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!).

I’ve finally moved to Germany and managed to unpacked all my things (in record time too!). Today is the first day I’ve had a chance to really think about DWS and gamedev for a while. Jargon and I had a meeting last week to figure out what’s left to get done for the next update of Mechadroids so I’ll be doing my side of that today. This week I want to brush the cobwebs off the systems and see what needs to be done to get us running at fullspeed. Short but sweet post for today – we’ll be keeping you updated.

It has been a long time since my last dev blog update so I figured I’d fill you in on some details.

As of the end of October I have finished working for my previous job as a software consultant and I’m now in the transition stage of working fulltime on Deadworld Studios. I’m moving from the UK to Germany to be with my girlfriend. Once that has happened I will be fulltime on setting DWS to be what Jargon and I dream it can be.

Progress slowed down over the months of August, September and October due to unrealistic working hours from my previous job. Needless to say now that is behind me I can start crunching through our TODO: list!

Expect a lot more frequent updates to Mechadroids from us as we ramp into full gear! From here things can only get better!