I’ve been thinking that it’s about time to start challenging myself again. Yes, yes, Planitia…but there’s something else I’ve been wanting to do.
I’ve mentioned the self-confidence problems that I’ve had in the past and while I’m a lot better (look, Ma! I’m writing in public!) there is one thing I still don’t like to do and that is compete. I shy away from testing my skills against other people, because I’m afraid I’ll discover that I suck. Well, it’s time to meet this thing head-on.
Therefore, I am hereby announcing that I will compete in Ludum Dare Eleven, which will be held from April 18-20.
Now, see, in order for this to really work I’m going to need to make a pretty good showing of it. So for the next month I’m going to be making lots and lots of small games. I’m hoping to do at least four and I don’t want any of them to take longer than a week to do. This will get me better at starting out quickly and sand over any edges in my 2D development skills.
So the bad news is that there won’t be any Planitia news for a while. The good news is that there should be lots more news on all the other games I’m doing leading up to the competition.
I’m also going to have to come up with a few good recipes, since one of the categories you’re graded on is food…
I recommend reading through my little survival guide
http://iki.fi/sol/ldsurvival.html regardless of whether you want to follow it or not. Might give some things to think about. Some people say following those will kill all the fun, though =)
I don’t know if I have time to attend #11 yet, but we’ll see. This would be the first time I have basecode ready (http://iki.fi/sol/zip/sol2dglbasecode20.zip) before the contest, which should save me an hour or two =)
But like I said, we’ll see.
Hmm, I think I should also participate in Ludum Dare. It’s been a few years since I last participated in something like this.
Wait…what’s this “sleep” you’re exhorting, Sol? I thought one of the things you’re judged on is how many of the 48 hours you can stay up in a row!
Not really. If ludum dare has taught me anything, it’s that the less “work” you do, the more productive you are =)
It’s very easy to get stuck in a “tweaking loop” when something doesn’t quite work, and you just want to try out one more value for that thing, compile and test, as you have a feeling it might work.. and it doesn’t.
I spent most of my last Sunday in such a loop trying to get level generation to work in a game I’m doing for gp2x. I solved the level generation a couple days later after actually thinking about the problem away from keyboard for a while.. if I had just taken more breaks, I would probably have solved it that weekend.