This Town (ABEFTTOU) : Ludum Dare Entry

This Town (ABEFTTOU) made for Ludum Dare 23 in 48 hours.  Runs on XNA, so the download leads to an installer.  If anyone knows how to compile standalone XNA executables please tell me kthnx.

Timelapse:

Postmortem

The Good:

1. GitHub is so beautiful! I cloned my half-finished OOP engine and worked on the engine alongside the game.  The cool thing is, the engine code remains separate from the game.  If I wanted to add, say, animated sprites to the game, I'd set it up in the engine, merge them, and have GitHub resolve the conflicts.  Ended up with not only a finished game but a patched up engine as well.
2. Small, concise idea that could actually be finished.
3. Having drafted the idea for the game before starting.

The Bad:

1.  Use something you're familiar with, dangit!  Should've used Game Maker or Flash, both way easier and faster to dev in than C#/XNA.
2. Figure out how to compile the game before submitting.  No one who didn't previously have XNA already could play the game at first because it wasn't packaged with the framework.  Stupid me.  And an addendum, people with weak graphics cards still couldn't play because I compiled it in HiDef mode unnecessarily and accidentally.  Stupid me.
3. Leave an hour or so for balancing and bugfixes.  Pretty much crippled the game.

This is kind of boring.

Spent this morning working for this housing peoples project organization called Habitats For Humanity under Tzu Chi (both pretty nice organizations that are pretty nice and you should check them out maybe).  Painted roofs.  Well not really roofs more like the bar under roofs.  It was in a sort of run-down black community and there was a bucket of fried chicken on the ground, and koolaid in the houses, and gatorade in a cooler outside, and watermelons for lunch.  Racist senses started tingling.

Cantilever Bridge : Finished

So GMC Jam #3 came around and the idea was to make a game in 72 hours with the theme "Live." Ended up making Cantilever Bridge, which is a generic-ish story-driven game based on two cities and a bridge to connect the two, around the politics and stuff of that.

Tense political action-packed diplomacy efforts right here.

Diagnosis : Second Place + Updated Version

Diagnosis took second place on the GMC Jam.  Not bad, not bad.

Would write more but I'm out of time for today.  The postcompo version is done.  Bunch of bugs fixed, look at the GMC topic for it in the first link for more information.

Edit hey Blogger reverted my post to an older version what gives.

Anyways shoutouts to zeddidragon and orange08 for their excellent games that placed 3rd and 4th, respectively.

GMC is the best.

And don't you forget it.

We fugged up the timezones so we accidentally started an hour early and chaos ensued.

lolololololololololololololololololololololololololololololololololololol

Screw thine timing.

The next Ludum Dare (bi-annual), the next GMC Jam (twice since ever), and the next Rapid Development Compo (delayed a ton of weeks) [b]all land on the same weekend.[/b] So what should I do.

Ludum Dare is 48 hours long, GMC Jam is 72 hours long, and the RDC is 4 hours long. What are the odds that I can make a game for each? Is that close to zero?

I'm thinking screw the RDC, and then make one game that fits both themes from LD and the Jam in some screwed-up way. But I mean really. Three compos in a weekend. asdfjkl;

What's sort of disappointing is that so many awesome themes for LD get nominated each time but they're all voted out for something mediocre.

WHY WHY WHY WHY

Look at all of that green ;_;

Shit Video

Challenged my friend Drew to a speedmaking of a video based on the theme "Diagnostic Youth Tunnel" (output from a random word generator); 30 minutes to make the video. I went over slightly due to render problems/music/generally being worse at movie design than Drew.

Here they are, anyhow.  Mine and Drew's.  Drew's is the one that isn't crap.