Pro:

- Even though I wasn’t planning to take part, I still did and don’t regret it

- Managed to create a new game!

- LD is always kinda fun, and coding with Gosu is allowing to code in Ruby very fast

- Created a shooting game with a lot of enemy fire. And the flower effects went surprisingly well

- very happy that the radar worked correctly!

Contra:

- when I was creating sound effects, they didn’t sound right and I took them out again. That was lost time. should have made bgm instead

- shouldn’t have made the enemies’ movement “random” . So some of them are having flowers, others don’t

- i know, the shootings are kinda crazy, but they aren’t crazy enough! ^^ should have been MUCH more

- i didn’t wanted to use wingdings as enemies, but, you know, no time and such. i also wanted to have them animated, but that would have taken even more time

- there’s a big performance problem if you get to the end. Reminder for myself: don’t make the collision calculations in the laser shots if you create around 360 every second, lasting for at least 10 seconds each

- i also wanted to add a possibility to move left and right, but having the calculations in euclidic dimensions crashed my brain at hour 42

So, this LD was a nice experience again! To all alpha-testers and fellow programmers: have fun!

Heartiac Arrest

I fixed everything and made the entry more readable / aesthetic. Also uploaded the Source.

I reset Asploreheim’s universe and made changes to the hill allocation setup… it *ought* to work now. I’m pretty sure I’m operating within the rules as they state that I can fix bugs if they’re game-breaking (which this is)

Apparently the login crash and hill-claim freeze happen when the game can’t handle all the data the server is sending back… happens scarily quickly. I’m not going to mess with the game any more. So there, if it breaks, I’m sorry :/

In retrospect, an MMO was a bad idea…

Fixed PATHWAYS so that it would properly show two of the “events”, uploaded the source, and I also moved around some text to avoid overlapping.

There are a lot more entries than I expected, I will try to fairly judge as many as I can.

So this was my first Ludum Dare. I did the Global Game Jam back in February, so I had some idea of what to expect, although the GGJ was teams rather than solo. One thing I do regret is not interacting more with the community–IRC, Twitter, etc. I could have used more feedback than I got, instead of relying almost entirely on my husband’s comments.

Friday night I spent brainstorming ideas and thinking over mechanics. Saturday morning I started coding. By late afternoon / early evening, I had the major mechanics implemented, but it wasn’t fun. At that point the turrets were just yellow diamonds (and they were warp portals which your cyan circle teleported between), and the hint circle always disappeared before you could fire again.

Screenshot of older version of SEEK*TOR

The best thing that happened for the game occurred when I sent my Saturday prototype to a friend for feedback. He told me two very important things:

1. He had the most fun figuring out where the hint circles intersected
2. He wanted to know why you had to aim and fire to reveal the map instead of just placing light bulbs around the “platforms” (yellow diamonds)

So I made the hints persist but fade over time. That means you can see the hint circle intersections, but the screen doesn’t become overly-cluttered with old hint circles. It also means the aiming mechanic is important, since if you take too long, the previous hint will have faded away. I also changed the theming of the game so that the portals became turrets and you selected a turret to fire from, rather than teleporting between them.

Sunday was mostly a day of polish. The big feature changes were implementing multiple levels, scoring, and flare limits. I also added the start, game over, and between-level screens, made the graphics, (such as they are–hooray for GlowFilter!) composed a background track, and created the sound effects.

In the end, I was successful in terms of having a pretty-much finished game at the end. On the other hand, seeing some of the other entries, I kind of wish I’d done something a little more ambitious…

Things that worked out:

1. Using abstract glow-y vector graphics instead of trying to draw. (I spent about 20 minutes attempting to draw a single turret before deciding my time was better spent elsewhere.)
2. The game selects from 4 (hand-crafted) turret layouts and randomizes the enemy and player locations. That turned out to be enough randomization that I didn’t need to make a turret layout generator. In fact, I only just realized that I left the game in debug mode where it always chooses the same turret layout.

Things that didn’t work out:

1. When I started, I implemented everything in one file just to see if the core mechanic would work. I made such a mess of my code that I spent hours late Saturday night moving code around so I could add levels. Spending hours working on code without actually adding new functionality–even regressing at times–was very hard on my morale.
2. I spent too long trying to make my git history tidy. I’d keep forgetting to add a file to the commit or not commit for a while and wind up with a gigantic commit that involved 3 features and all the source files. Then I’d try to figure out how to break up or revise the commits. (And how to use vim, since that’s the default git editor…) Given that I never had to revert to a previous version, it was kind of silly of me.

Tools and Libraries Used:

1. FlashDevelop
2. TweenLite
3. git
4. ACID Music Studio
5. Free VSTi soft synths: Crystal, LazySnake, and ErsDrums
6. Audacity
7. sfxr

View my Timelapse.

What went well:

• Finished a game!
• Learned Lua and LÖVE inside and out.
• Made some decent (by my standards) looking pixel graphics.

What could have gone better:

• Had to scrap most of my planned stuff in order to finish on time. Originally Missing was going to be a survival game with a lot of roguelike elements.
• Spent way too much time making a procedural maze generator, which didn’t end up being important to the final product.
• Didn’t have enough time to add gameplay, ended up adapting the planned food/water element of exploration into a collection game.

http://www.platymuus.com/goods/junk/asploreheim_bugfix.zip

Contains a new Asploreheim.exe. Replace and enjoy the lack of fancy, laggy road rendering. I also tweaked the hill placement slightly so it ought not to be so center-biased.

Cubees Entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=rate&uid=1481

Ludum Dare 16: Cubees – Timelapse Video

Ludum Dare 16: Cubees – Gameplay Video

This was my first Ludum Dare and my first game I programmed too.  My game was very simple but I wanted something I knew I could finish and finish I did.

What went right:

• The game got finished
• Fixed any major bugs

What went wrong:

• The goal of the game: it never really happened
• Bugs took a long time fix
• Ran out of muffins

What went into my belly:

• 6 muffins
• lots of soda
• Rigatoni with pasta sauce
• Angus burger
• bagel
• chow mein

What I learned:

• You can make a very simple game in 48 hours while knowing practically nothing about game programming
• What a SIGTRAP is
• How to use Code::Blocks and its debugger
• You can never have too many muffins
• Pasta sucks without parmesan cheese

So, after my second LudumDare (the first being 14th, I forgot about LD for the 15th contest), I was rather disappointed. I made 2 entirely crappy games, one not even functional. I did manage to stick with my wheelchairs, but I really just made a platformer with spring platforms, and added some outline graphics to make the blocks look a little better, and little branches to hold the springs onto walls. But in all honesty, it was completely rushed (yes, I’m comparing this to a 48 hour timeframe) and played like crap. I couldn’t even be arsed to make the “PRESS ANY KEY” message blink in and out, or even use an outdated chiptune I made.

However, on the plus side, I participated, and I made ExciteMike’s wallpaper be square. I also learned I suck at making randomly generated mazes.

So, maybe next time I’ll think of a better idea. I can’t say I liked the theme. Don’t flame me on this, but I think most people just voted +1 because it wasn’t a bad theme, and it ended up winning (much in the same way that a tournament participator could be getting 3rd place every single round and still win).

Well, my first Ludum Dare is finally over. The dust has settled and I finally have regained sanity from sleeping a combined ten hours over two nights. My game,  Lost? (spelled with punctuation to differentiate it from the popular television series of the same name), is pretty much a combination of Knytt Stories and Metroid (leaning significantly towards the Knytt Stories side). I’ve learned quite a lot about rapid development here, so I’ll outline it as the fallout has settled.

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First off: Wow. What a weekend. So many thoughts I want to share. So many emotions flooded out during the experience. Let’s see if I can try and compose this a bit.

LD Entry URL: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=rate&uid=1277
Time Lapse Dev Log: via YouTube, via MobileMe

The Plan:

My high-level plan for the weekend was:

• Friday: Prove out key tech elements needed for the game concept.
• Saturday: Build the game. Make it playable from start to finish. Get to “content complete”.
• Sunday: Polish, Tune, add the nice-to-haves.

I’m glad to say I was more-or-less able to stick to this plan.

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I just made a timelapse video, you can watch it here. I removed the parts where I was away or asleep. The music is from a concert I played on Friday (from Brahms’ 2nd symphony).

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buC_zbkgDHU

Edit: programs I used: FlashDevelop, Tile Studio and my new pixel editor which is still work-in-progress.

BenHem says …

Crash!
|./bashplore: line 83: {-2..2}+15+(15-2)*121: syntax error: operand expected (error token is “{-2..2}+15+(15-2)*121″)
./bashplore: line 96: [: ==: unary operator expected
./bashplore: line 27: {1..20}+{1..20}*20: syntax error: operand expected (error token is “{1..20}+{1..20}*20″)

Nooooooooooo, gona fix it after a film, thanks BenHem

BenHem, don’t understand how you get the error because when i get this kind of error it always say something like File_other_then_bashplore: line … Cannot easly find the bug but i’ll try to fix it, that’s a promise 8p

Okay so i just woke up after my long period of post-LD sleep and i discovered the the goal of my game (collecting the 4 heart pieces) is unacheivable because you cant move between rooms smothely and you get stuck in walls. i think i know how to fix it (i didnt have this problem before, and that is why i submitted it without checking) and just then i found this:

“After the deadline, we do allow bugfixes. You’re allowed to fix any bugs that stop a player from playing or finishing your game. Make your fixes and upload/edit your entry as appropriate.

For the sake of German keyboards, Y now works as Z also.  That’s the only change, shouldn’t affect judging in any way, except that now I won’t be berated by angry Germans.  If you are an angry German, and want to consider my ignorance in your rating, pretend Y doesn’t work, because that is in fact the state the game was at deadline, and that would be fair.

First, I’ve now posted OSX and linux/source code versions on my entry’s page.  I noticed some serious slowdown when testing on my macmini – this is because it uses very large textures (1024 x 768), and there isn’t really anything I could have done (not within the 48hr time limit anyway, it would have been too fiddly and time-consuming).  Fairly recent (/non bargain-basement) graphics cards shouldn’t have a problem, but I apologise if you find the game getting slower and slower the more moves you make.

Second, here’s my timelapses:

Coding etc.

Audio

There’s two because I did the audio on a different computer, and I’m too lazy to edit them together properly.  Read on for my post mortem.

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Hi there, I’m wondering if I can change the preloader code to fix a bug. I promise not to touch the gameplay. Can I?

Nobody must move a finger but me (as I host the flash at my site)…

Thanks!

Well I think its safe to say I have totally mucked up my game. After getting some sleep and finishing my maths exams today I played through the game. I was horrified at the number of mistakes and errors there were. I also realised that I spelled the name of the game wrong when I submitted it. But I’ve learned some new things so that’s the good thing.

One question though. After you have submitted your entry are you allowed to fix errors and stuff in it? I don’t really want to fix anything (what’s done is done). I’m just stupidly curious.

P.S Maybe I’ll get the worst game award.

This was my first LD, and I had a great time! : ) Thanks to everyone organizing this, being in #ludumdare, and just working hard to churn out awesome games. THANK YOU!

There’s definitely something to be said for reflecting on the good and the bad, though. Let’s start with…

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