Two days after the end of Ludum Dare 16 I finally write my post-mortem. And you will find it after the break.

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Bah.  My game is crashing for samel on OSX, but the comments system for entry pages is a bit … unwieldy for communication purposes.  If someone on OSX can get my game to crash, I’d appreciate if you could

1: launch the ‘console’ application and let me know if you see anything there relating to the program (ideally paste the results in the comment to this)

2: let me know what version of OSX you’re using (I only aim for intel osx 10.5+ , so if samel’s crash was on PPC or 10.4, and other people can get it to work, I guess I’ll just relax and forget about it )

Probably a linking thingy, but I don’t know.  I used a completely new setup for building this version, so amn’t sure what might be going wrong exactly.

This was my first Ludum Dare, but have been following the competition for the last couple years if not longer.  I did not manage to finish my entry in time, but did really enjoy the process.  Having family time at the weekend is very important to me, so my coding time was limited to around 5-6 hours over 2 days.

Time lapse:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeIedoXsfIQ

Game play: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALXlAzhhi30

Download Game: http://blog.codheadz.com/file.axd?file=2009%2f12%2fJungleExplorer.zip

Download Source: http://blog.codheadz.com/file.axd?file=2009%2f12%2fLDExplo.zip

To run this you will need either the XNA studio 3.1 or the XNA redist from the link below:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=53867A2A-E249-4560-8011-98EB3E799EF2&displaylang=en 

What did not go so well

• Did not finish the game to a level ready to submit before the deadline
• No sound
• No prepared engine, other than XNA
• Lack of time
• Giving up with an hour to go, when so close

What went well

• Keeping the concept as simple as possible to give me a hope during the very short amount of time available
• Coding with high velocity freed from my usual constraints of IOC and unit testing
• Ignoring my ball of mud engine and coding from nothing
• Getting 90% of it done

Here’s looking forward to the next one.

So I thought I’d write up a post-mortem on my game, so I’ll just outline the key points which I have come up with.

What went well

• The art – I’m quite happy with the images I created for it, it could have been a little better in some cases, but I’m quite fond of it.
•  The audio – A lot of people have commented on how the audio is cute, or funny, the voice of my boyfriend proved rather successful for Rex the dinosaur.
•  The menus – I quite like the colour scheme of the menus, although looking at it now it’s very Bonsai Barber. However there aren’t many clicks needed and it’s easy to navigate around so I’m happy with that.
•  All the little bits and bobs – I love that in the last remaining 5 minutes I managed to pull together an icon file along with all the other little touches that makes it feel a little more finished.

What went wrong

•  Not being a coder – I was limited in what I could make, so I thought making a seek n’ solve game would be easy. However I was wrong as it was a lot harder than I thought.
• The pop-ups saying you found an item – I had to keep these in to have it work properly.
•  The fact that it repeats items and never ends – I couldn’t figure out how to get my game to work the way I really wanted it, sadly this is the huge downside of the game, showing no progression or reward.
• Items staying there – Yes I realise they still stay there for everyone that seems to point that out, I couldn’t make them disappear and also because the game doesn’t work how it should, so no need to point out something I already know please. I know this means it shows know progression for the player, why else would I add the quit button, it was the only way I could make the game end.
• Not enough images – For the game to work really well I’d have to of increased the number of images by about 500% as this would then add the complexity needed for the game, and then the gameplay would be down to the placement of the items.
• The controls – Having right click as a drag button would not be the first thing  a player would think of, I could have fixed this many ways, either by telling the player when they start the game in a pop-up with arrows or something, or the better way. By having items over the edge of what is visible on the right side of the screen, then encouraging the player to look. However if the player reads the instructions they shouldn’t encounter this problem.
• Zelda – Unfortunately The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks came out so I had to stop myself from playing it all the time, although I did play it a bit over the weekend at times.
• Sleep – On the Friday night I didn’t actually stay awake for the theme to be announced, and had a large amount of sleep, although this was mainly down to having a long day at work, doing food shopping and my podcast in the evening. So I was quite tired, and I had about 4-6 hours each night, so that knocked a fair bit off my development time. However if I had less sleep I’d not work as well as my brain wouldn’t function properly.

What I would improve

• More images – I would add a large amount of images to populate the space and make Rex’s living room more junk filled, originally the game was two times the size it is currently, unfortunately I didn’t have the time to make enough, but now that I can improve on the game in my spare time I will attempt to create more assets to populate the space.
• Learn a bit more code – It was pretty much the first time I’d really made something on my own in Game Maker, which was so vey hard, I am a designer, however not a designer in any way of programming. I hope to try working on my programming skills a little, not that it’s really essential for my job, but it’s always good to know a little of everything.

Final thoughts

•  I intend to work on the version and perhaps make a version 2, when I do it’ll be posted up on my blog
• I’m extremely happy with the outcome of the game, not being a programmer, I made something that i feel was a little successful. I know of its failings, and I hope to work on them so it can then become a better play experience.

You can give Rex’s Junk Hunt a try if you want, don’t expect an completely engaging gameplay experience though

…I updated my game to have diagonal movement too. (Linklink! And it is faster as well.)

But don’t worry, the main windows download on the entry page is still the old version.

Here is little gameplay video (interface was not recorded by fraps, music not from game!) and timelapse of making my entry.

Gameplay

Time elapse

Enjoy! )

The video proved out to be terrible quality, but I wanted to record a playthrough of the game. I think I might also do a run with all the crystals (the “all out run”) and a run with the secret ending.

anyway, enjoy this bad-quality video at vimeo: link

My long-winded post-mortem for my Ludum Dare #16 entry, Cubees.

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OK, here’s my story of the LD48 compo this year.

First, it was my 2nd LD48 so I quite knew what I could expect. The main restriction for me always is that I have a family that keeps me quite busy at the weekends. But this weekend my wife was invited twice to go out, so my actual time was:
Friday 3am-5am
Saturday: 12am-1pm, 8pm-12pm
Sunday: 8pm-12pm
Sum: 11 hours.

But that’s fine for me. I’m bad at polishing things. I’m quick at prototyping.

What went right:

• The idea. Really, I sat there for 2 hours thinking of a game I could do in ~10 hours and I was close to give up. then came the idea with “explore the fridge”.
• Music, Sound. I’m bad at anything about sounds. I have no idea how to make music and how to make sfx. So for the sfx I just did some “chip chip” and “squeek” sounds using my voice. That gave me the idea, that I do have 5 hours left in my MS SongSmith free trial version. I wrote a few lines in the IDE, launched it and just “sang” as it came to my mind. It was bad. But it was so bad, that it started to be good, again. I kept the first trial w/o any improvements. Had I tried to improve it, I think it would have failed horribly

What went wrong

• MS Paint. Really, usually I use CorelDraw for graphics, but I just wanted to do a quick prototype to see if the idea just works at all. I wanted to redraw the gfx with Corel later, but got no time. The gfx suck totally, but at least the game is fully playable.
• Sleep. I was so excited on Friday, that I woke up too early. I was dead tired on Saturday and close to be sick on Sunday.
• Communication. Really. I was so busy and had just too little time to chat and look what others did, that I have the feeling I missed a good piece of the compo. Might have been because I had so little time, too.
• Sleep. I’m still tired.
• Highscores. Next time I should try to find time to implement a simple online high score table. That might add long time fun to the game, since no one cares how much you can score if you can’t compete with others. Maybe.
• Sleep. I slept too little and feel like I can’t remember what I wanted to do the very second ago

Tools I used

• GLBasic. I’m the author of that language. I hope not to get a pimp hat for that
• MS Paint. Next time I’d better use CorelDraw, because the results are worth it.
• AC3D. For the fridge door I used AC3D, which is a very nice modeller for low poly objects.
• Audacity. For the wav sfx recording I used Audacity with the “save selection as wav” option. Was very quick.
• Microsoft Songsmith. Really, they all post YouTube videos about “Enter Sandman” with MS Songsmith, and they suck. But if you use it in the way they designed it for, the results are quite funny. Don’t expect anything serious. It’s a toy that will produce a joke. I should have saved the file as WAV and convert to MP3, later. That way the Linux version had had music.
• Nettalk. It’s a slim, free IRC program. I can’t program w/o IRC, I’m afraid of being alone

Final thoughts
The game was thought as a joke. I didn’t like the theme a lot, because all my “exploration” ideas were too big to realize in that little time. The feedback so far is overwhelming. Thank you so much. I really thought it’d fail miserably, thus I chose “cheese” in the game’s name. I’m happy that it doesn’t stink in the end.

Well, I choose to took the challenge as a double-experiment: it was my first LD as well as my first Java game (or something like that, called Mars Rover). I wanted to learn more Java while making a quick game. I can say the experiment wasn’t a total failure, just a half-failure, ’cause I’ve learned more about the Java language. The other half (the main one, should I say), in contrast, was a horrible failure. I started the game Sunday 1:00 PM (GMT -2) and “finished” it by 7:00 PM. I was locked in my bedroom trying to avoid external noise but it was terribly hot (and just now, writing it, I remembered I have an air conditioner ¬¬). So I released the game with the minimum features needed to play it. I didn’t know the best way to work with good performance 2D graphics in Java, so I ended doing it like a normal desktop app with some 2D drawing in the background. The original idea was to have some nice icons for drag-drop instructions and nice sprites and tiles for the rover and scenery, as well as sfx and bgm. I think I had enough time to implement it after my submission, but I was really tired (I know, you guys worked almost the 48h we had and aren’t complaining… shame on me).

For the next LD:
- Learn how to make real games in Java (BEFORE the contest) OR
- Use Python with Pygame OR
- Use Ruby and learn Gosu OR
- Use JavaScript with some pre-made games lib
(I’m much more comfortable with those 3 languages)
- Think about the themes BEFORE voting ends
- Turn on the air conditioner

My LD entry, Boboil goes Exploring, will no longer ‘melt your laptop’, as I’ve fixed the memory leak.

Also, as some people said they were on laptops, I’ve added support for arrow keys too. So play it NOWZ!

pythong says …

haha, I have the most evil book in the world, but which is worshipped by mages? i always thought it would be the manual for windows ^^
nice game!

Mages can be evil too Just because it has a skull+crossbones cover, doesn’t mean it isn’t a manual for Windows

SonnyBone says …

I thought the skeleton was a villager at first, so I just kept bumping into him. HE MURDERED ME.

Nice use of the theme.

You are indeed surprisingly weak at the beginning of the game. I was hoping to have a whole level-up system but I decided it would have taken too long.

Hamumu says …

I really liked it, except that you have to go past all these guys who are lethal. After reading the walkthrough, I thought I’d give it another shot and when I got to the mountain I got one-shotted by a guy standing in the middle of the passage. I couldn’t have avoided him! I want to see more of the game, but it’s just too vicious.

I really like the graphics.

Would appreciate auto-repeat on the keys!

Thanks! It took me quite a while to get the graphics the way I wanted but at the time it was very much early days You should play left handed, your sword is longer :fnarr: it doesn’t affect gameplay though.

It’s possible to get to the top of the mountain without being hit – dodge moar
Auto-repeat was planned but I guess I never got round to it.
A couple of cheats if you want to see more …
Pressing F7 will remove all the fog.
Pressing F8 will give you 40 HP, The Sword, the Lantern, the Book, and enough Skill to kill just about anything before the Dragons.
There comes a great price for such cheatery though…

Frimkron says …

I was killed by a Trogdor I must come back and finish this one. Really enjoyable!

You’re very near the end! I’d read the walkthrough, it has hints on how to deal with those pesky dragons

I’ve put together my timelapse video! It’s on youtube here:

Frimkron’s LD16 Timelapse Video

I didn’t leave it recording while I was asleep and I stuck footage from the 2 days together – that’s why there’s a jump in the middle. As you can see I spent the entire first day working on the maze generation *eyeroll*

I have the following question: unfortunately I used Wingdings as enemy graphics, and those are not allowed in the rules. I didn’t know about that, but that also means that I disqualified myself.

Question: is it still ok to change the graphics now? I don’t want to be a spoilsport, so I have these to offer, intentionally making them worse to indicate that

Old graphics

new graphics

So do you think this is ok? Elsewise I will take back my entry by also deleting the links

pythong

Okay, ANOTHER BUG was fixed. you can now (finally) beat the game. I’ve played it through ;3

Also, i was planning on keeping this a secret but i cant hold exciting things in for long >_<

A secret path!? Could it be?!

Oh, and by the way, if anyone liked that font i made and used in my game, you can download that here.

I think it would be fun to have a race to see who can play, win and rate all 121 games from this contest before the time runs out for voting. There will be no prize for the winner and the challenge starts now. So far I have played 2 and beat none. But I’ll get there soon. Exception: if the game is not win-able you do not have to win it.

Man. I have made a game! Thats pretty unbelievable. Wow.

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Hey Crew! I did it, I got through a Ludum Dare! I’ve been wanting to get into one of these for at least a year and a half, I didn’t have the chance, mostly because they happen right in exam season, but I done graduated!

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Game-crashing bugs for 5 Colors fixed, readme expanded, hints added.

You can get the new build here:

http://necessarygames.com/5_colors_pandora.zip

For the record, I changed one line of code, and inserted two small objects… amazing how small yet game-destroying some bugs are.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy-dLGBFMcw

Finally got my timelapse uploaded.  I used chronolapse.

Now I’m going to start chipping away at playing all these great entries