2011-12-18

Ludum Dare 22: Bailing Out

Hi,

lets see wether I can write a half-way not confused post.

Who are you?


I am a computer science student at the Technical University Dresden.

How come you participate?


I followed LD21 with great excitement. The idea to just create something and not try to make it perfect – to have an excuse for it, is awesome. I am super excited that some hundred people around the globe join together to code and design just for fun.

I love playing your LD games. It’s the best kind of entertainment and far more innovative and lovely than the usual games.

I love the idea to have a coding crunch and create something myself.

So a friend encouraged me to take part. And Thursday night I decided to do just that. I moved all my appointments out of the way and prepared for an hour by creating a scratch Qt project and added a mainloop and some moving boxes.

I have not created a game (or game-like thing) in about 8 years.

How has it been so far?


A blast! I quickly had a sense of what I was trying to create, and just began coding.

I wrote a lot of boiler plate code the first day. Input, game states, scrolling text, a moving spaceship, a moving background and all that shananiganry. It was really fun and went surprisingly smooth (taking math courses pays off!).

On the second day I added the things that make it a bit more like a game, like animations, pictures, levels, a start and an end.

So why stop now?


I am physically and psychologically tired :(


Right now there is nothing to do in the game but wait for the end to arrive at you (so to say).

I wanted to implement an EVE Online kind of (directional) scanning (in 2D), where you are in a solar system and have to search for the right wormhole to jump through to the next system. (repeat until you are in the earth solar system)

A star map would guide you.

I was not sure what to do while being inside the solar system and flying to the wormhole. So I left that out to come back to it later. Perhaps evading some asteroids or I don’t know.

Anyways, I am tired and the timing would be pretty close in the end. So I’ll just leave it at that, and be happy that I created something cool (although it is very unfinished) and took the chance to hone my skills for some hours.

I wish you all the best for the last 9 hours,

later!

(download)

P.S.:
Created on Linux, and probably doesn't work out of the box on windows.
Uses SFML 1.6 and Qt 4.7.