Quick update this morning: I managed to get a ‘demo mode’ working. Now when you first start the game, the boxes will be whizzing around in the background giving you an idea of what you’re about to get yourself into!
A few hours later and we’ve already finished (or at least made good progress on) two of the goals that I was hoping for:
Here we are, 24 hours into the competition.
A lot of the last few hours has been spent doing a fair amount of restructing. Before, I had a single ’thread’1 for each of the tiles, along with another thread listening for user input. Unfortunately though, that lead to all sorts of race conditions. Specifically, whenever two tiles overlapped, it was often the case that one was doing the falling step (which copies from one internal buffer to another) while the other was in the swap step (which copies from tile to another). Then after the first finished, it would copy the second buffer over… overwriting anything that had been swapped.
Oops.
We’re getting there. 18 hours in and I have the first hints of what might actually be a game…
The voting period for Ludum Dare 26 has ended, which means that now we have some results! Before I post my own, take a moment to check out the overall leaders. Given that there were 2346 games submitted (1610 in the compo and 736 in the jam), there are bound to be some real gems in there.
So when I got home, I decided that I really didn’t want to miss another Ludum Dare. Granted, there was only about two hours left in the competition. I’m good, but I’m not that good. 😄
Also, I really wanted to make a web-based game, which meant either write another game in Java (suboptimal) or learn how to write a game in Flash or JavaScript. Nothing like a last minute decision to use an unfamiliar framework and write a game in less than 24 hours. 😄
In the end, I did it in six.