Well, after somehow getting through Monday without actually falling asleep at my desk or something, it feels like the time is write for a bit of a general LD18 retrospective.

First off I want to say a huge thanks to everyone for making it such a huge and brilliant event. I had a really great time. This goes double for PoV, who made it run so smoothly despite being too busy to actually enter; and to the crowd in #ludumdare that made sitting in a room on my own for two days a far less antisocial way to spend my time than you might expect.

Speaking of sitting in a room on my own for two days.. Here’s a video of me doing just that. Apparently I fidget a lot.

Right, Post Mortem Time. I’ll put it behind the break so I don’t need to worry about spoilers. Or in other words, if you haven’t played my game yet, try it now

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This is a dissection of my LD18 entry Architector which details some of my design decisions and processes, good and bad. Hopefully this can be helpful to someone.

I was the only one testing this game, and I only did very short testing sessions. This makes for a very hard game.  I didn’t see things like the player’s survivability or how hard it could be to scale a high tower. The double jump was actually a last minute addition that proved to be very necessary to facilitate climbing.

Killing enemies is what makes the game advance. This is meant to keep the player in the action and to keep them from avoiding the dumb enemy AI too much. I struggled between this and time-based block dropping which would have put an emphasis on survival, but I felt that the sudden shifts between the gun mode and the block mode needed to be under the player’s control somewhat.

The game feels a bit slow to progress; the goal is pretty high due to aesthetic decisions and the blocks are a bit short. I am considering having multiple blocks drop in a row for a post-competition version.

The camera is a frequent complaint. Due to some limitations in the framework, I could not have it zoom out, which would have been best. I instead opted to have it be under mouse control. In gun mode, this makes for difficult aiming when the player is moving, which encourages the player to stay still while shooting.

One hurdle was making the falling blocks not too confusing to control. The layered colors in the sky give a sense of height, and the camera control helps give a better sense of the surroundings. Still this is no replacement for a good zoom out.

I had to make the blocks so that the player would not get stuck too easily and could make something scalable. The blocks collide on their background tiles, which creates space between the tiles the player can interact with.

Scaling the tower is facilitated by the double jump and the dragon, which can be used as a rocket pack by firing it downwards while jumping.

A good platformer jump is a tricky thing: it needs to happen right away, but its height must be controllable. I do this by making the gravity lower on the player when the jump button is held down.

There are three kinds of enemies in this game: the flying fish, the bat and the dragon. Enemies are the first thing I programmed into the game; the blocks falling and tower making dynamics were an idea I had when I saw Lame Castle, Skyscraper and build the level you play in the suggested themes. It’s also a bit of an homage to Homestuck.

The bat homes in to a fixed distance from the player, which varies from bat to bat. Its quick scattershot is hard to avoid but deals low damage. This, coupled with the fact that it keeps its distances and that none of the weapons are good against far away targets makes the bat dangerous, hence its low damage and health. In the player’s hands, it becomes a  low damage scattershot, good against other bats and groups of enemies.

The fish fires bubbles which float upwards, making it dangerous to enemies above. It deals a lot of damage but can be difficult to use against ground targets. As enemies, they slow the player’s ascent; the floating bubbles miss often when the player is bellow, but when the player is above they are deadly. This makes it dangerous to move past the flying fishes.

The dragon is the only ground enemy. As such I made it allergic to being too far below the player. It drops from the sky like the rest. It walks towards the player, periodically jumping to navigate the terrain. When it’s near enough it locks in on the current angle towards the player and waits a moment to fire. This makes it possible to avoid it by going behind it. As a weapon, it becomes a short range flamethrower/jetpack.

Am I missing anything? I’d like to know where I am right and where I am wrong.

As promised, wallpapers of screenshots from all the LD18 games:

• 1024 x 768
• 1152 x 864
• 1280 x 768
• 1280 x 800
• 1280 x 960
• 1280 x 1024
• 1366 x 768
• 1440 x 900
• 1600 x 900
• 1600 x 1200
• 1680 x 1050
• 1920 x 1080
• 1620 x 1200

(Want the Python script that generates these?  See this.)

So I managed to wrap my JAM entry! My good friend @DirkRugged helped with the artwork and @IamGreaser composed the music this afternoon. Hope you like it!

Here’s the time lapse for my 72 hours of development on Stop That Hero!

I finished in time, yay!

I apologise if there are any bugs… as I have had no time to test it! Also, I would like to spend more time on the artwork at some point, give it a proper proof read (ANY proof read), and make some music… But for now, this is it. (It’s really, really stupid. I apologise.)

Well, i was going to enter an updated version of my game into the Jam, but it won’t be finished in time :/.
But do not despair! it /WILL/ be released, but not as part of the competition (‘ll add it to the current entry, etc)

I’ve just submitted my Revenge of the Living Dead “enhanced” version to the Jam, thanks to your feedback! Now it has a “compass” to guide you to the nearest human. Also fixed a lot of positioning bugs and improved the graphics a bit. Here’s the entry link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=rate&uid=1572

Although it’s not as finished or feature-complete as I would have liked (what is with Ludum Dare), here’s my jam entry Cannonon. A simple top-down 2D shooter where you hack weapons to take control of them. Includes 3 simple levels and two different types of weapons.

View the entry here or play it here.

I apparently needed sleep and a third day to get this game completed, but here it is!

So far, the Stop That Hero! Linux version (1.6MB) is all I have. I just started using CMake for my build scripts, so please let me know if the game won’t run on your computer.
Get the Stop That Hero! source

I’ll work on a Windows port, but for now, I’m going to relax! It’s been a grueling 72 hours!

UPDATE: Windows port (2.2MB) created and available for you!

I also updated the Linux build. It’s the same code, but the build was done on an older Linux-based system, so it should run on more systems without a problem.

Sorry I couldn’t submit a separate entry so I’ve just tagged it alongside my compo entry (it’s essentially unrelated to that).

It’s called Enemies A. S. Weapons and you have to kill that guy with that name by picking up bullets lying around, of which bullets are your enemies.

Made in 15 minutes using MegaZeux, you’ll need that to run this (it’s open source, you’ll just have to go hunting for it on sourceforge or something).

http://pubacc.wilcox-tech.com/~greaser/stuff/ld18/easw.zip

It took a bit of research and a bit of waiting but my time lapse for Cat Splat! is available.  IN HIGH DEF!

48 hours of game competition, ~24 hours of development compressed into… 6 minutes!

Cat Splat! Time Lapse

Ignore the black bars, that’s me working on my macbook instead of my iMac

As I couldn’t make my game in time for the compo, I will try to finish it for the jam.

My game is very simple, grab enemies with right mouse button and then shoot them to other enemies with left mouse button.

Here is a screenshot of the game, in the next hour I will try to improve a bit the graphics because current graphics sucks

If you want to test it, please follow the next link: GrapplingHookus

So now that everything has settled, I’d like to take some time to explain the process that went behind making Fromulus.

Firstly, I spent most of the time disconnected from the internet.  This wasn’t exactly on purpose, but I think it helped me focus a bit more.

The competition started at 9pm my time, and I devoted the first night to ideas and sleep.  I came up with a few decent ideas, which I blogged about earlier.  I settled on Fromulus as it seemed like the best option.  I woke up a bit later than I had really intended, but got to work fairly straight-away on art.  I did all of the art in one sitting, which was probably close to 8 hours.  Most of that was playing around with different styles for things.

Originally, the grass was a standard green, and the ground a purplish-brown.  I opened up the hue editor in Photoshop and played around with it until it became red.  For some reason, it just seemed a lot better.  You compare:

Red vs. Green: Fight!

After choosing this odd palette, I decided that I needed some equally weird plant life.  I decided to go with spirals, as they were very visually pleasing (to me, anyhow!).  They were a bit of a pain to do, but I think it was worth it.

A very large bulk of the time then came doing animations.  I drew the Slimer first, but ended up redrawing him later as his animation didn’t look great.  Next came the Chomper.  Each has two animations, and fits into a 16×16 block.  The ice cube and fire graphics are just drawn on top with code.  When I get more time, I will likely draw each type of creature on fire, to make the animations look better.  Here’s what the Chomper’s spritesheet looks like.  The first row are of him walking, and the second are of him getting thrown back.

Chomp chomp chomp

The largest animation is, of course, Fromulus himself.  He has five different animations, which all needed to be smooth, as you obviously see him the most.  His death animation is the longest, at 10 frames.  Here’s what his spritesheet looks like.  In order of rows, the animations are: walk, cast, jump, fall, die, and then the rest of die.

I am a wizard!

I had very clearly two images in my mind:

1. When he falls, his robes needed to fly up.  Although there isn’t really enough room to show some boxers with hearts on them, I did manage to show a little skin.  (How’s that for ‘humor?’)
2. When he dies, he should disappear and his hat should float down.  This is definitely my favorite animation.

On to the coding portion, things went relatively smoothly.  I used the wonderful flixel library, with which I am very comfortable, as I have been using it for quite some time.  I made a poor choice in map editor decisions and went with one that is a little flaky (Wasabi M) over Ogmo Editor, just as it was easier to use the maps straight away with out delay.  Ordinarily, Wasabi M is a great editor… however, this time around it had all sorts of problems, namely not letting me see the entire map and then, towards the end of the competition, eating the map that I had drawn out.  So, in the last minutes, I scrambled to make the map you see now–which is why it’s not very good at all.

I actually made some sound effects, but you don’t hear them in game.  Why is this, you might ask?  Well, sfxr only makes wavs, and I didn’t have any software to convert them to MP3.  I tried an online converter, but Flash wouldn’t take the files.   So, I will fix that in a later version (or just embed the sfxr player into flixel).  This really made me mad, but I didn’t really have any time to keep fussing with them.

Before the competition started, I played around with musagi to see how to make chiptunes.  The plan was that if I had any left over time, I’d write a track.  However, before the competition even started, I came to a grand realization: I really, really suck at making music.  So, I gave up on even thinking about trying it.

Anyways, that’s pretty much the tale of making Fromulus.  I enjoyed the experience thoroughly, and will definitely be competing in more Ludum Dares as I can.

Edit: removed responses to things on the voting page, as I see you can make comments there.

Now the part you’ve all been waiting for: here’s a shot of what I’ve done since the competition ended:

Look ma, I have the fire spell selected!

Whew – a couple hours left in the JAM, thank goodness: I found a minor bug in the windows version of PuzzaBOMB. The web version worked fine, but in between levels the .exe would get an error message due to a race condition dealing with cleanup of physics objects from the previous level. Everything works perfectly now. Yay!

PuzzaBOMB v.1.1 - storming the castle

Links: PLAY ONLINE – Windows Download – Mac OSX Download – Jam entry form

Hi all

I won’t finish my entry in time cause live got in my way…

I will finish the game later so and will post it here when it’s done

(id software style)

here is a short timelapse video:

So what happened was this….

I tried to make and RTS right….Yeah. Anyways, due to alcohol, illness and guinea pig births. I was unable to finish in time for the compo, but i figured hey, I’ll get it in time for the Jam. Then I discovered my game sucked, the logic was borked and AI + Turning Circles  = HELL.

So I started again… like 5 hours ago…. and here is the result. Credits to go mkevin747 for CC image of the Demon. Really made my day

FROM THE CLUTCHES OF SATAN HIMSELF (windows)

Title Screen

In Game

I’m at the final iteration!

Basically, the tasks I have left:

• create instructions screen
• add sound effects
• package this baby up!

In the last iteration, I was play testing and balancing as best as I could. I decided that the bat was too expensive, so I moved it down in front of the slime in terms of costs. I lowered the starting health of the Hero and gave him fewer lives. I also tweaked the level design a bit to accommodate the AI’s inability to see too far ahead. There are also victory and defeat screens now.

I finally got the AI working well enough that I realized that I wasn’t just debugging the program anymore. I was playing the game! And it’s actually not that lame! B-)

Some stuff came up today, and I didn’t have time to do anything whatsoever with my game. So it doesn’t look like I’ll have anything for the jam tonight. Oh well

Here’s a final playable build, from what I had finished up last night! I decided to embrace that placeholder music and use the rest of the loops from the game it’s from, which, as it turns out, is kinda thematically similar to what I’ve got in mind.

Again, good luck to everyone racing to have something finished up tonight

My girlfriend’s sister was in a fairly bad car accident last night, and is in the trauma center of the local hospital as we speak (or type, really). I’ve gotten nothing done today, and there’s no chance my team will be able to finish in time as a result. I really like our game though, so it’s likely that we’ll complete it and post it up here afterwards, just for kicks.

Peace, all.