Ludum Dare 21 Post Mortem

LD21 marks my third serious attempt at completing a game in 48 hours. On the previous two attempts, I stalled on Sunday
morning and didn’t finish.

The theme this time was “Escape”. It wasn’t one that I voted for, but I could work with it. You can see the results here.

My idea was that the player is a process marked for deletion in a Tron-like computer system. Player must navigate through various cores (levels) to reach the free network. He has to avoid firewalls, sentry programs and search bots.

I didn’t get my intro screens done in time, so the story itself isn’t really in the game, and you wouldn’t know unless you read this. Ah well.

All in all, I was extremely pleased with the weekend. I submitted a game, which was a huge goal. I didn’t do anything drastically wrong; although I could definitely do more things more right. Now it’s just a matter of continual improvement.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

1) Ruby Ruby Ruby! Man I love this language. It’s plenty fast for these kinds of game. I was constantly amazed at how quickly I could go from thinking of a feature, to seeing it in the game. Ruby isn’t always the best tool for the job, but it’s usually the first tool I reach for.

2) Gosu Gosu Gosu! The gosu library (www.libgosu.org) with ruby bindings takes a zen like minimalism approach. Load a graphic, blit it. Load a sound, play it. Not a whole lot of options. But you know what? It was exactly the right amount. It did its job when asked and stayed out of my way otherwise. It conformed to the way that I worked, rather than requiring me to conform.

3) More time devoted to artwork. Previous LD efforts were almost entirely coding, with no thought to art other than the barest stand-in images. Never sound or music. This time, while my art isn’t great, it’s all there, along with sound and music. Not great, but a huge step forward in terms of actually finishing.

4) Family support. It’s hard to overstate how awesome it is to have a family that was not only willing to let me disappear into the cave for the whole weekend, but would actually bring me food and water. Thanks ladies!

5) Git. I can’t imagine working without a repository now. Even in a single user environment. Next time I’ll be setup on github.

WHAT WENT WRONG

1) Collision detection. I borked this part up HARD. And I spent a lot of time looking in the wrong places. This is one of those basic game formula that I should have known, should have easily implemented, should have loaded from a gem, something. Spending several hours reinventing the wheel (or square, in this case) was frustrating and wasteful.

2) Ergonomics and comfort. Apple peripherals are stylish and pretty, but by the end, my wrists and shoulders were killing me. Using a Magic Trackpad for Photoshop work was a lesson in pain. TextMate took too many keystrokes to do oft-repeated actions. And I felt like I was constantly reaching for the trackpad, just to change window focus so I could go back to the keyboard. Probably just a matter of figuring out the right way to do it. I want to be able to never take my hands off the keyboard when coding. Even reaching for the arrow keys has to go. That might mean emacs. Sigh.

3) Cross platform issues can’t be put off to the last minute. I should have been doing Windows builds the whole time. I was also packaging everything by hand, which is error prone. My uploaded entry is missing the right audio libs, so I’ll need to fix that. So next time, some rake tasks for doing builds automatically, and frequent Windows tests.

NEXT TIME

Ruby and Gosu, definitely. That combination just works. Figure out packaging and cross platform stuff ahead of time. Find (or build) a gem with some basic game dev primitives. Improve my editor-fu. Not as much junk food.

TOOLS USED
OSX Lion
Ruby 1.9.2 / 1.8.7
Gosu
Ocra
TextMate
git
Photoshop CS3
GarageBand
Audacity

ENTRY :: PLAY :: TIMELAPSE

• I don’t know how to draw.
• I don’t know how to compose music.
• I’m not a fast coder.

But somehow I managed to send something for this, my first LD.

I thought about making use of my previously designed Framework, as I posted before, but it turned out to be useless for what I wanted to do. In fact, most of the bugs I had were because of the framework, so at a point I decided to don’t use it. I ended up embedding all the animations by myself, using Actionscript 3 default listeners, and only relying on TweenMax for the animations.

Talking about animations, I mentioned that I don’t know how to draw, so I decided to make easy drawings, but that wouldn’t look good… That’s why I decided to create the line-moving drawings (I don’t know what is the actual name, I’m sure it has one). Also, glow always looks good, so everything was glowed by code.

At the beginning I didn’t like what I was doing, but after I started adding animations, I really liked what I was achieving, I just couldn’t believe it.

I really wished I could have done other scenes (The Escapist tied on a wood plank, going to a chainsaw), but the animations took me so long to make, and the code was getting so messy, I decided to put just one scene.

The code is far from perfect (but it’s really close to hardcode-perfect), and I have some random bugs that attacks and freeze the game without saying a thing, but I think it’s playable (I hope so!).

All I want to say is thanks for making me draw and thanks for making me code fast. Thanks for this opportunity. It was beautiful to see people all over the world uploading pictures of what were they eating, pictures about their workstations, their design docs… It was an amazing experience, and I hope I’m back next time!

This post will be edited in the next hours/days since I will upload my timelapse later and will add more statistics and stuff…

If you are interested in this kind of information about my game: Bookmark or leave the Tab open

Wanna know moar?

(more…)

Right! So I’ve made a timelapse during this whole thing! It’s split into two parts:

Part 1: Singleplayer. Uploaded during the compo and posted on IRC.
Part 2: Multiplayer. Uploaded a moment ago.

The two songs used in them represent the two anime soundtracks that helped me keep motivated throughout the compo. (Haha)

Computers used:

Battleship Asus: Android tablet running Ubuntu 11.04. (AH THE DETERMINATION)

Battleship PC: A quad-core PC with 4GB of RAM, used towards the end of timelapse part 2.

Apps used: gedit, terminal, javac, zip, mtpaint, nano, wc -l, etc.

Timelapses:

Timelapse part 1

Timelapse part 2

And Firefox suggested this to me

Seems like Notch is quite famous in LD. Well, he brought tons of people here (including me), so not a big surprise.

Anyways, I’m fixing up some things in my game and making a video on how to get faster. My record is 230km, and nobody went over 100 in the highscores yet. SHAAAAME ON YOUUUU.
EDIT: Video is done!

I decided to write a little postmortem about my first Ludum Dare while it still was fresh in the memory.
It how ever got bit longish so I posted it to my own forum and decided to link to it here (so I don’t whore up all the front-page).

So if you’re interested you can check it out in here.

There’s some screen-shots from the progress included =)

everything finished …exept for the leveldesign

now this is what i call a gooooooooood level..makes you wanna play it..right? right? right?

after this will be bugfixing time

yup, it breaks.

Well, nevermind. It was against the rules so I restored the links for the version I sent within the 48 legit hours. Sorry about that, I’ll keep updating the game on my own but I won’t submit it to the compo

So, I did it. In 48 hours, I made a game about a bunny escaping from an animal testing laboratory. It’s called “It’s A Bunny Story, Actually…” and you can check its competition page here.

It doesn’t quite have everything that I was hoping to add, but it has ‘enough’, I think. If it gets a positive reception, then I’ll most likely go back to it, maybe even tidy it up and add enough content to warrant a commercial release (I’m thinking $2 for 20 levels, or something).

So play it, enjoy it, rate it, and I’ll see you next time.

So this is me sitting in front of my PC, working (mostly).

I love it. In Timelapse everything seems ultra-efficient.

Go Play | LD Entry

-Matthew

Finally, my first game for Ludum Dare: No Escape

And the game entry is here.

I found out that Ludum Dare had started on Saturday, and told myself that I should join in. But, I didn’t act on it. The next day, I wake up with a game idea and the urge to participate. So, I open the Ludum Dare site and found out that they’re in a mess! I am not familiar with the rules of Ludum Dare but, decided to make the game anyway, thinking that I will check on it later when site is back up. After staying up all night, I can finally submit my game “No Escape”.

“No Escape” is a “stomp’em up” game. You play as an angry red eyed giant, stomping on the little guys that tries to escape from your wrath. But, you have to carefully avoid stepping on the little houses, or you’ll trip yourself to death in an epic way XD.

When I started the game, I thought of it as a Tap Dancing game. An idea that crosses my mine: a tap dancer tap-dancing his way to escape from a crazy horse chasing after him XD. But, I’m not so sure how to make a good beat or rhythm from the steps. With less than 24 hours to go, I decided to go for a safer way and make it an obstacle avoidance game. Which then, evolves into a mix of avoidance and stomping game.

That’s all from me. I’ll be glad to hear what you think. Thank you!

I’ve uploaded the timelapse of the development of my game

You can see them here:

Day 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFjMG7mlYh4

Day 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFjogdlqEK0

Well that was fun.

After spending a day and a half working on my original idea – a sidescrolling platformer where you play as a spaceship captain who must escape onto the last escape pod before the core overloads – I realised two things:

1. I suck at making platformers that aren’t buggy piles of rubbish
2. I had just enough time left to start over

So I did. I had 15 hours or so, and apart from a couple of hours here and there I spent them all working on what ended up being called “Escape the Space Nazis!”

The name came from a last-minute thought: “Hey, wouldn’t it look cool if the game was in the style of a WWII propaganda poster?”
Well I’m sure it would, but the stuff I ended up with wasn’t too bad either. Throw in some stuff about ‘Space Nazis’, and BAM – that’s the story done in about five minutes.

There are a few bugs that I had to work around, it’s not the most pleasant thing to look at (or listen to) and there’s only one level – but I hope you enjoy it!
(And in my defense – it was made in 15 hours at the very most!)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=1886

Just submitted an entry to LD for the first time, and well, it’s not the most serious game ever made. Problem was that this Saturday we had decided to play some board games with friends (initially Diplomacy but we ended up with Android) and Sunday we were going to a family dinner. Soo, not much time left to code. Last minute I scrapped my plans of writing an awesome platform game in Scala and threw this ape game together in Java using Slick2D.

After 10 hours, 53 minutes and 20 seconds of frantic coding due to a very late start, the Sky Fell.

Download the 1.8Mb zip file for Windows.

The servers also fell, and while I got my entry  in successfully last night, I left this final post for today. My entry this time around is the most playable and complete game I’ve developed for LudumDare. I’m very pleased with how it turned out – especially seeing I started very late and didn’t put much time into it. The game looks lovely in motion, and unfortunately the grey screenshots don’t do it justice. Saying that, here’s a grey screenshot :

I’m not entirely satisfied with the game. I had to manually program all of the particle effects, something that my previous games never needed because I had tool-set already developed for that. The graphics turned out OK due to an amazing fluke. I bought a new camera, and played with it all the way to work and back on Saturday. When I started my LudumDare entry, I had a huge stash of photos taken during the competition period – just sitting waiting to be used. With a bit of colour correction they turned out ok, but trying to modify anything made me miss my old Wacom Tablet. Hopefully next LD I’ll be back up and running as an artist.

The game takes some practice, but it is possible to win!  Good luck in your Escape  …

Once there was a weekend I made a game in …
… and that was yesterday.

Thank you, McFunkypants to remind me of “write the code, only then you’re ready for making graphics’n'stuff”

Yeah, that worked better, last time I worked on the code, panicked, worked on the graphics, came down and worked on the code again, only to have forgotten a few things.

So, I made a game about escaping ..an interstellar encounter with pirates, flowery aliens, asteroids and a f-ing sun

Goto Entry

You’re the 80′s style super cool, super human rough’n'though chief engineer (something I think about Philhassey and PoV right now ) who’s on board a freighter with some nearly out of the flightschool noobs, who don’t know anything and try to steer you right through the sun. You’ve got to keep the ship together, until your ship reaches the jump gate. You’ve got a crew of 8 nameless – but I’m sure nonetheless cool – mechanics that you can have working on various systems to keep your ship flying.

The idea was that you have these “lets hide in that asteroid field, that would hurt us, but the pirates will surely die sooner” – moments. And “oh god, we’ll never reach that gate, unless we explode our warpcore right behind us, but wouldn’t that hurt the hull to much?”

First of all, I’ve only got one level. Ok, the positions of the enemies and the asteroids change, but their numbers and the positions of you, your target and the sun stay the same. But I had that mentioned moments a few times, so I hope that works.

Second, there are bugs. I couldn’t test it on Windows 7 which seemes to be a problem, since a few friends (but not all of them) with hardcore gaming machines said it would lag und firefox 6. I on the other hand had no problems with my 5 year old core2duo under windows xp. don’t know.

Third, there are bugs. Yeah, again, I’m not sure but I don’t think the shields do that they’re supposed to do. But with the right configuration you’re able to survive the sun. And sometimes the systems bleed health without beeing attacked, don’t know why.

Ah, and something about the weekend: Since I’m in germany I staid up laaate (4 a.m. saturday morning) to get the theme and watch the madness on irc. I got to bed around 4:30, already having the idea in mind, but I didn’t want to miss the morning shower under which I have the best ideas, strangely, before starting something. Around 8 o’clock a child started screeming for hours in the flat right next to mine. I guess my neighbors have guests, since they don’t have child. Argh. Saturday was nearly over after that, I had a headache the whole  day, live streaming didn’t work and my moods were down. I sleeped over the afternoon and then drove to friends to play uno, that was relaxing a bit. I came home Sunday morning around 1 o’clock, and started working. And didn’t much stop until Monday morning 3 o’clock.

And that’s how Make a run for it got made

Thanks to PoV and Philhassey for fixing the server, after we made it crash – and in fact for this whole event!

(hopefully I didn’t miss another person who worked on the LD-Site? If so, please hit me hard and tell me his or her name)

Now the progress I made yesterday.

• Difficulty settings
• Statistics screen
• Extended level
• More spike directions

Aaaand demo: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/18105137/scrash.exe

I have submitted my entry already, let’s see if I can make the game better in time.

See, this is why I love Ludum Dare. I’ve worked on sooo many dungeon crawlers before, but I’ve never quite gotten around to finishing any of them. This time, the theme seemed to fit the gameplay, so I went for it. Here’s the end result:

Prelude of the Chambered

Play it! | Game entry

I recorded the entire process at one screenshot every other second, and streamed it all live. I didn’t do as much talking as I hoped I would. It’s very difficult to stay interesting when concentrating..

The first several hours were spent making the game renderer from scratch. I chose a low resolution screen with simple four bit images that can be tinted to any color, which sets the graphical tone in a nice way while still letting me draw art fast. Levels are designed as images with each color representing a different block, and the alpha channel containing the “id” information. For example, a pressure plate with id (alpha) 200 will open all doors with id (alpha) 200. I can override this default trigger behavior in the code to do more advanced pressure plate logic.

One major inspiration for this game was Link’s Awakening, which I’m currently replaying again on my 3DS, so the game world is based on a central hub with a few different dungeons you need to complete in order. In each dungeon, you find a unique item that lets you access the next dungeon, and a boss monster that drops a key. Once you have four keys, you can open the final door and win the game.

The game play ended up being slightly more action oriented than I originally thought, but that is probably a good thing. Except for a few places where you can get yourself stuck, I think it actually plays fairly well. I tried to design the levels so that there were very few wasted blocks to make the game feel tight and complex. There are two hidden trinkets per level. and usually two hidden powerups as well. All-in-all, there are six levels in the game, and even something that actually feels like a boss fight.

In the last couple of hours, I added stuff like sound (SFXR, woo) and title screens, while trying to play test the game as much as I could. I got in bed at about 5 am or so, feeling exhausted and happy.

Last night I submitted my first ever entry into LD. Loved every minute of the experience. At times I definitely felt like quitting. Glad I got my act together and submitted!

The game itself is a small adventure with a mini game on each screen. Just keep looking around for visual and audio clues and you’ll figure out how to get to the next stage.

Screenshot from the game:

My main focus was to create an interesting atmosphere to suck the player into the weird world. I think I succeeded fairly well in that aspect. The music & graphics work very well together in my opinion. Overall there’s a very distinctive vibe to the game.

I wish I’d had more time to create a few more puzzles and add some more clues into the game on how to resolve the puzzles. But I just ran out of time and probably made some bad design decisions along the way that prohibited me from created more puzzles.

This game was written from scratch in Java using the amazing libgdx framework. Pretty amazing cross-platform framework. Check it out here: http://libgdx.googlecode.com

I’ll definitely be taking this project beyond LD and make a nice little game out of it. It’ll also give me time to further tweak the assets & music and give it some good old polish.

Check the game out here: Still Dreaming

Congrats to the other 500 people that submitted an entry so far (wow!). Looking forward to the next couple weeks of playing everyone’s games!

Cheers,
Bach