So I said I'd enter Ludum Dare, which I'm already regretting for several reasons. Firstly, I'm slow. I'm really slow at pretty much everything because I daydream alot, get bored and have to do something different to what I was previously doing every five minutes. I can't do anything productive at all unless I'm also listening to music or watching tv simultaneously. I'm also a perfectionist. Having no attention span or motivation with things and also being a perfectionist means you essentially get absolutely nothing done at all. At all.

The second reason I regret entering Ludum Dare is because by hosting all of these competitions, I'm feeling as if I'm almost starting to "hype" myself, something which will end up being extremely, extremely underwhelming for pretty much everyone involved. Combined with the intimidation of Mega entering Ludum Dare too and working with Rez - who happens to also be one of my favourite game artists - on an RPG4D entry, I think I have reason to feel this way. The reason my game competition output is so comparatively high to my game output is because I enjoy organizing things, I enjoy putting ideas into motion, I enjoy games, I enjoy observing games being made and I enjoy this community. If I were to ever start a career in video games, I would definitely be involved in the more managerial roles… or at least, the supporting roles. Directing, designing, marketing, that sort of thing. I think I know what works in a game and how to get people to play it, better than I can actually personally make a game that people want to play. But I guess that's the same with everyone. Everyone's a critic.

Thirdly is that I'm seriously behind on alot of university stuff and this is another setback. I do feasibly have time to do all the stuff I want to do over the next month - game making, university and playing gigs - but I won't have time to do anything else, and also I'll be stressing the entire time. When I stress, there is a significantly increasing chance that I'll just go into "fuck it" mode and do absolutely nothing at all but play Playstation and drink beer. I'm pretty sure everyone can relate to that, too. But this time around I'm pretty determined to avoid that. Although incidentally the reason I'm writing this blog is probably as a justification for not writing the 1000-word essay on Ken Thompson that I'm actually supposed to be writing.

I mean, what some of you might not know is that I'm actually doing Computer Science (I'm in my first year). So that means that at least I'm supposed to be good at programming. I'm currently learning Java as part of my course, but I'm pretty behind on that. We're also doing electronics and shit, which I really do not care about at all, so I'm behind in that too. The only thing I'm caught up on is the mathematics side of it, but only because it comes kind of naturally. I was originally going to do four years, but now I'm definitely only doing three. I'm not going to drop out - I'm from one of those middle-income, working families, so I was brought up to be terrified at the idea of wasting thousands of pounds like that. But I can't say I'm enjoying it right now and really just want to get it over with and pass.

All of that said, I will enter Ludum Dare, and I will finish this game that I've been doing since Saturday as a practice.

Anyway here's a screen of what I've been doing over the last couple of days for 3 hours a day, the time I spend on Ludum Dare will be more concentrated. It's a schmup/minecraft hybrid of sorts. Mainly minecraft, because I hate schmups (I suck at them) and barely ever play them; maybe space invaders counts. You customize your ship with parts that you craft. You get resources by playing levels of a side-scroller. There is no health or lives, if a part of the ship is hit, it is destroyed. You could say I'm just ripping off 0x10c… but to be honest, that game is such an obvious continuation of minecraft that if Notch's next game had been anything other than minecraft-in-space, the fanboys would have hung themselves.

Hey look everyone, I made a long blog. I'm one of the adults now.