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Ludum Dare 24

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This blog post is more than two years old. It is preserved here in the hope that it is useful to someone, but please be aware that links may be broken and that opinions expressed here may not reflect my current views. If this is a technical article, it may no longer reflect current best practice.

Ludum Dare is a world renowned rapid game development competition which started in 2002 and has since increased in popularity due to the participation of professionals such as Notch, the creator of Minecraft. Since Ludum Dare 22, the Aberdeen University Computing Science Society has hosted meetups in Room 205, Meston Building at the University of Aberdeen.

Our meetup started at 6pm on the 24th of August, which as I write this was now yesterday. We ate calzones from a local takeaway and then watched Blade Runner on the Room 205 television. After the film, we all began to brush up on our programming skills whilst waiting for the theme announcement. The Ludum Dare IRC channel was shown on the television while we waited.

The theme has now been announced: Evolution.

I figured a lot of games would contain some element of a character evolving skills, or a civilisation evolving, or something similar to that. Instead, I’ve taken what I hope is a novel approach to the theme. In my game, it will be the physical player that is evolving whilst the elements in game remain the same. This will be achieved by creating a game with a steep learning curve.

This game will be written in C using the ncurses library and the player will play the role of a pizza chef in a takeaway pizza resturant.

I’ve recently been playing with ncurses in C with SpaceBarOS and so this seems a better choice than my original one of JavaScript with HTML canvas. The Room 205 information screen I implemented uses JavaScript with HTML canvas but I appear to have forgotten everything about it since I implemented it.

I’m about to go to sleep now, ready for an “early” start tomorrow on this game. I imagine I’ll place the code into a Mercurial repository and make it available on bitbucket for those that are interested in following the code.

Once complete, I also plan to host a telnet server to allow people to try it out without having to install all the ncurses dependancies.

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