Gearing up for Ludum Dare 28

I’m getting myself ready for LD48-28, deciding my general approach to take to this project. I like to do this ahead of time so I can get certain design considerations of the way, impose creative constraints, and focus on a particular goal within the scope of my project, independent of the theme.

Tools

IDE

GameMaker Studio

As usual, I’ll be making use of GameMaker Studio for my development, and probably only targeting Windows .exe build for the initial release, with a possible HTML5 build eventually if feasible.

I don’t have any particular aim this time around to use any specific features of GameMaker, we’ll leave that up to the theme and game concept to drive those decisions this time.

Graphics

Paint.NET, and Pickle

I’ve given the new Pickle 2.0 a try and while it’s no longer free/donationware, I do think that I at least like it for its onion skin feature that enables easier animations. I can see a lot of potential improvement for Pickle, and to that end I’ve written up a number of feature requests and enhancements and sent them along to the developer. I’ll be really excited if any of them get picked up and implemented.

I am going to use my pixel art minimalism technique, and also I intend to use a tightly constrained color palette. Not sure yet how few colors I want, but maybe a 4-color monochrome palette a la classic GameBoy would be fun. In any case, I’ll be making an effort to use only the smallest number of colors necessary, and paying close attention to how color works in the graphics I develop. I am going to see if Paletton can help me make better palette selections, and if I can apply what I learned from this coloring tutorial that I recently came across thanks to Joe Peacock’s recommendation.

Audio

Bfxr

Bfxr, of course, for sound effects. Maybe also some recorded audio samples for stuff that I can’t do well in bfxr.

Famitracker (maybe)

It’s probably still ambitious for me to try to pick up and learn Famitracker in a weekend and use it to good effect. I’ve been putting off learning it, though, and I want to have some kind of bgm in my game. Whether I end up using it or not in my LD project, I’ll be making an effort over the next few months to figure it out and put together some compositions with it.

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