So I, along with my wife, will be entering this weekend’s Ludum Dare Jam.

This is scary.
I haven’t done any programming since I had to leave Atomicom due to ill health - which had been up and down all year with the breaking point being in August.
If things go particularly pear shaped, then it’ll likely crush my confidence and I’ll have to have a sit down and think whether I’ll be able to work as a programmer again.

But, this is also exciting.
We’ll be working together on something we both love.
And, if it does goes well, it’ll also set the grounding for myself getting better, as it’ll boost my confidence.

Bit of a double edged sword really…; as it can go either way, but without risk there is no reward.
I am at least being somewhat sensible about this, in using Impact as an engine, and JavaScript as a language. While it’s not my usual go to, what with being out of the world of programming for a while, it’s perhaps the safest option for now! OpenGL, SDL, C++ et al aren’t the friendliest of things to deal with after a long break from using them :)

Additionally, we’ll be working together under the banner of Arcade Badgers.
This has been a little sideline thing I’ve been planning for a while, and if this weekend does go well, it may well give me the kicking I need to actually go forward with it - and seeing as I’ll be stuck on benefits for the foreseeable future, I’ve not got anything to lose in trying - especially as there are Test Trading and Permitted Work clauses I can poke at.

Now to do some tests… what’s a variable, again?

Bang Bang Racing was released on PC(Steam), Xbox 360 and PS3 last week as a download title!

It was a collaboration between Digital Reality and Playbox, and as part of Playbox, I did various programmery things to it, and I’m credited as such :)

The vast majority of my projects seem to erode quite badly with bitrot, so I’ve taken all my LudumDare entries - including incomplete and unreleased ones - and splattered everything that I have of them up on github.

This includes:

1. LD11 - GEvOlve
2. LD15 - Moons of Subterrane
3. LD16 - derelict_
4. LD17 - Yargh!
5. LD18 - T.I.T.A.N
6. LD19 - Germies
7. LD21 - Thieving Fingers
8. Mini LD11 - Little Quirks
9. October Challenge 2011 - Little Quirks

Interesting ones include:

• Yargh! - which used rather little of SGZ2D’s functionality, and did the vast majority of it’s logic in Lua.
• T.I.T.A.N - which uses it’s own unique little SDL powered engine, based on Components and Entities.
• Germies - which is one file, all C with SDL, and written in seven hours.
• Thieving Fingers - which is the first to use GLESGAE, and rooted out vast amounts of bugs and things.

T.I.T.A.N, Fingers and the both Quirks projects haven’t been released till now, so feel free to clone, fork, poke and prod :)
GEvOlve is a load of mince… it can be thought of as the wooden spoon entry, as it was the first thing to use what turned into SGZ2D.

One final thing to note, is the main reason all these have been put up is that of bitrot as I mentioned above… Little Quirks has suffered the most, as the release included isn’t the final demo that I had done, which is shown in the screenshots on the project page. This is a shame, as there was a lot of extra logic put in, as well as some actual gameplay. The tileset was also more complete, with a few more interesting tiles of which some were recovered for the October Challenge re-do, but not everything, sadly.
That and I’m more likely to be able to go back to them when they’re in a more workable condition like this!

You can find them all on my github here: https://github.com/stuckie/ludumdare.