I attempted Ludum Dare #16 last weekend. It’s very difficult to completely write from scratch a full game. My project did not come near completion, but I had a lot of fun. Instead of having writing sprites, animation, resource management, gui, tilemaps, etc. code it would have been much quicker to have started with a library or framework that had taken care of most of that stuff.
Here is a timelapse video of me working. It is 22 hours of the 48 hour long competition. The only parts not recorded was when my computer was off and when my screen was blank from inactivity. Music is Escape Route by Corran on the Cave Story ReMix Project based on the music of Cave Story by Pixel.
Way back in July I wrote this simplified Super Mario Brothers 3 game for the Mini Ludum Dare (a 48 hour mini-competition) that month. The theme of the competition was a game based on a movie. The movie that I picked was “The Wizard,” which is a movie about some kids who hitchhike across several states playing Nintendo games — so this would have been a video game about a movie about video games.
Originally I was going to have elements from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Double Dragon (both also featured in the movie) all tied together with an arcade style game where you control Jimmy and play these mini-games against people. I figured if I made the Super Mario Brothers 3 part (which is the final showdown against Lucas) then I could easily adapt that to make the other parts.
All-in-all it was a little over ambitious, but I think I could have possibly pulled it off if I actually had two full days. That saturday I went to watch a movie with friends, so I really only had one of the two days to work with. I am, however, still very satisified with how much was accomplished in such a short amount of time.
Arrow Keys makes mario run, ‘x’ key makes him jump.
