I’m going to be taking a small break from coding on Friday to attend the ‘Bit of Alright‘ indie developers conference in London. I’m really looking forward to this as it’ll be a great place to meet other developers and pick up useful advice! I’ll be flying out tomorrow (Thursday) night to London then spending some time seeing friends and family. I really can’t wait as this will be the first trip back to the UK since leaving for Germany.

After that it’s back to Mechadroids! I’ll let you all know how the conference was when I get back home. Until then!

So, I have decided to enter the Ludum Dare Mini along with my esteemed friend and colleague, Mr CWolf, which is happening this weekend (21st-22nd Jan). I wasn’t sure whether I would be doing it, even though I desperately wanted to, due to time issues. While working on Deadworld Studios, I’m also doing some web development on the side and all the coding is beginning to take it’s toll. That being said, I can’t let CWolf have all the fun and I have been meaning to do one of these since University (unofficially tried my hand at a 24 hour challenge, it didn’t turn out too good).

Anyway, as CWolf has mentioned, the theme is fear and while he is going for an ambient psychological approach, I have decided to go with a more of a technical approach (as I usually do). Mostly because I don’t think I can create the level of immersion a player would need to truly feel fear, although CWolf seems to have latched onto a good idea. I can’t say too much about my game because it is a bit of a one-trick pony and once you know what to expect, it will lose it’s power.  I guess it will work on the principles of fear of the unknown.

There’s not much time for prep work and I’m still feeling a little wound tight due to our recent Mechadroids update and the web development work I’m doing, so there is a good possibility I’ll be taking the next few days off and winging the whole thing… what could go wrong!?

Oh, another thing. Myself and CWolf will be synchronising our start for the Ludum Dare Mini.  We’ll be starting at 8pm (UTC + 1), 1 hour later than CWolf stated, on Friday 20th Jan, which is actually 6am Saturday for myself. Also, there’s a small chance of a dual stream going on, depending if we can work out how to do it.

Last week I decided to enter the upcoming (and my first) Ludum Dare Mini! This is my first Ludum Dare event ever so I’m starting to get a little nervous with the lead up to it. For those of you who don’t know what a Ludum Dare event is here is an extract from their site…

“Ludum Dare is a regular accelerated game development Event. Participants develop games from scratch in a weekend, based on a theme suggested by community.”

So for the usual LD event it lasts over 48 hours and the next mini event is this coming weekend (21st – 22nd of Jan). The main difference between the LD minis and LD main event is this that the rules are a little more relaxed in regards to release of source code, timeframe and declaring tools/frameworks/reuse of code for minis. I think this will be ideal practice for the main LD event in April I intend to enter.

So… this LD mini’s theme is fear! I’ve decided to make more a psychological game based around fear – use of music and dark will be pretty important. I’m drawing pretty heavy inspiration from games in the Silent Hill series. I’ve decided to use Slick2D with my own framework built on top of it since it provides a nice graphical game support for the crucial visual experience of my idea.

Since the 48 hours is flexible I’ve decided I’m going to start mine at 7pm UTC+1 on the Friday 20th of Jan and finishing at 7pm UTC+1 on the Sunday 22nd of Jan. I will be live streaming the entire event (except when I’m sleeping) at my live stream site of http://twitch.tv/cwolfs so feel free to drop by and wish me luck! Also feel free to jump into our IRC channel at irc.globalgamers.net #deadworld to show support / ask questions. I’ll probably be more responsive there than on the live stream chat.

Why am I doing this? Practice to be a better programmer in some aspects, learn more, the experience, to be able to say I’ve done one and… why not? Wish me luck and I’ll see you on the stream (or IRC earlier!).