Ok, time for me to write about what went well and what didn’t go so well for my LD20 entry.

My Idea
Even before the theme was announced, I’d decided that I was going to make a game with a tank in it. When I saw the theme, I immediately had the idea of driving a tank through a hyrule-like land, pwning stuff. I discarded the idea of doing this from a side view, because I decided it would need some decent 2D physics to really do that justice. So instead I had the idea of doing a top-down scrolling shooter with lots of monsters and shooting and dodging bullets. So I had 2 ideas to combine: 1) rampaging through Hyrule destroying everything in sight with ease and 2) having massive firefights with lots of incoming bullets and big monsters. The trouble was, I realised as time went on that these two ideas weren’t really that compatible. How could the environment being raged through resemble the Zelda overworld if it was full of giant bullet-spewing enemies? It was at the point when I added rupees to collect, with no reason to collect them, that I finally thought “where on earth am I going with this?”. As the deadline loomed, I threw in a boss for something to fight against, but this still left the rest of the level as a pretty useless killing spree. Next time I’ll think my idea through more carefully before I start.

Graphics
I was pretty happy with how my graphics turned out, considering the timescale. I think I’m getting better at using GIMP with each LD I do. That said, I think I could have sacrificed some of the graphics time to work on the gameplay more.

Sticking to the Plan
My original plan was to pick a dizzyingly simple idea, bash it out in half a day and then spend the rest of the time polishing it to a shine. Needless to say, it didn’t turn out like that. I didn’t have anything even remotely playable after half a day, so I just had to soldier on until I did. I think my idea was more do-able than for previous LDs, though, so it was a step in the right direction. I just need to scale down my ideas even more next time. I think my problem with the clashing ideas was partly to blame here. In future, I’ll pick an idea that’s more well-defined and not leave any holes to be invented around later. Trying to implement the idea is hard enough once you start coding, without having to finish working out the half-baked idea at the same time!

What Suffered
Because I didn’t get the tweaking and polishing time that I’d intended, I didn’t end up with something fun like I’d hoped. And sound and music didn’t make it into the game this time either, which was a shame. I was looking forward to throwing together a tune that was rpg adventure-ish, with a bit of Ride of the Valkyries mixed in. Next time, gadget!

The Jam
I’d originally intended to keep working on my game on the Monday and submit it as a jam entry as well as a competition entry, seeing as I had the day off work. But I wasn’t happy enough with where the game was going, and felt way too sleep-deprived to do any more work on it, even for one day. Plus, I had major issues getting py2exe to build my Windows version and that ended up taking me half the day anyway. Soooo I decided to just be lazy instead.

Right – that’s that off my chest, now to start playing all the awesome-looking entries I’ve been getting incredibly jealous about. Seriously, there are so many interesting entries this time – I can’t wait!

one of the new level mockups for T.H.I.S

No zombies, I promise… But maybe some skeleton kittens.

Here’s my timelapse guys… Enjoy!

I made it in HD so if you want the best view stick it on 720p and hit full screen

Thanks again to everyone for making Ludum Dare a fantastic thing to be a part of!

Here’s the timelapse for my entry this past weekend.

I haven’t embedded it because I’ve just realised my desktop wallpaper has a huge Portal 2 spoiler. (I’M SORRY, SOPHIE!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4e-Gj9-4bcg

Finally, here’s the time-lapse of the development of Mittens. Enjoy!

They are Punishing

After my brainstorming session I had four things written in my notebook:

Avoid Monsters, look for other people, share an item and sheriffs badge

I then wrote the word share-iff.

At that point I was done writing. It was perfect. Though seeing as it was maiden voyage into LD I decided to overscope what I was able to do in 48 hours anyway.

Too many Deputies

The amount of characters for this game went into the double digits and for most of the people you come across and deputize they have a custom death sprite. I didn’t need that many options and most players don’t find them all let alone kill them all and admire their graves but I did it. I’m glad I did it, walking back to find a grave that you recognize was pretty cool, but It didn’t need to be 10 guys.

For the map I had decided about 2 days in that I would use the Deadly Alien Map Editor to make it but after a few hours of that not panning out and only half working I did the rest of it myself. The level itself was the most time consuming area which didn’t have to be and still ended up with a truckload of collision and placement issues.

The Final Push

I left a bit too much to the final hours of the competition: Win Condition, Tutorial, Lose condition, sound, music, other things.

Some of those things kinda made it in. The win condition is there, mileage may vary on the aesthetics of the splash screen, and a tutorial was implemented, complete with typo on one of the key presses in the game but I could have thought about them earlier.

This all sounds pretty negative but I had fun slept regularly and got to draw a lot of characters. I learned about my limitations and that’s what I wanted from LD anyway.

Instead of copying and pasting my post from my own blog, I will write one just for LD!

The most important fact, as with any Ludum Dare, is that I was able to finish! I originally thought I wouldn’t have enough time to get it done, so I threw in the towel roughly 8 hours before. I had second thoughts a few hours later and quickly rushed back into coding. Thankfully I had just enough time to finish it!

Even though this was my first time making a platformer, I’m feel that it isn’t just another run of the mill platform game. I wanted the torch to be part of the player so those moments are more intense when you aren’t holding the torch. I think this worked quite well, but sound effects and a sound track really would have helped the atmosphere.

I usually use 8bit graphics, but I wanted to simplify them further so I wouldn’t be hung on graphics during the competition. I wanted to be spending more time with the actual level design. So I opted for 8×8 sprites scaled to 4x times their size. While it gave the game a cutesy feel, it made text feel awkward as it looks huge on screen. The furthest I’m going to go next time is 2x or I will scale the graphics in my image editor instead of doing it through code.

As I said before, this was my first time making a platformer and I was worried about it being too easy. From the feedback I’ve been given so far, I’ve found that it’s far from easy. There was also an issue near the end of the level where players thought they need to make a blind jump, when in reality they had missed the hidden passage. I’ll make it more obvious in the post-compo version. ;]

Speaking of post-compo, I’ve already added/fixed a bunch of things. Notably I’ve fixed the physics for both the torch and the player so things should be much smoother. I also added much needed particle effects to the torch. I should be releasing it sometime in the next few weeks!

Until then…don’t drop your torch.

>>Torch Play and Rate!<<

Well, my first ever LD ended almost a couple of days ago (excluding the LD where I had to unexpectedly pull out because I forgot I was going to Vietnam the second day).

And how did it go?

Well, it could have been better. I decided in advance that sleep deprivation was going to be a big no-no: I either finish in daytime, or I don’t bother. Making games is fun, but it shouldn’t be too unhealthy.

There were also some dramatic unwelcome or unexpected interruptions, such as calculus homework, having to spent 5 hours helping a friend out with a film project, and having to research and apply fo tours to universities.

Overall, I could have done with more time.

The lack of time shows in the way that everything I made on the first day (engine, many graphics, hell, even music) was extremely polished, but everything I made on the second day (story, sounds, enemies, final polish) was *profanity*.

Lesson learned for next time!

One of the things I love about Ludum Dare is how inspiring the themes can be. This includes the themes that don’t get chosen. I plan to make a game with one of these themes soon.

I have been thinking about creating a torrent file for all the compo games for rating purposes..

Is that even legal? Is anyone already doing this? If anyone has details please share.

Thanks

ER

SLiV, a guy on the dutch game maker community made a “Let’s Play” of Speculum, don’t watch it if you are still planning to play the game cause it contains spoilers. The game can be played here.

I wanted to base my gameplay on the theme, rather then come up be a game beforehand and shoehorn the theme into it. So I came up with different games for most of the themes from the final round of voting, and thankfully the winning theme was one I was happy with.

The idea is that the main character is sort of weak and can not kill enemies, and you have a partner who covers the main characters weaknesses. The “Take this” thing made it seem like “this” should not be a person, so I made the partner be a robot. Once I decided that, coming up with the different abilities for each character was easy, I just had to ask myself “How’s a robot different from a human?”, and based the abilities on that.

I think Stage 2 is the only level where it makes you actually feel the theme “It’s dangerous to go alone”, since it’s the only stage where you have to separate from your robot buddy for a short while. When Gem is alone, you have to avoid enemies rather than just shooting them from afar. I wish I made more levels like this, to further express the theme.

Some things I’m unhappy with, would be the lack of levels and music. I knew I wouldn’t get any music done before the compo even started, but I love game music and it’s set’s the mood for the game, so I’m sad I couldn’t make anything. This was my first Ludum Dare and it was pretty lax. I didn’t work super-hard or get stressed at all, but because of that I think I didn’t get enough done as I wanted to.

I’m pretty happy with the graphics, I made every sprite less than 16×16 because I thought it would be faster and easier, but if I continue to make this game, I won’t set such a limit on myself.

Overall I’m pretty happy with the result, just a few thing’s I could have done better. See the game here.

Enjoy!

I recorded a timelapse video for the weekend, with integrated webcam for the first time.

Timelapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUphCeVHoWg

Game’s here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=rate&uid=1984

So, this was my first Ludum Dare ! And also, the first “real” game I made. You can play it here first before reading this.
First things first : the title sucks. I didn’t have any ideas on it so I just took what first went through my mind.

You might find interesting to read this post describing the whole process. You can also find my quite uninteresting timelapse video here; not of much interest, as i mostly spent my time munching code.

The idea

The first think that occured to me, was that the theme wasn’t great, and that nearly anything could be fit into it. As I had wanted to create some rogue-like game, that being one of my favorite genres and in my opinion having a lot of potential. Of course I wasn’t going to go for some groundbreaking game, but I liked the idea of doing something like that.

So I decided that I would “mock” a little bit the theme by having a old man give you a random set of items, those items being stupid… Then you would have to adapt in the dangerous caverns where all the monsters awaited you without much help (I was thinking toothbrushes and stuff). Alas, caught up by time, I ended up only putting in “serious” stuff.

I wanted something simple to play, but fully randomized like the original Rogue so that if players wanted to go on playing they wouldn’t have to stop because I didn’t have time to make levels (which sometimes happened to other participants, which was truly a pity !). That also meant I could really take my time on the game engine, starting from scratch.

The process

I started by implementing a basic loader, that took me about 5 minutes. Then I started work on the map. First big snag and also enormous error, was when I tried using a two dimensional array in AS3. I had never heard of nested arrays so I then assumed for some reason it wasn’t possible, instead of doing some research. I started coding using a very long array. Let’s say that I lost 6hours total, when I discovered I couldn’t do much with this, found out about nested arrays and learned using them, and cleaned all the mess left by the giant array.

So I worked on the generation algorithm. Didn’t know anything about that, so I sort of improvised to imitate Rogue. The algorithm goes through the map, and sometimes starts creating a room of variable size. After that, it creates corridors between rooms… That’s where it sort of became hectic. Thinks started behaving wildly sometimes, so I ended up doing some wall borders then floor all around the area, that way I could stop working on it. I had already spent a day on this. I finished it with random mob and item spawning.

Then came feature creep. I thought, “Line of sight, why not ?”. Ended up spending half of day two on it with no result. Twas fun, but then I started getting nervous about finishing.

I moved on to the inventory system and item interactions. That was pretty straightforward, using different arrays and algorithms. It was quite simple and I think, one of the things I managed the best. You don’t notice it in the game (well, I think) because it works seamlessly and frustration-less. This took me about three hours, max.

Finally, I implemented fighting and mob “AI”. Not really AI, because I didn’t have time to do pathfinding or stuff like that. It’s less than 50 lines of code. It justs checks if the player is standing next to him to attack him, and if not, moves in his direction. And even that’s basic.

Then came features : luckily I had worked by being careful that most things were dynamic, so I could easily implement items/mobs. I was hard pressed on time so I did only a small portion of what I had in mind… That’s where graphics kicked in, pixel-drawing armor/swords/potions. Not much work of course.

The end of LD#20

I think I did really okay, and I might even polish this to get a solid, entertaining game. It’s more of a engine now than anything else, but it could be more. I hope you found reading this interesting !

You can check out the game here, and my 31hrs timelapse of me coding away here.

Finally got round to doing a video of the game hope you like it and if you want to try it you can play it here

As some will know, I’ve had a lot of trouble fixing what i thought to be memory management teething problems. I would like to say the following:

I AM PROBABLY ONE OF THE WORLDS MOST RETARTED PEOPLE FOR THIS:

The bug causing access denied and random crashes can be (or rather  not be found) on line 142 of Src/Video/LocalAssistant.pas where a missing close(f) was found later which by some miracle does not affect my 64 Bit natty box and any other 64 bit ubuntu variant for that matter bu affects Win32, Win64, Linux 32 bit and pretty much every OS under the sun. The new package is uploading as I speak with a win32 binary and libs along with a linux (ubuntu) x64 binary too. Oh, and I fixed 8 pixels in the ’tilkeset’

Sorry for the inconvenience, but its all fixed now and if you have 3-7mins of your life to waste, you can now give it a spin!

PS: Lazy people find the link here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4853895/CrunchiesLD20Mk2-All.zip

I already wrote up a quick post mortem on my blog. This is a longer version with more info – if you’ve read the other version, skip down to “What went wrong” and read from there. Cheers!

The theme this time was pretty weird, so I was maybe considering skipping, but I got inspired and then I did it anyway. And I am SUPER PROUD of that because I got to do some cool sprite animation, script some cutscenes and make a game in a genre I haven’t tried before: the genre of PUNCHING.

PLAN

Every time I do a Ludum Dare, I have a vague idea of what sort of game I want to make or what skills I want to develop before the theme’s even announced. This time, inspired by playing Nicolau Chaud’s Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer (review) last week, my plan was to make something contemporary and human. That led me straight to the idea of making a game where you punch people who don’t have rape alarms until they’re scared enough to want rape alarms. For their safety.

Consequently my entry “Vigilance” is a game about suspect charities, lonely women walking through empty parks at night, and pretending you’re a ninja.

Below the jump: my dev process, including roughly how long it took me to do the various things in the game, and a quick post-mortem.

(more…)

So… I feel I somehow failed by not devoting enough time to this LD to make my game complete. Let me get into the details

What was the plan
Make a game where you are given random stuff by NPCs and need to get rid of it.

What was the outcome
A manic shmup platformer thingie.

What went wrong
As I said, I didn’t devote enough time for this. The level is not fully done. some features that are implemented are not accessible. Also, some features that got their placement and graphics, are not implemented. It’s all half-cooked both ways.

What went right
The game. Seriously, I’m pretty happy with it even tho, I didn’t manage to polish it as much as I wanted to. Switching plans to shmup was a good choice, and it has a bullet-hell feel to it near to the end, but then, there are no enemies to use that against. I tried to get around that by adding whole hordes of enemies, but it just gets choppy is such places.

So… what’s the plan
I’ll probably spend this evening trying to fix some bugs, adding enemies, and hooking up lost features, and then get the thing to Kongregate.

GNU/Linux users can now brave the kitten apocalypse by downloading the Linux port

Right, I know I said there would be posts about how it was going and what I was doing as Ludum Dare was going on. And I do apologize, for the obvious lack of them.

So here they are all bundled into one big post.

The theme for Ludum Dare 20 was – “It’s Dangerous To Go Alone. Take This.”
In which fof the first hour or so, I couldnt find a single good story idea.
So I opted for Plan B – even though Plan B never exixted in the first place.
And Plan B was – make the game in XNA!

Brilliant plan – although my XNA skills werent the greatest, especially in the 2D department.
But now that I look upon how it did go, it went pretty darn good

So…with some start on what programme I was going to use, the coding began.
With photoshop open as well, I made small pictures to go in and within the first hour or two, had a small red and blue square moving around the screen.

My idea to tie this into the theme – the most important part of Ludum Dare – was that as it is dangerous to go alone. Why not take someone on the journey with you. – Hence the 2 squares. One controlled with the W,A,S,D keys, and the other the arrow directional ones.

The name of the game wasnt thought up until the Sunday, so almost the end of the competition.
The name I created was – B.Y.O.B
Now, this had two names depending on how you played, i.e. by yourself, or with a friend
If, by yourself, the game title is: Be Your Own Buddy
and if you are playing with a friend: Bring Your Own Buddy.
Still linking back to the not to go alone, take something with you aspect.

Altogether 3 levels were created, and due to terrible coding writing, the only way to link them was seperately, but putting them in password protected folders, with the password for each at the end of the previous level.
There was also a “Secrets” folder with an achievement in it, once you got the password at the end of level 3 – effectively completing the game.

If you want to play – entirely for free – click this link and download it.

http://www.mediafire.com/?ax2fze2fiue729l

Once you extract the files – READ the instructions text file FIRST!
That is the most important step, as if you dont have a certain something you wont be able to play – but tells you how to get it!

It isnt a very long game, and for my first ever Ludum Dare entry – I think it turned out amazingly.
Let me know what you all think

And below is the gameplay video and playthrough I made!
Enjoy -

EncryptedShadow
Apperception Games