Preparing for the Ludum Dare!

I'm taking a huge leap here and I am going to try to enter Ludum Dare 25. I recently ditched C++ and went back to my beloved Java and I made some significant progress.

I began by following The Cherno's Java Game Programming series but found it a little too slow. I got to about episode 16:

While bored at school without access to the internet I went through one of the examples in the book Programming Video Games for the Evil Genius. The program was supposed to take a multidimensional array of string variables and draw tile on screen to form a level. The example code didn't work properly so I heavily modified it and got it working.

After posting that screen shot to Facebook a friend of mine pointed out that the map looks like Super Mario Brothers! So I added a ? block and Mario into the game,  everything is still static at this point.

Bored at school, again, I wrote a proper buffer to allow thing to move and I even added sound! At this point, the user can use the arrow keys to move Mario around the screen and pressing the space bar will make Mario jump (kinda).

Anyways, I'm pleased with the progress I have made in the last few days, especially if you compare it to that of last week. Hopefully in 8 days and 20 hours I will feel confident enough to enter Ludum Dare 25. If I do I will post a video time lapse of the development process.