William Edwards, Coder

Ludum Dare 24 contest approaches

Yippee, its time again!  We are planning a Jam contest entry.  As you can see, our artist has been sharpening his pencils and doing team building pictures.  I think the ears and sandals chap is me.

Previously we’ve tried to show that platform games don’t need to be made from blocks and tiles, and that text adventures can be pretty.  Neither wowed the audiences sadly.  I really rather liked the text adventure particularly, but then maybe I’m a bit stuck in the 90s with my gaming preferences.  Without Internet access games were supposed to be deep and thoughtful or pushing the boundaries (like Harpoon and flight sims; making you think your computer could do what the big computers did in the Cold War).

But nobody really plays sims any more.  Not even SimCity.  Ludum Dare is full of platform games and 3D shooters dominate the real marketplace.

We keep coming back towards RTS.  We have a history of doing Glest mods - and Tiberian Sun mods and modding tools if you go back far enough - so its natural that we think RTS is cool.  But it’d be hard to make an RTS that is popular, I think.  Its a niche.

This time I think we’re definitely going Javascript webGL.  Its maturing enough to be a good enough platform.  It means no heavy computation, but that’s fine.  It has a few secrets; websockets, for example.  The Web Audio API isn’t really there but works well enough in Chrome to be usable in LD.

Just a few days to go.  If you want to join our team, do let me know!

Previously: LD23, miniLD31