“Stalactites Go Down, Stalagmites Go Up” – We hardly knew ye
I should have just submitted Spelunky
So close and yet so far. Two hours short of really putting in an entry. Second Ludum Dare first failure.
In SGDSGU you are a telekinetic kid escaped from a covert government facility. Once they became aware of your escape, they sent out zombies to do away with you. As far as controls go, just click the fully formed stalactites at the top. Puncture zombie heads and try to stay alive!
(You can download what would have been the final here (play it in the stand alone flash player instead of the browser).
Currently missing:
- Win condition.
- Sounds.
- Stalagmites to block the zombies.
- More user feed back (hover mouse over stalagmites causes a glow).
- Gore effects.
- Optimization 
I’m still running on the high of getting the game done on time, figure I may as well decompress with a mini post-mortem.
What Went Right
Concept
Settled on a pretty simple concept.
Art
The animation and character creation went extremely smoothly in flash. I like how everything turned out visually. Flint also eased the burden art wise with some neat dynamic deaths for the zombies.
Programming
Flint was pretty easy to get up and running, the examples that came along with it could not make it any easier to use.
The game programmatically was not all too complicated, so most of that went pretty smoothly as well.
What Went Wrong
Concept
I wasn’t too big on the caverns theme as it left so many options open (?). Yes too many options, through together a bunch of concepts. They were pretty easy to narrow down, most of them included tilesets, yet, since I’ve never drawn tilesets from scratch I was pretty apprehensive about going that route. I did a lot of humming and hawing as Flixel looked like the perfect little engine for this competition. Easy to generate some random caverns toss a ninja rope in there, and bam you’re done. In the end my fear of pixel art was enough to keep me away.
Art
I hate flash registration points.
I need to have a timer going while I’m working on the art, I put way too much time into making the art bits, when a good chunk of it didn’t get used. I know placeholder art, generally becomes the final art. So I try to get it done all in one go. Having the same problem last compo, I think I’ll have to go about it differently next time around.
Programming
Wasted a little bit of time getting up to speed on Flint. I have to stop using Ludum Dares as a way to try new things. I need to start dealing with the learning curves before the competition.
Placed my registration points way too willy nilly, wasted way too much time programmatically shifting bitmapdata and registration points around.
Sleep
Squandered a bunch of time sleeping, got a decent 20 hours of sleep in.
–
I got most of what I wanted accomplished. I wish I would have had more time to play around with Flint to create some neat gore effects but oh well. Despite all the extra time I sunk into the artwork, it was a good experience, it was good to spend some quality time with my tablet.
Congrats to all you guys the majority of the games this time around look really phenomenal.