I will be participating in Ludem Dare 42 this weekend, August 10-12 2018 along with my brothers Michael and David. A few years ago, the three of us formed Team Rocket Propelled Chainsaw, a brotherly club who make video games. TeamRPC is re-united for the answer to life, the universe, and everything edition (42) of Ludem Dare!
Alright then, I just gotta remember how to update teamrpc.info so I have a website to post the game to when it is ready. I have no doubt that I will also be spinning up a few virtual private servers to aid the gameplay, if I am indeed going with my original idea of polishing up my earlier game, Agents of Dectile. We may end up doing something completely different, though. **EDIT: We did something completely different.**
Assets
Here are some gratis assets that I’ll be keeping up my sleeve.
BBC Sound Effects
Open Game Art
Freesound
Inspiration
https://www.deviantart.com/jesse-anime/art/Dat-vampire-sora-190529449
Tech reference
https://grid.malven.co/
https://grimtech.neocities.org/
https://www.plivo.com/phlo/?utm_source=Existing-MC&utm_medium=Newsletter&campaign_source=PHLO
https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/
The LD42 Experience
I took half a day off of work so I could get started right at 3PM. That’s right, 3PM PDT, instead of the usual 6PM. Ludem Dare was trying something new this year and I liked the idea of beginning a little earlier in the day.
I knew I wanted to build a Vue app, so I got started with the vue cli.
vue init webpack ld42
I went back and forth between the Vue documentation and my editor Atom, figuring out how Vue router works to map paths such as /game to the Vue Game component I created. David got home from work and showed me his notes. The night before, he had gone through all the theme finalists and come up with several ideas for each one! Talk about dedication. We began brainstorming on the theme which had been selected, “Running out of space.” We ended up settling on the theme of a futuristic space station which was struggling to cope with changes in it’s stock of resources.
It took a solid 24 hours before the game “engine” was in a place I wanted it. Then, the actual implementation of player missions could be implemented. From our earlier conversations, we determined a rough outline of the missions. David is really gifted in storyboarding, and came up with some fantastic flow charts that I could use to implement the missions to the engine. These were invaluable to me as a developer because they already contained the decision trees that the player would have to deal with.
And here’s our game!
