music. There are certain game themes which lend themselves to silence, so I can possibly use that, or I can make a game that has an overwhelming amount of sound effects in it, like my last LD48 entry. Or maybe I’ll get lucky and one of our musically talented CleGameDevs people will throw me some resources, and I’ll make it a Jam entry instead of a Compo entry.
Tonight and tomorrow I plan to go over my preparation checklist and make sure I am ready. Gotta make sure all my software is up to date and working properly.