Ludum Dare 2008

The theme of this year's Ludum Dare competition was "Roads". So how did I do?

The game

Here is a video from my game

and the game itself Chopper vs Trucks 3 MB

The Backend

In the beginning I wanted to use Lua to define the game logic, but I found out, that it's not easy to integrate OPP with Lua, so I wrote the whole logic in C++. But I definitely want to investigate Lua integration with C++ further to use it in my following projects.

What really paid of was my one-click deployment system. I was running a webserver on my development PC and every time I wanted to test something I made a release:

7zip a -r -x!.\* /$(RELEASE_DIR)/angiine.release/angiine$(DATE).7z $(ANGIINE_DIR)
cp /$(RELEASE_DIR)/angiine.release/angiine$(DATE).7z /$(RELEASE_DIR)/angiine.release/angiine_current.7z

And on the target computer I had a batch file looking like this

wget http://server/angiine_current.7z
7z x angiine.current.7z
cd angiine/bin/
./angiine

The whole cycle "recompile, package, download, unpack and start" took about ten to fifteen seconds. I was able to test the game on two different computers almost seamlessly and I can't recommend this hard enough.

For real masochist you can check you all the versions of the game I managed to produce during the 48 hours - angiine.releases.7z 4 MB

The Progress

During the compo, I spent quite some time on loading 3D models to my C++ program. I should have prepared my base library and not waste my time with this during the competition time.

Here are some progress screenshots of the game:

For more information, you can look at my almost award winning journal :) here

Statistics

For anyone interested, here is my timelapse

This is an overview of which programs I used the most during the competition:

Results

Overall	32/59
Fun	39/59
Innovation	28/59
Theme	42/59
Polish	40/59
Graphics	20/59
Audio	42/59
Humor	28/59
Technical	12/59
Food	28/59
Journal	5/59
Towlr	29/59

My best scores were in categories Journal (5th place - link) and Technical (12th place). I'm very happy about that, but I will definitely try to do better next time :).

So that was my Ludum Dare compo overview - I had extreme fun, I slept very little and after turning my game in, I got amazing sense of accomplishment. Kudos to the organizers, I'm already looking forward to the next one.