My first game jam was Ludum Dare, and wow what a weekend. I remember being excited, nervous and slightly doubtful that I could produce much in 48 hours. I did it though, and I'm happy with what I managed to produce.
Lately I have been enjoying building retro 2d games, but now is a great time to get into 3d. Why the change, well the latest version of iOS includes webGL in its browsers. This is not an advert for Apple, but is does mean that almost all the major browsers now support webGL. The way I see it, if I do not learn this now, I will get behind the trend.
Thirteen kilobytes is not a great amount. It's about the same size as the above the fold limit for css. JS13kGames' challenge was to build a whole game within this limit. Challenge accepted.
After building a few experiments and other simple games I came across a small issue with sprites. I would store an array of them, and inside this array store a reference to a sprite. It worked, but what I needed was a way of extending the sprite class.
A little while ago a wrote a post about Phaser, a JavaScript game framework. Since then been working on ways to improve my boilerplate. My current solution is slush, a gulp based framework generator.
The results are in and I've found out overall I came 340th out of 2497. My rating was in the top 14%, which I'm quite happy with.
I've played quite a few games over the past few weeks (102 to be precise). They were all part of Ludum Dare, a 48 hour game jam. Some of the games were great, others were unfinished and buggy. I'll attempt to point out some of the best ones.
What a weekend! Ludum Dare is always full on, but I never seem to remember it weeks down the line. My entry went quite well, but I bit off slightly more than I could chew. I build an underwater platformer called "Aqua", based on the theme "Beneath the surface".
This has been my best Ludum Dare so far. I've used Phaser to create a nice little platformer.
After a short break away I thought I would get back into the swing of things with a quick game. I was going to enter the Ludum Dare warm-up but due to other commitments I didn't make it. This game was put together in a day, and still needs some work, but it is playable, so give it a go.