Ludum Dare – Premortem

I bombed. I made a last-minute decision to enter LD23, and got in a good six hours on the first day, but the second left no time at all. You can see where I was headed over at my page on the Ludum Dare site. However, the experience was a useful one, and I thought I’d write a few words on here both to explain what this site is for, and how a failed game development competition entry shed some light on it.

In my day job I work as a PhD student at Imperial College, designing videogame-designing AI. There’s a link in the sidebar to that project, which this year has been devouring an unusually large fraction of my time. The intention this year was, though, to start developing games in my spare time. The Scratchpad link at the top includes a few two-hour game designs which I had a lot of fun making, but the real focus has been on a side project or two tucked away in corners, that I badger friend and game expert Mike Prescott with on a daily basis.

Mike’s exceptionally perceptive about game designs, and a conversation with him about an idea you have tends to be incredibly healthy for whatever you’re trying to do. One thing that even Mike can’t fix, however, is my inability to get things done, and Ludum Dare showed me just how much can be done in a short period of time. The theme – Tiny World - matched perfectly a game prototype I’d tried to make earlier in the year, so I decided to take it, twist it, and do it in a weekend.

In four hours I’d surpassed, in pure gameplay terms, what many days of evening hacks hadn’t managed to cover, simply because if something was taking too long it got cut. No art, no UI, if there was user input that was hard to code (like clicking an image on-screen) it got replaced (with, in this example, number labels that the player could press to select things instead). Fast, loose, and productive. Lessons that most game developers learn, lessons that I’ve been told many times before, but lessons that – like many things to do with programming – you never really learn until you’ve taught them to yourself.

This blog probably won’t see much activity for a few more months now, but I did promise myself to produce a game this year. While my Scratchpad games are undoubtedly works of art, I’m hoping that something more substantial will find its way up here eventually. If I can get into the LD mindset again, perhaps that’ll be sooner rather than later.

Welcome

Thanks for visiting Cut Garnet Games! I’m just getting set up here for 2012. Check back later in the year for more on what I’ve been doing!

In the meantime, you can visit Games By ANGELINA for the latest on what I do during the day – write software that automatically designs games!