To whoever did it, please don’t do it again. It caused me quite a bit of hassle.

A multiplayer game.

Create your own units! A skeleton head with fangs, or a topless body with no arms!

It’s called Castle Combiners, it uses PlayerIO, it draws heavily from one of my favourite childhood game Impossible Creatures, it’s an RTS, and pixelly and silly.

So far you can log in, chat, change your nickname, and create units and save an army.

What I just said is kind of obvious, but it blows my mind. So many game devs round the world are being connected by what they (hopefully) enjoy doing, and the sense of community is huge. The results are really impressive as well.

I’m really gutted I couldn’t enter. I haven’t been on my computer all weekend, so I wouldn’t have been able to do anything. Damn working on a Sunday.

It does really upset me that I haven’t really done anything for the last three LDs. LD22 I was ill, LD23 (where I managed to get out of work) I really didn’t get a good idea, and this one I was working.

I would post a pretty picture or something, but there’s not really much visible to show.

IT’S ALSO MY BIRTHDAY TOMORROW. Just sayin’.

So, I didn’t finish my game this Ludum Dare. I did, however, get a nice prototype, which I will hopefully be adding to. I’m calling it Revolves for now.

Timelapse:

You can download it here.

It’s all pretty self explanatory, and there’s not really much of it.

On, and you can expect quite a few Ludum Dare update posts over the next two days.

I often find myself charging in to add a feature without really thinking through how I’m going to implement it. Then, it turns out that it doesn’t quite works, but works some of the time. I think “That works well enough, I’ll come back to it later” and leaving it half done. So right now, I basically have a whole load of half finished features, and I have no idea what needs doing.

Also, I’m far too concerned with optimization and proper coding practises. I worry about whether I should use getters and setters, whether I should rewrite that as a function or have that as a static variable, etc. I need to stop doing that too.

Oh. And I don’t comment my bloody code. That probably doesn’t help.

I’m at the stage in development where I’m finishing up the engine so I can add all the content to the game. However, as is the curse of development, my code is turning into a spaghetti-ified mess, and it’s going to take me a while to get everything done. Of course, what I really want to do is start over and make everything better, but that’ll just be a waste of time because it will end up just the same way.

So, I think I may take a break from DIG. In fact, you could say I’ve already started on the break. I’ve done hardly anything over the last two weeks.
Of course, I will return to DIG, but I’m going to go quiet for a while. I might try and do a quick game in a month or something, who knows. But I’m not leaving DIG. Promise.

Woo! Week 6/7/8 video!