Took a couple of days and a dropbox account suspension to sink in, but I thought I’d write a little about our Jam game.
Results
 |
Mood(Jam) |
4.57 |
|
Audio(Jam) |
4.55 |
|
Overall(Jam) |
4.50 |
 |
Coolness |
72% |
|
Fun(Jam) |
4.27 |
| #30 |
Graphics(Jam) |
4.35 |
| #79 |
Humor(Jam) |
3.14 |
| #138 |
Innovation(Jam) |
3.38 |
| #191 |
Theme(Jam) |
3.51 |
This was my favourite jam so far, even though I wasn’t a massive fan of the theme. Â We spent about 3 hours on the saturday morning trying to think of something to make, then decided to just stop worrying about themes and make a game (which is the main point anyway I guess!). We had a lot of fun making it and went all out for the time we had, probably squeezed a week’s work into 3 days – wish I could apply that kind of effort in other areas!
Tools:
AS3 (Flash) + Flashpunk using Flashdevelop IDE.
Photoshop for da pixelz
Tiled Map Editor (http://www.mapeditor.org/) Which is *amazing* and I fully recommend everyone try this out, life saver for jamming and really easy to import into stuff in flash
Since my dropbox died, my buddy @OddballDave kindly offered to host, so you can play it here:Â http://iamclaw.com/?page_id=250Â or a few other random gaming sites re-hosted it online if you google about.
Making it:
We had the basic idea of a leaf to float around with like in wind waker, and the thought of a nice open-air feel. We whipped this up in an hour or two; I drew up a tileset, got the basics going in flash and had an animated little dude running around collecting a leaf and gliding, and it seemed pretty fun! Then we added the first piece of music and Dave suggested having it fade out the volume the higher up you went. This was the point where the game really became clear in our heads, just that fading out based on Y position made it feel like it had so much more soul. From then we focused on adding little bits to the world to make it more interactive and nice, birds that chip and fly away when you get close, random butterflies that follow you around, worms in the tree etc.
We tried to add a few varying elements that all revolved around wind and the leaf, with more time we’d like to have put in some actual puzzles, but since it was a little rushed we threw together a few sections that were like little roller coaster rides.
Since we had set controls that couldn’t be configured (arrows, Z + X) we could hard code the stuff into the environment. We just had non-intrusive instructions at the most basic level possible, little boxes with pictures/letters in to represent keys.
Now here’s something fun, the triple flower bit. A lot of people got stuck here, and when we made it we thought “this is a bit tricky”, which is why we left it in. It’s funny when people say “this is too hard” because I don’t think it’s anywhere near hard enough. Games (in my opinion) are meant to provide some challenge and resistance, it’s not a straight run to the finish it’s about having fun playing about and figuring out how to get there. Another noteworthy thing I’ve found reading various comments about it is that a lot of people aren’t used to non-linearity or freedom in games, which is crazy. I guess a lot of games nowadays are signposted all along the way telling you where to go next, I don’t like this. I’d prefer to work stuff out on my own, and I know it’s not for everyone, nothing is ever ‘for everyone’ that’s why people have opinions, I just found it an interesting thing to point out!
Focusing on the feel of the game we had a small map of a few different areas we wanted to make with different tracks. Due to time, we had to switch up our plans and make use out of  a smaller arsenal. I suppose this is the core of any jam anyway right? To take a very small set of restrictions and tools, put things together in a way that you wouldn’t normally to get around these constraints and learn a bit in the process. We wanted to have a night time area where the feel of it changed slightly. For this, when you get to a certain part of the game it flicked a switch and boom, night time. When you return to the outside area (the start bit) it’s night time. The track that plays is the main theme that played before, but with some different instruments and a few tweaks, and it gave it a completely different vibe, but also felt familiar which was cool.
The final thing we did was to jam a couple of secrets here and there, an owl (because I wanted to draw an owl) and a tiny sign that people have thought was a collectable but was actually a tiny “no Fez” sign, because I’m hilarious of course.
To wrap it up, it was so much fun to make, and I’d really love to expand it a bit, maybe spend a couple of weeks creating some puzzles and a bigger more interesting world with more secrets, although I don’t have the time really since I’m working on getting my main game Chroma finished before I run out of money and starve. But if any flash game sponsors are reading for some reason, give me a shout! 
Lastly we’d like to thanks everyone for all their really great feedback and comments and just general awesomeness through this Ludum Dare, we were blown away to get gold in the Jam and couldn’t be happier with the whole thing, so thanks everyone!
@ClawhammerMark – Code and art
@autotwitch -Music and audio
Reddit
I was trying to think of a joke involving thousands of potatoes and Ludum Dare, but 2346 games is nothing to joke about. That’s incredible. I’m at lost for words. Lets just get to the results:
. The next thing is “Innovation”. Well, that didn’t worked. But I expected this. I made a Fruit Ninja clone. Yeah right, the game everybody played at least once, but this was important for the “Humor”, I guess. “Audio” has never been my strength. It is my weakness, but luckily, we got SFXR and the Randomize button. What an awesome tool!
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.![[IMG]](http://media.indiedb.com/images/articles/1/129/128213/auto/yjzlRUl.jpg "[IMG]")
