Well, it was my first LD and it was some ride!

Friday:

I already decided before the competition that I would use FlashPunk & FlashDevelop for development, Box2D for physics, MinimalComps for UI and Paint .Net for drawing.

Other than MinimalComps I had already worked with all of the tools to some degree, and felt confident with them, and while I didn’t know MinimalComps I figured it would save me the trouble of drawing my own buttons and such, so it would be worth it…

Saturday:

I woke up at Saturday morning, and went straight away to see the theme.

I then realized how dangerous it is to work alone, so I took this!, and then spent the next ~2 hours coming up with ideas. I tried to think of something simple, that I would be able to make something playable fast with, but which can also be extended after the competition will be over.

Eventually I came up with a bit weird and vague idea, that seemed simple enough to accomplish, and looked fun in my head. What I first imagined (I think) was basically you building your army to stand against your enemies, and then slipping to the next room while everybody is fighting and shooting at each other… Something like a mash-up between Plants vs Zombies and Heroes of Might & Magic (the battlefield part), only with puzzles that combine both tactical thinking and real time co-ordination.

Did I say weird and vague already?

Well, at this part, I obviously concluded that I won’t be needing physics so I ditched Box2D, and decided to go on a tilemap based game. Also, since this idea can still go in plenty of directions, I decided to first try to do some level design before even starting to code, to see if this idea is even feasible.

So I spent the next ~2 hours designing 10 simple levels. I did that with an awesome tool called notepad, it lets you write different characters on screen! I simply wrote all my maps with ASCII characters where each symbol meant a different unit, enemy or obstacle. During the level design I also designed the player’s units, the enemies, the obstacles and the player behavior. I also had to design how each of these interact with each other, which I did, but did not think it through (as will be seen later). For each level I wrote down the layout of the room, and my proposed solution to see that all levels are passable.

When the level designs were done, I actually had to go and visit my father, and then meetup with some friends (earlier engagements). That wasted several important hours, and as soon as I came back I sat down, pulled an all nighter and drew all of the tiles.

These look less than pretty, but that was what I was able to come up with at such short time and with limited skills. In the official version, I hope to partner with an artist and make some super awesome graphics! In fact, if there’s an artist who wishes to join me, feel free to contact me.

I also started scripting the UI, it was then when I realized, that MinimalComps is simple only if you don’t touch it! I just wanted to make the font larger, and discovered that it was not really supported, so I had to hack the code, another waste of time…

Sunday:

Next morning,  unfortunately, I had to go to work. Yes, there are countries in which Sunday is a work day, mine is one of them! Another waste of time…

As soon as I got back, I started frantically coding. The first thing I did was coding a level map reader, so that I could simply put my earlier notepad designs in, and it would layout the level for me. That worked pretty well and saved me some time, and so I started to crank up the first levels. I coded the behaviors of the units and enemies, play-tested it, fixed some issues and continued.

As I reached the more advanced levels, the time was starting to run out, and then I realized that the advanced levels assumed some abilities that I had not coded, and were now pretty complicated to make. For instance, the enemy archers should shoot my player as he runs out if they are not occupied, even if they are not on the same row with it. However, I coded the archers to only shoot at stuff coming on their row, which made them pretty pointless as enemies if they are not in the player’s row, which they weren’t, because I had already put some other stuff in that row…

Since it was already too late, I decided to scratch the last 4 levels, and I quickly designed a single new advanced level which would fit with what I already coded. After that was done, I play-tested the game from start to finish and saw that it’s playable. However, I only play-tested the right solutions, I didn’t try to play-test wrong player behavior due to lack of time.

I had maybe 2 hours left at that point, and I wanted some spare time in case of uploading trouble. The one feature which was obviously missing was a “Restart Level” button for when you die. I really hadn’t planned it in advance, it was an afterthought, and as a result, it only works half the time…

Well, that’s it.

So, to sum up:

What worked-

• I selected in advance tools that I’m familiar with, which made my job easier.
• I chose an idea which I honestly like, and I think has a lot of potential.
• I made the level design first. This gave me insight into the coding.
• I coded the level map reader, which allowed me to easily switch level layouts, and this could expand later on reading output from a full fledged level editor.

What didn’t work-

• The biggest problem was that I didn’t make enough time to work on it properly. I will try to amend this in future LDs.
• I gambled on MinimalComps for UI, which I didn’t really know, and it only partly paid off.
• I didn’t think through the interactions between the components of my game, when I designed the levels.
• The “Restart Level” feature was an afterthought, I should have thought about it in advance. More generally speaking, I should have sat down and decide on what features are a must before starting to code.
• I only play-tested the solutions to the puzzles, and didn’t give much thought to other actions that the players might do.

In the end, despite all the faults, I am pretty satisfied with the fact I have an idea which has potential to become an interesting game, and from the feedback I’ve been given, I’m not the only one to see this (which is a first).

Yo peeps

It’s not dead, so I can’t really perform a postmortem examination, but let’s take a critical look at my second Ludum Dare entry.

The main thing I wanted to achieve this LD was to make a multiplayer game that was fun to play with my family and mates. After my first LD, I was proud of what I had made but was aware that it wasn’t a whole lot of fun to play, and lacked polish. It’s cool, but I wanted to do better this time. My main focus was to make it fun. I think I have done that.

What went right

Focus on fun – I wanted to make something that I would actually play after the competition was over, and that other people would have fun with. I kept it as simple as I could, and focused on making it fun. I think I succeeded here.

Getting feedback early – I made sure that I got other people to play it before it was done. I think this ended up making a huge difference to the multi player. When my brother played it with me, he wanted a way to kill me himself, and the trailing asteroid turned out to be the most fun way to do this. Getting people to play test it during the competition definitely helps.

What went wrong

I must be looking at this with rose-coloured glasses, because I’m having trouble coming up with something. I guess this means that keeping it simple means a lot less goes wrong. That being said, I’m sure you all will have plenty of constructive criticism to share. Check it out, and let me know what you think I did right and wrong with this game.

Play Take This Convoy

Okay, that was a first and that was quite short, but I did participate ! From the 8 hours I had left from the week end (3 hours saturday between diapers stuff and few hours monday evening, before throwing all I had eaten, no no, no more details), it was interesting to think what idea and what game could possibly be done from the theme “Its’ dangerous to go alone ! Take this !”.

From knowing the theme, in the night (3 or 4 am where I live), till the morning (yes, while I was asleep), I thought about the game idea, and what came out was obvious for me: the player must not be alone in his quest, and I do not have time for multiplayer ! Soooooooo.. let’s play multiplayer with one player ! (this guy did not sleep at all, or did he fell on his head ?) And that’s what I wanted to create : other players, or ghosts as you can see them in car race game, that will do exactly as you do, but not at the same time. And to make it useful, the goal is to make THEM shoot the enemy, not your main character, that will be defenseless.

I use Unity3D, it’s very easy to make a prototype with this engine, but I did not use the physics engine a lot, but I tried to use it anyway, that’s the goal of a Ludum Dare, try new things ! So let’s put a first character, let’s control him with arrows, from a side point of view (2D platform like) and make a whole bunch of ghosts linked to this character: as a chain, or a rope you could say. Many tries later (did I mention I did not use the physics engine a lot ? :s ), I had a functional chain following the main character. Quite… not fun ! All the player moves were repeated exactly by the chained elements, with a spring effect, some axis constraints for the position or rotation, but the effect was.. not there. So I tried something else: from the player controller, let’s send the moves and jump events to another controller with a delay, and from this controller, send the events to the next one with a delay, etcaetera, etcaetera.

Ok, this works better ! It’s fun to see the ghosts do the same moves as you do but with a delay, that’s little pets following you, wait.. following not every move ! Okay, key touches are not exactly the type of events you can store and send very easily, and even if it’s working well in most cases, all pets do not follow the main character, and more important : how can they do exactly the same moves when there are mountains, jumps over rivers, and so on ? Let’s add a simple AI: tell the pets to move closer to the main character if there are too far away, and that’s the new target !

Quickly, this first prototype worked well, I was pleased to see the result: all the pets moving around the main character But there is no goal at this game ! Erh.. Wait, it’s sunday evening and I have to change my new born son diapers.. okay, let’s say the compo is over for me, I will post it tomorrow evening, after my work day.

It’s quiet in this world, there is nothing to hear, and the built terrain from the wonderful terrain builder in Unity is shiny ! Let’s create some music, oh wait: I’m no musician ! Okay, I’ve got garageband on my mac, let’s play with it ! Cool, there’s some very good sample, at least I like them, and that’s create an “ambiance” that do not fit at all with the environment I created. Let’s start over… the environment, that will be faster than recreate a music ! Dark sky, new terrain, new Island ambiance, I like that ! But that’s not enough to have a playable game…

It’s dangerous, so there must be monsters to kill ! It had some so freaky smart monsters (red cubes that jumps and goes towards everything near it) and a simple counter, and voilà ! Hum, okay, there should be a portal to the next level or something to make a good transition, let’s add a particules system, let’s make it red first, and it will turn green when all monsters are killed ! That went well, it’s easy with Unity, but it was already late, and I started to feel very tired, so the green portal has never been coded, but at least I could add a “title screen”, a “game over screen” and a “you won screen”.

That was short : I tried a few things new, I enjoyed doing this and I submitted a game: that’s something I’m proud of, even if I do not like very much the result (there is no polish. at. all.).

So, let’s put the right link for the web playable version, and here’s some instructions :

- turn on the speakers,

- use the arrows to move,

- use space bar to jump,

- kill all monsters,

You’re done !

I’m in for Mini-LD #26.

Here’s what I plan to use for this:

• ActionScript 3 – Programming Language
• FlashPunk – Boilerplate Library
• Flex – AS3 Compiler
• Geany – IDE
• Inkscape – Graphics
• as3sfxr – Sound Generator

I’m not sure what I’ll make just yet. But, I’ve realized that I really do like Flash and I really do like AS3. I shouldn’t fight that love.

Peace, love, and clean code,

— Mr. Dude

Hups, i planned on uploading the timelapse of making the game the day after the compo but forgot to since i intended to add some gameplay video into a dead period of the timelapse. Never got around to it and instead of just letting it rot on my drive i decided to upload it now as is instead. Better late than never eh?

Timelapse video on vimeo

????

What do these mean?

I’m not that great at post-mortems or recaps or whatever, but I did polish up my game a little bit after the competition ended. It handles different resolutions better now and delivers in-game messages in a less annoying way. It also includes music and a voice-over for the intro, not included in the compo version because I couldn’t/didn’t make them myself.

So, without further ado, Leaving the Vault v0.3.0:

• Windows Version
• Linux Version
• Cross-Platform Python Version

I’m really not likely to make any further additions or improvements to this specific game. I’ve started collecting all the best parts of the code and some other things I made into a framework to use at the next (mini) LD. I suppose I’ll see you all then!

The date is set!

May 27 – 29, 2011

Update #5 :by PoV

[ Submit Here | View All Entries ]

Update #4 :D

Choose your own theme or themes from the list, Please state your theme(s) in the titlescreen of your entry

• Descend
• Demolish
• Destroy
• Detonate
• Dig
• Dirt
• Drill
• Dynamite

(more…)

Well, my game didn’t turn out too bad! I’ve received some encouraging comments on it, and hopefully some generous ratings. If you haven’t played it yet, here’s the link and a screenshot to catch your attention:

Take this! (and everything else)

I have to say, making this game in 48 hours was really fun. Hadn’t I been busy after the weekend, I would have pounced on my other project(s), and started working on them like I was on a 48 hour deadline, from all the adrenaline pumped in my veins. I probably had more fun making it than I had playing it! So after hearing the feedback on my game, here’s my own judging of it:

When I was thinking about what my game would be like, I tried to design something that would be easy to implement, easy to learn, but challenging. It worked more or less. It was simple, but because of the time limit, I wasn’t able to make difficulty settings or levels or game modes. This, like I was afraid it would, made the game hard to balance in terms of different player skill. It works if you only play it one or two times, as it becomes “hard” pretty fast. However, once you get the hang of it, when you reach the maximum difficulty (which you will, very fast) all the challenge disappears. I myself got to over 800 points and then stopped because I was so terribly bored. Players who played it once or twice reported between 102 and 60-something, but I’m sure they would have gotten the same score as I did if they kept on playing. I was only able to face this issue by the very end, since I had been making the engine up till then, and I was pretty tired.

So that was the main issue: The game advanced too quickly in the beginning and didn’t advance enough at the end. I think it would have helped to have more than 6 characters (I found that having a lot of items really spiced it up, especially after there were more items that fingers on your hand. Besides that, about the graphics, in terms of prettiness, they are simplistic and overall look like they were made by a child, but in terms of being practical, they’re very informative and really helped the players learn and play the game without becoming confused about what’s happening (one could expect this to become an issue in a timed reflex game about a crowd barging into your home). The sounds and music are non-existent due to the deadline, but like someone noted, it’s “Better than bad sounds”. Like the same person said, “the lack of polish is obvious”. So I’d like to apologize once again for the default Game Maker message box and highscore table. It was added right at the end. It was late, I was tired and realized that I needed something like that. Sorry! But I was very happy with the initial splash screen, which was also added at the very end.

After this very long reflection on an insane weekend of game developing, I’d like to end by saying that I’ll probably be polishing and expanding this game a fair bit after the competition. Hopefully I’ll fix the difficulty issue by adding more characters/levels, add some more gameplay mechanics (restoring health), giving it audio content and polishing it a bit (at least remove the default Game Maker stuff). Maybe I’ll include it as a mini-game in the main game I’m making.

Thanks for reading, thanks for playing and thanks for the feedback!

Here is a shiny graph of votes and coolness

It generates itself from the current data so it will be up to date.
It will actually work for some previous competitions too.

This was my second LD and I’ve partaken in numerous Allegro Speedhacks before so I was quite used to the format and knew what I was getting into. I also had the fortune to have a completely empty schedule for the entire dare, so I could go into it 100%.

I choose to go with AS3, because that what I program in daily but I hadn’t used Flixel before. In retrospect it absolutely speeded up my development but  I don’t think I will use it again as it didn’t really match my coding style. All in all I’m pretty happy with the outcome even if it came out a bit too difficult.

You can try out the game here:
clicky

What went wrong
- scope
The original idea had way too many features that of course didn’t make it in the end. I had planned everything from magic weapons to hordes of different enemies but in the end only melee and ranged weapons. In addition to this every little fighter is simulated with too much detail. They have damage levels, different weapon skills, and other preferences that the player never sees. This could all have been removed with out affecting the game, saving a lot of time.

- balancing
When the game eventually was playable I realized that it would be a nightmare to balance. All the little things that controlled the fighters, merchants and soldiers made the inner workings way too complex. Changing on variable had unforeseeable results which in the end kept me from even trying.

- scheduling
I sat working way too many hours without taking any breaks. Not good. This made me very tired and I had difficulties tying everything together in the end. 

What went right
- idea
The idea of running a shop came almost right away and I was quite fond of it. I hoped that the supply idea and the whole balancing act as a weapons supplier would work good enough to build around. It did work out fairly well I think and I think the choices presented to the player are interesting enough with room for improvement. 

- graphics
I aimed pretty low for the graphics and just wanted to have something that was recognizable. I used breaks in coding to spend time on improving the graphics and I think it works well for what it is.

- difficulty
Even if the game is set at ‘developer difficulty’ and it wasn’t really intended, I must say I quite like it that way. It is relentlessly difficult, but still fair enough to the player and it always feels doable to win. At least next time you play.

…
That’s it! As I’m currently reviewing and rating all the entries I’m amazed by the rich and creative spectra. Good work all!

Since some of the entries get a LOT of comments i feel that we should put some of the not so famous entries into the spotlight. This is a list of all entries and the number of comments they have received. It was quite interesting  (and sad)  that so many (42) entries was almost ignored getting less than 2 comments and that 16 entries got no comments at all.

So, let’s see to it that everyone gets some feedback by the end of the voting period =)

0 LD20X6: Initialisms by whitelynx(2)
0 Mary’s Awesome Adventure by brainiac256(8)
0 Matt’s Trial Dungeon by matt9837(0)
0 Only for voting by vladp(0)
0 Quest for the enlightenment by medice(0)
0 Right Thing. Right Time. by chinchang(2)
0 Soul Keeper [ fixed link ] by floko(0)
0 Space Adventures In Space by lord-tim(0)
0 Square City [jam only] by oberhamsi(0)
0 Super Fat Man by wweemmnn(0)
0 The Creek by petermd(0)
0 The Legend of Iowa by synthecism(0)
0 Torches by condr(0)
0 UpdateGames by samuellevy(0)
0 Violent Security Essentials by slowxm(0)
0 Zombieland by panbake(0)
1 A Sword and His Hero by rtward(0)
1 A Unnamed Whale Adventure by anthonyl(0)
1 Brik by alexandersshen(0)
1 DudeBlob by agnulf(0)
1 Escape Alone by guns_are_toys(0)
1 Fearless journalist version 0.9 by nguillemot(0)
1 From the wreck of HMS Lightning… by arowx(0)
1 G.R.A.N.T. Device by emptyflash(1)
1 GunHack by samuraiforever(0)
1 Hoot & Annie by uncade(0)
1 Hot Potato by gbgames(0)
1 House of Dangerous Kittens by spoon(7)
1 Icarus’ Descent by 8bitmuse(0)
1 Insert Rupy and take th… take something by tut-tuuut(3)
1 It’s dangerous to “go” alone. by tehalynn(2)
1 It’s Dangerous to Fall Alone by tfendall(0)
1 It’s Too Dangerous To Go Alone Take This Shotgun a.k.a Not The Game We Wanted To Make by spleeny(0)
1 Its not dangerous anymore by goatfactory(0)
1 KingsExercise by cornedor(0)
1 LD72 by fredericrp(0)
1 So I herd u liek memetics (Also Comic Sans) by nandrew(0)
1 The Invasion of The Blobs by philhassey(1)
1 The Way Home by pdyxs(0)
1 towlrAlone by redbone(1)

(more…)

Is should note that I’m developing my entry, Against the Wall, into a full game. You can check out my progress on the game’s new site. I’ll post a non-compo webplayer there in the near future.

Now for some self-analysis: On the Friday evening of the competition, I initially tossed around a number of ideas that in retrospect look like the ramblings of a madman. The best one was about a herd of cattle that get telekinetic powers and rampage through a city. Not wanting to do the animation for that, I eventually settled on something simpler: a 3D platformer where the player must climb something by using a special item that forms ledges. I was hoping for something Mirror’s Edge style with the platforming, but the eventual hasty execution of that game mechanic left something to be desired.

I made a bunch of boxes, wrote some C# code that made them react to the player’s input, and limited this input by requiring the acquisition of a special item. What the item was, I had no idea at this point. I was wavering between a tk glove or a magnetic device before calling it a magic wand and moving on.

Saturday began with a texture hunt. I grabbed a digital camera and took pictures of some marble and granite surfaces in a nearby park. Other elements photographed were a blue bath towel, a bookcase, and a random metal box. I applied the stone textures to the boxy models which I created the night before with Blender.

For the procedural world, I bit off more than I could chew. The number of bricks that would exist on even a small chunk of the wall would quickly add up into the thousands, causing my PC to chug. I spent almost all of Saturday on this feature.

Sunday started with mesh creation. I made a model for the quest giver and faced him away from the player’s starting point, so that the player may initially think it was a human silhouette in the distance. I pinned a note to him (that pops-up and goes away far too quickly) that quoted the theme of the competition, and placed the wand in front of him. I crafted the city-ledge high above the player, made fake walls for the unplayable areas, and scripted some code that would trigger the player’s “winning” of the game. Problem is, I didn’t test it. The blocks that I had placed in a gap under the city that were supposed to be movable were prevented from moving due to a glitch. Imagine my surprise when I found out that my compo entry couldn’t be beaten!

The take-away? Primarily, I need to budget my time better. I spent almost all of Saturday on my ambitious procedural generator. Placing the bricks by hand would have been well enough and would have taken less time. I should have focused more on the platforming gameplay and level design. Second, I should have set aside the last few hours of the compo for testing my game. Instead, I left everything to the last moment, resulting some major bugs. Third, I went into an eleventh-hour panic when I couldn’t log into my server and Dropbox was my only alternative, then panicked because I did not load it in the right compression format, then panicked that I didn’t initially put up a webplayer, ending-breaking bug, etc. In other words, I need to chill out.

The competition was a fun challenge, and its constraints forced me to think outside the box and make something unique and interesting. My objective now is to flesh-out the game world with some story, add a variety of gameplay mechanics, and form this mess of hastily assembled code into a game.

Please take the time to play and criticize the compo entry. If you like what you see, you can follow my progress on Against the Wall ‘s site.

So, not being satisfied with the completion rate of my LD entyr, i decided to work on it some more and upload it to a Flash hosting site. I spent waaay mroe time improving it than I intended, and people are still pointing out bugs, which I’m trying to hunt down.

Anyways, I’m pretty much satisfied with what I got now, and I already spammed some flash-hosting services with it.

So, what’s changed:

Level redesign
LD version didn’t even use half of the 128×128 tile grid, the improved version utilises almost all of it.

Graphics upgrade
Added many new tiles, redrawn some enemies, added flickering effect to bullet to distinguish them from other stuff. Also, parallax background (yay!)

Final boss
Added a boss, and a pretty hard one. Actually, it’s the only hard thing. Or…

No future mode
When you beat the game, you have an option to test your skills in ‘no future mode’ (a cake to anyone who figures where this term comes from) IMO it’s unbeatable, but who knows….

Explosions
I aimed at having a lot of explosions in this entry, and all I had was some dust. I fixed this by adding loooooooooooots of explosions.

Plot
Now it has an intro, therefore a plot. It might not be an epic one, but it comes with a twist Also, I made the character talk. Talking animation was done during the LD, but there was no code to wrap it around.

More weapons
Haha, no, that’s a lie.

Game balance + physics update
I updated the physics a bit, so that you have more control over the character, and balanced the game so it might actually get tough at some point. I took my time to reply the game thousand times to balance it properly.

Music
Actually, music is the very same cause I couldn’t push myself to change it after listening to it so many times, even tho I know it’s shit But I added intro music (not mine, tho). Ok, I changed the music track due to lots of comments saying it’s shit . I spent about 2 minutes making the old track so no wonder Anyways, the new one should sound much better.

Now let me nag you with this lengthy comparison:

And try it there:

Kongregate

Newgrounds

Original LD entry

Also, it’s awaiting approval on other sites I spammed with it. Wish me luck with that!

Hello there,
I just found out about LD from Notch (the creator of Minecraft). I think its a great idea, and I’m gonna try to participate in the next event (August?).
Anyhow, does anyone here think its against the rules of the competition to take the Platformer Kit in XNA and heavily modify it (add features, use custom art, etc.) and then submit that as your game? I mean, if you add a story and completely redo the art and stuff, its not the same game at all. I’ve been learning C# for a while, but only made 2 games or so. I find that getting started is the hardest part, but once I’m past that I’m fine.

Thanks,
Varmitharen

I THINK POTATOES ARE AWESOME LOLOL

Let me tell you about my first ever 48 hour Ludum Dare experience!  I made a top-down puzzle game where you, the player, control the movement of both a green Link-like guy and a kitten at the same time.  It is dangerous to “go” alone! Take this [kitten].  ”Go” as in, yes, “going” to the bathroom.  In this puzzle game you have to collect TP for the toilet and litter for the litter box!

Play the game – Click here for my game’s competition entry page.

I’ll go through my experience chronologically as I talk about how my game came together, and then I’ll also tell you about the process of making each of my levels if you don’t mind spoilers.

Part 1 – How 48 Hours Turned Into a Game

Ok, so Friday night the theme was announced. When I saw it, I simultaneously felt like I had to do something Zelda-like, while also not wanting to do anything so literal.  The direct reference to such a classic game put me in a bit of a mental bind.

I started brainstorming ideas. For inspiration, I grabbed from the internet both the Zelda screenshot and the famous meme image. I actually had them up on my screen during the whole contest!

Inspiration: The Dangerous Duo

Some Zelda parody ideas popped into my head right away, but because you can’t reuse existing Zelda graphics for Ludum Dare, my ideas basically amounted to “recreate Zelda,” and that seemed a little impractical in 48 hours. There was one particular moment from the first Zelda that I kept thinking about:

Kittens are made of meat…

For more inspiration, I started to read everybody’s blog entries, and I was amazed by all of the clever interpretations of the theme.  I started to think about each word in the theme individually, and tried to figure out how I could play off of it. It was then on Friday night that playing on the word “go” hit me with an idea: I’d been wanting to do a simple classic top down puzzler for awhile, so what if I did something with needing to “go” to the bathroom.  I figured the player could be a little Link guy like from Zelda, and there could be a kitten companion (like from the meme) at the same time.  Visions of pixel toilets and pixel litter boxes flashed in my head.

More after the jump!

(more…)

Let me start saying that this is my second LD (previous one was LD17). Before entering to LD20 I watched the keynote and I “almost” cried: It’s great to be part of this.

So let’s start the postmortem of The Last Robot Standing…

Before knowing the theme

I wanted to make an isometric game like the ones I played when I was a child. I still remember the day when I played Knight Lore a game made by Ultimate (aka Rare) in 1984 for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum game.. it was the first “3D” game I had played and the graphics and gameplay were incredible.

The name of the game engine of Knight Lore was Filmation. So my goal was to make a Filmation engine-like game for LD20.

More information here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Lore

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filmation_engine

My reaction to the theme

At the begginning I didn’t like the theme. I remembered I vote against it. But majority rules

It was hard to think about a game that was original and my first take was to refuse to use the “take this” part of the theme as part of the gameplay.. I wanted to use it for fun only instead of getting an object like a gun or something like that. That proved to be very hard

Tools

I used:

Coding: Game Maker 8.1

Graphics: Paint.net

Music: ChordPulse + GXSCC

Audio: Audacity (I recorded my own voice for “sfx”)

Game development blog

The first day I was working on the engine. I wanted to have a map made of 8×8 isometric rooms, with two height levels made of fixed and movable objects.

I started with a basic 2D map and gameplay:

Then I changed the “draw” methods to make it isometric, I had already experimented with isometric graphics so it wasn’t too hard.

I added then movable objects using the chapter “Pushing boxes” in the book “The Game Maker’s Companion: Game Development: The Journey Continues”

Then I added jumps to the main character and movable boxes stopped working. Also, calculating depht was very hard and it was more like a trial-and-error solution rather than a bullet-proof algorithm.

It took hour to realize the movable objects weren’t solid objects so that was the reason I coudn’t jump over movable objects.

After that I implemented enemies. Enemies were very simple, they have an initial direction and speed and an arm rule (left or right). If they collide they use the arm rule to find a new direction.

After implemented enemies, I broke the movable objects code again I came up with terrible hacks to solve it

I changed to a B&W (actually 4 colors) look and feel, and I added a B&W TV “filter” (actually it’s a transparent sprite). That was the end of day one:

So starting the second day, I had a pretty decent engine but not a theme-related gameplay.

Eventually, like 6 hours before deadline, I decided that the object was going to be a music or mp3 player that the hero would use to listen to music during the game.

In a couple of hours I put together four “songs” using ChordPulse (a relatively unkown “band-in-a-box”-like application) and then I saved the songs as MIDI files and gave them a 8-bit treatment using GXSCC.

A couple of hours before deadline I decided to use the movable blocks to push enemies against mortal blocks (spikes). It was hard to make the enemies instances to remember that they were killed when entering again to the same room, but I could solve it.

One hour before deadline I came up with an idea for the game ending…. so the game now had a story

What went right

The tools: I have become very proficient in Game Maker. It is simple to use. Now with version 8.1 it was easier to edit rooms. For the graphic style Paint.net was great and for music…

The music: I really love ChordPulse and GXSCC. I could put together 5 songs that I’m very proud of. The songs are not great compositions but I think they are simple and add value to the game. This is the “final battle” tune (it’s simple but I really like it):

Final Battle song

The engine: I can’t believe I actually wrote a filmation-like engine… I wish it was 1984 and I would have been rich Of course the engine is super simple, but I think it’s a good start

The gameplay: I really liked the gameplay.

What went wrong.

The music: I really would have liked to have more time to compose more and better songs.
The graphics: I’m not very good at graphics, I’m mainly a programmer so my graphics are very blocky and geometric
Few game elements: the hero, fixed blocks, movable blocks, mortal blocks and one type of enemy.. but I couldn’t do more in 48 hours
Few rooms – small map… again I couln’t do more in 48 hours.

Conclusions

I really liked this LD, I’m proud of finishing a game in 48 hours and I will continue working in my isometric engine.

I hope you enjoy playing the game as much as I enjoyed making it.

My entry

A gameplay video in spanish

Good luck to all participants

I never finish my games. There are exceptions of course, but even now, I have urges to let Minions or Champions or whatever I’m calling my LD0 catchup game fall into the past. I managed to finish two games when I was in middle school. Ugly, ugly things. My code for those two games was the most unprofessional thing I have seen to date, and the result wasn’t pretty. I got them sponsored, but I think games were easier to get sponsored back then. After a long break from game making, in 2009, I finished another game. It was pure mediocrity. But it was an improvement.  It’s still sitting on FGL waiting for a sponsor.  But my code was cleaner. And this year (school year; sorry but I go to school and that’s how my perception of time is ordered), I finished my miniLD25 entry, Blind, and my LD20 entry, The Legend of Zelda on Budget Cuts. I consider them to both be successes at least in terms of good coding practices. And in between this all, numerous, various projects have fallen into neglect and died. But this year, it’s not as bad as before.

So the question is: why? What changed? And I think I have the answer: both LDs, I was motivated to sit down and finish the job. In all cases — whether it was working through the night and till the deadline, or … scratch that “or”, I did that both times — I had a specific goal and a specific time period to finish. My other projects almost all got too ambitious. Each of these times, the project was exactly what I expected. Each time, I counted on spending part of the weekend working on the game, and got that exact amount done in practically the whole weekend. But I did get it done.

So I need to motivate myself. I need to set clearer goals and duedates. So I am resolving to take on a medium sized project (I’m not quite ready for major yet), and finish it before the summer is out. I haven’t decided what it is yet, but there are plenty of options. Note that I said project, but not game. I’ll get back to this in a minute.

This school year, I got a lot more serious about programming than I was before. I plan to double up on two CS classes next year. I will be taking the two semester AP compsci course, and the two single semester systems level programming and computer graphics classes. This means that on entering systems and graphics, all my classmates will have taken the AP class and I will have not. In order to be allowed to take the class, I have to learn Java and familiarize myself with all the standard data structures common to most languages. And this must be done by the start of class, so I have the summer to finish. This might be my project.

I also want to learn two (and a half) other languages/programs. I want to learn python, and also Unity in one form or another (most likely using javascript or Boo). The half is that I think mathematica might be worth knowing. Learning one of these properly might be my project.

Of course, I might simply make a rather complex game.

So why am I telling you this? Not because you have to care (though that would be nice) and not because I want to vent about how I never finish anything (though let me tell you, it really sucks), but because there’s no taking it back once someone reads this (assuming the amount I have typed does not scare every prospective reader away). This is it. I’m committing to doing something, and no more needs be said.

–
Mikhail Rudoy

P.S. Someone please remind me how to add the more tag so that I can edit it in and edit this postscript out.

As the title says, the post-compo version of my entry, Torch, is now live on Kongregate. I’ve addressed most of the bugs I found, added sounds and music, some more detail to the tile set, and other miscellaneous things.

http://www.kongregate.com/games/alexlarioza/torch

Neat! Quaintbrush was featured today as a jayisgames.com Weekend Download.

Check it out:

http://jayisgames.com/archives/2011/05/weekend_download_184.php