Or not! This weekend (as the first weekend of every month, since a couple months ago) was a Mini-LD contest at Ludum Dare. That means a 48-hour development contest, but without all the theme-picking rigamarole. It's hosted by a single person who picks the theme themselves and can tweak the rules all around. In this case, the rules were bent entirely out of whack with the theme of "Tool". No, we didn't have to make a tool-themed game. Rather, we had to create a tool that would help us make games in the future. I thought about it and ended up working on two different things, but neither for very long:
First was SheepEdit. Remember in
Hitsuji, how the sheep animated smoothly, because he was made of a series of separate images that rotated around? A lot like South Park or Monty Python really. I was planning to make a more powerful and easier-to-use version of the editor I made way back then, allowing me to make these kinds of characters in the future for some crazy sidescrolling action. Pretty cool idea, lots of math involved (well, lots by my standards).
Second was Pixeltron, a paint program for making low-res retro sprites. But once you drew them, it would've let you apply various filters and effects to them, getting nifty modern-retro looks, like having your sprite surrounded with a glow or neon piping. That could've made
Moon Invaders 2 pretty cool!
But I just did a little bit on each before giving up entirely. These Mini-LDs just don't put on the pressure that a full-sized LD does (perhaps due to the amazing and fabulous prizes that regular LDs offer?), and I have yet to actually complete one. They've all had very interesting themes, though.
