I have started looking over my toolkit for the Ludum Dare 23 contest that will take place April 21-22. This will be the third time I participate in this contest where the goal is to create a game from scratch within 48 hours. You are however allowed to use frameworks (or even Game Maker, but from a programmers perspective that is taking all the fun out of it) as long as it’s open sourced and declared in advance.

I know that I want to use some kind of Entity System, and that I want to create it myself. My last entry (Abandoned) was created using a game framework called Push Button Engine, which is using the basic priniples of an Entity System, but not strictly speaking. I’ve been curious about entity systems for quite some time now, and I have been trying to imagine how I would have used it if I had made Ripple with such a system.

I’m most probably use Haxe/NME as programming language and I’ll build for the flash player. There has been a lot of buzz around NME the last couple of months since you can deploy your games to Flash, Android and desktop (…and iPhone, although you need a mac/xcode to get the game on to an actual device).

I have also been wanting to make something in some kind of semi-isometric perspective (y-axis is isometric, x-axis is regular top-down) for quite some time. This will make the game a little easier to control since the controls are always flipped 45 degrees in a regular isometric game, which does not map very well to a keyboard, but still give that nice, retro fake 3d-feeling =)

Well, have a look at my initial semi-isometric projection written in Haxe and published with NME =)
Sorry, either Adobe flash is not installed or you do not have it enabled

Check back before April. I will probably do some kind of live coding, and I will post more details
/Tommislav