I’ve found more than one Love user now who uploaded nothing more than their game’s .Love file. Now technically this is fine, since it’s everything needed to run the game AND source! How convenient!

Unless you don’t have the Love game engine installed.

Now in a normal circumstance it might be reasonable to ask someone to install the engine to run your game. However, in the case of Ludum Dare, we have a mere 599 games to play, test, and rate. When I find games that require much more work than “click link and play” or “download, unzip and run”, I find it very tempting to just move on to the next entry.

The fantastic part is that there’s a very easy solution to this! As detailed here, you can easily build executable packages for windows, linux, and mac! These binaries will be easy for users to download and run without being burdened with installing whatever additional software you might have happened to use in your project, making it quick and painless to rate.

Note that this process falls under “Porting” which you can do at any time after the submission window! So go forth my minions and make your entries ready to run!

So let’s see. Err, okay, let’s put it this way.

I came up with a few things, which will change ‘Dodge – DYLC’ in a major way. Like major major major major minor major way.

I’ll give you a picture.

OMG, It's so new, it could be from the future! (It still only exists in future, though ;^^)

Now, I’ll explain.

First thing you’ll notice: It’s dark. That means it’s night. This is something that I need for the lights, which I need for the enemy behavior.

ENEMYS:

These lights are some sort of alarm. The enemy AI will be changed to shoot waaay faster bullets and they will only shoot if you come like 2 – 3 near them. If you hit a light source, all enemys in a certain zone (see ‘New Mapping’ below) will be alerted and their reaction zone will be increased by 3 – 4 blocks, which makes it harder to pass through the map. As you may get now, this adds a lot of stealth factor to the game (which will probably make McFunkypants quite happy. ;] ) and you can get through the map without being seen.

NEW ENEMY TYPES:

Sniper! (longer reaction distance!)
Scout! (Only able to attack you, when directly in front of him!

MOVEMENT:

Blocky movement was fine for the first demo ‘n’ stuff, but I want to change it to a fluid movement system, also with fluid movement for the crates, as it’s easier to push the crates without hitting the lights like this, because of that I can put more of them into one part, to make the level harder and the puzzles increasingly difficult. Also: If the player is pushing a crate, he’ll be moving slower.

NEW MAPPING:

This is a special thing I definitely want to pull off. If I pull it off correctly it should make the playing experience a lot smoother and it will offer the possibility of using items (See ‘Items’ below) to get to other regions from a point where you have been already. This adds more puzzle.

‘So, WHAT exactly is the new mapping?’, you may ask yourself. There is a simple answer. It’s one huuuuge map, which you can only see a portion off, as you advance on your way, the view will scroll along. It’s that simple.

ITEMS:

You may have noticed a hand symbol on the lower right corner. This is a crud beginning for an pick-up system, which will help you. At the beginning you’ll only be able to carry one thing at a time, until you find a bag or any other container you can take with you, which will increase your carrying limit by 3 (?) for a simple bag and by up to 9 (?) when you got a backpack.

Example items:

Flashlight: Will make you able to light up a certain area, but makes you easier to spot for the guards.
Screwdriver: Allows you to disable the big lights.
Crowbar: Allows you to open crates to search for items.
Knife: For sneaky assassinations.
Axe: For cutting down wooden doors. Will alert enemys within a certain distance.
.. and many more, I’ll see what I can come up with.

NEW TERRAIN FEATURES:

Hills!
Water!
Caves!

And that’s all I could come up with since yesterday. I hope you liked reading through that. Feel free to leave suggestions!

Also: A shout out to all people who gave me nice feedback on the 6-hour version of it. Special shoutout to McFunkypants for inspiring to turn this game into something great!

- Folis

P.S: If you went all: tl;dr: GO READ IT FOR F**KS SAKE!

P.P.S: http://folis-dev.tumblr.com/ – visit my blog!

First the timelapse:

Time Use:

Code (9 hours):

• 4 hours on helicopter and camera control
• 4 hours on NPC behavior, gameplay logic, GUI and integration
• almost an extra hour of debugging a silly bug at 4am when it was time to submit

Graphics (22 hours):

• 1h for the skybox
• 30m for taking photos for textures
• 14h30 (!!!) world creation (modelling and texturing, the buildings and roads and being OCD about it, including 5 hours on the stupid modular road thing)
• 3h15 helicopter model
• 2h40 prisoner model incl. animations

Misc:

• 2h brainstorming

Total: 33 hours / 48

And now post-mortem:

Pro Style:

• Motivation: I was really motivated to get a game done no matter what. I didn’t get distracted by other things, woke up early and used all my available time. At the beginning of the second day I thought about restarting another game as I wasn’t too pleased with this one but I kept going. 4 hours before the deadline I hadn’t even started adding some gameplay but I still continued and in the end I made a game in less than 48 hours (I was a bit late on the dead line due to last minute debugging but since I was sleeping when the compo started it’s still less than 48h total)
• Ideas: I didn’t feel the usual frustration of “bleh, I don’t know what game I want to do”, I had several ideas right from the start.
• Blender: I switched to blender for character animation and it was actually the first time I tried to animate a character in blender. I had watched a few tutorials weeks before so I wasn’t completely clueless still this could have turned into a time sink It wasn’t Blender Just WorksTM. 
• Unity 3D: still awesome, ZBrush: still awesome, not much else to say about those :]

Noob mistakes:

• Not being so good with my 3d software. I just don’t do enough 3d, I do spend time learning them, watching video tutorials (because i can do that while being lazy) but it’s hard to be fast when only actually putting things into practice twice a year for a ludum dare.
• OCD. I wasted a lot of time obsessing over unimportant details. Getting good UV maps, editing small texture details. This was ridiculous, I don’t know why I got so obsessed with little things this time.
• The modular road system: I had a perfectly fine road grid you can see it in my WIP video post. Sure it wasn’t perfect, the roads kind of ended in weird ways but it was Good Enough. Instead I decided to make some modular elements: intersections, turns. Why did I think my helicopter game needed good roads that badly? Then turning my roads into modular tiles didn’t work as expected. I hadn’t carefully planned a good system. So nothing was aligned properly. And then persisted, I wasted 5 hours on those tiles until I was satisfied they aligned properly. 5 hours! More than I spent on coding the gameplay!
• No time to tweak the gameplay. It’s very boring as it is. Due to the time I lost I barely finished some gameplay in time and had to debug in overtime. I could test the gameplay logic by accelerating the time but I didn’t really play my game until after I had submitted it. Too late to fix the gameplay.
• no sound or music :/

I wish I could have made a jam entry out of it and taken the extra day to polish it, but since I had to work on Monday and then finally get some sleep after that I wouldn’t have gained anything by not going for the compo. A lot could be added to this game, I wish there could have been some shooting involved and cars and it could become like a mini-GTA! well if only I had a few months or years

Ludumdare Kajaani was a great success! We had 15 dedicated participants joining the competition and jam last weekend. Thanks to everyone who were involved!

Here are some games that were made during the event!

For more info you can check : http://ldkajaani.blogspot.com/

Now, a couple of days went by and i got a lot of positive feedback, thanks to all of you <3

I must say i am pretty satisfied with my entry. But some comments had me frustrated (not the comments in particular, but the cause of them). People were experiencing crashes, or the game not starting properly, and if it works, they get stuck because i made some design fails in the early levels. Poeple weren’t able to experience, what i had worked on so hard, just because i made some mistakes in the development. It felt devastating.

When i read that submitting fixes were allowed, if they are dependant on having the game working, i was rejoicing. It still leaves me with a crappy level design, and that can’t be helped just yet. Just take it as a challenge. They are definately solveable.
I would love to record a play-through but my machine is too slow to have the game running and fraps recording at the same time I might be able to do it at a friends pc the next couple of days though, so look forward to it

So to mention the issues that came up:

1: Crash on startups
There were few occasions of startup crashes. One of them was a fault at the model loading in the collada parser. I used float.parse() without the ‘i-dont-care’ parameter (CultureInfo.Invariant) so it crashed for some localizations ( using ‘,’ / ‘.’ delimeter ). That was obviously fixed pretty easy once i knew whats wrong. I just had to add some basic exception handling to the code to find out about it. I should have added that long ago, anyways.

2. Levels only getting loaded partially or not at all
The building and collapsing animation of the level geometry was written in the last hours of the development, so it was a rather hackish attempt and i knew it wouldn’t be perfect to begin with. I also knew that my timing sucks, as i was using GetTickCount(); which is rather unprecise, only getting updated about every 16ms. Not quite enough for a solid physics simulation.

I started playing around with different timing methods that are available in .net, which boil down to GetTickCount()/Environment.TickCount and QueryPerformanceCounter()/Stopwatch, not being satisfied with the results of the latter, as it was jittering like hell. As i figured out after a couple of hours, the actual problem lies in the game loop. After reworking some basic orders (i fooked around in it while working on the game) it worked like charm. Physics feel alot smoother, and the levels construct/deconstruct correctly.

3. The goal model was not showing up for some
Actually, i have no idea what the cause was, i still don’t. It was fixed with the time/gameloop fix though. So it comes for free. (Although it still looks ugly whiteish as the texture is not working correctly. I won’t fix that for the entry, cause i’m not allowed to :p)

4. There is still a reported crash, without putting out some error message, besides “error” apparently, which i can only hope is unique to that one user. Although i’d love to fix it, i have no way to do so at this point. Sorry about that alexlarioza :\

If you experience crashes or other bugs, please let me know. You can find me on Twitter or irc://irc.afternet.org/ludumdare as wzl or redwater\wzl,

Thanks, it is really appreciated

Finally, thanks again to all of you providing constructive feedback. It really helps designing a solid concept to work on. If you liked it, you should look forward to the next iteration of the game

Enjoy playing, and good luck with your entries fellow luders \o/

I’ve gotten a little addicted to my own game, but much to my frustration I’m not the one with the high score. Since I’ve been playing it between ratings I decided to upload a short gameplay video.

The goal in this game mode is to get as far away from the central star as possible. There’s also a story mode which has puzzle elements to it. I might upload a play through one of these days.

VIEW VIDEO ~ VIEW GAME PAGE PAGE 

In case anybody wants to try beating my score even more, it’s worth nothing that only the web version submits to the leader board(and only after adding a name).

Having never done a competition like this, I wasn’t really sure what I would be able to do.

As it turns out, I’m pretty proud of what I was able to do in such a short amount of time. I’ve only had my hands on the App Game Kit for a few months, and during the first 2 months it was in Beta, so it was a bit unstable and commands were unfinished. It was officially released on Monday August 15th, just 5 days before the competition.

What I’ve learned from this experience:

• It takes a VERY long time to get good at making art assets.
• Under pressure, and with some family support, I can accomplish more than I thought.
• I love the App Game Kit. While it’s early in it’s development, it’s a great tool for making games.
• Sirens are hard to implement in a game without them becoming annoying.

In the end it’s a game that I only spent 48 hours making, and still took time out of that to go have dinner with my family, and get a good 8 hours or so of sleep Friday and Saturday night.

All things considered I’m happy with it, and after some fixing up it will make a nice game to release commercially.

The following content is a copy / paste from my personal website so there are maybe some useless information…

This game was made for the Ludum Dare 21 on the theme Escape.

When I was student, we had to make a game in 5 days and it was in team. That was hard. But the ludum dare performance is different for the following reasons :

• working alone is easier for the organization
• working alone involved to be skilled in the different domain (and’s that not the case for a lot of people… including myself)
• working alone doesn’t help to find brilliant ideas… Especially when there is a short development time
• 48h hours is twice shorter than 5 days…

What Went Right

No big issue with the development

I didn’t across any difficulty to develop the different features of the game. All the gameplay is simple, and unity offers lot’s of functionality easy to implements.

The music

Thanks to Otomata, I succeed to make a music in less than 5 minutes which is not too bad. It’s one of the thing I’m the most proud in this game. I think I’ll reuse this great tools!

What Went Wrong

The development choices I did

In hindsight, I don’t think I did the best choices. I should have work more on the narration, the atmosphere of the game instead of producing a game in which the player can absorb. It’s maybe the point of a game : talk to the player. If you don’t succeed, your game is useless… I might have done an useless game…

Lacks of skills

I have knowledge to design and develop a game but I’m not skilled in graphic and sound design… And without that, it’s hard to construct a coherent game.

What I’ll do for the Next Ludum Dare

Less Content More Feedbacks

Like I said earlier, my game is not really accessible… I should have develop less gameplay and add more feedback about what’s happening in game and add more clues.

Next time, I think, I’ll try to do something simpler and more accessible in term of gameplay. Here I tried to do something maybe too strange. Building a meta riddle which is not explain to the player is maybe not the best way to entertain people..

Upgrading my skill in the meantime

I have to do more games until the next Ludum Dare in order to improve my graphic and audio skills as well as my design and development ones!

For that, I’ll finish the development of a game I began three weeks ago, and then I’ll begin a new one I want to do for years. I think I’ll useFlashpunk or Flixel to develop it. But I have to try both before to choose between them or maybe do you have some advice?

A time lapse

I wrote a time lapse of my Ludum Dare on Monday. To avoid this boring and difficult exercise, I’ll directly record my performance next time! It’ll be more interesting and easier to share =)

A flash game

I’m currently working on a game made with flash. And it will be the same with the next one. That’s why I think to use Flash for the next Ludum Dare. I haven’t used Unity for few months before this week end so I lost precious time with stupid bugs… (like onTriggerEnter instead of OnTriggerEnter…)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=258

The feedback coming in is that my game is way too hard. The level that I managed to build would normally be like the last level of a 20 level game. It has everything thrown in it and I made it as hard as possible. If I had had more time I could have made the tutorial levels necessary to make it not so frustrating for players. The one thing I really screwed up on was running out of time before I could build more levels. I had this wonderful toolbox ready and I could have easily built more levels (especially easier ones) if I had just had time. Oh well, I learned a lot with Stencyl so next time my progress will be better. Game difficulty is something that I just need to start considering when I’m developing these games. It’s just something else that I’m going to have to add to the list. Hopefully I learn for the next entry

Due to people having so many issues with making progress, here is the walkthrough:

SPOILER*******************
Jump over the growlers and get a boulder. Climb the rope and jump on the cannon. The boulder should load into the cannon (if you aren’t standing on top of the cannon). Then the cannon should fire the boulder into the crane. Drop the boulder on the blue rock by controlling the crane. the rock should break if you hit it. By the way, due to a bug, always wait at least 10 seconds after loading the crane before dropping a boulder. Ok, now you have a way to get back down and get more boulders. Keep doing so and reloading the cannon and try to kill off as many of the obstacles (knifers and growlers) that you think you need to to make it easy to get more boulders. Once you feel safe, start dropping the boulders on all of the things above the exit. Once you have cleared a path to the exit, then this time load a boulder but stay on top of the boulder. This might take a few tries (you have to be on the boulder just right). But then if done correctly the boulder should shoot you up into the crane and you will be stuck in it. Now move the crane over to where the exit is and release down. You have escaped!
END SPOILER ***********************************

Did a little post-compo work on my LD48 “pinball” game, Bounce-onium: Escape from Prof. Kitty von Doom’s Laboratory - there are now 25 levels, a level select screen, cool chiptune music and most notably: SPIKES!  Lots of polish added – for example, your mouse/ball now spins properly and there are lots of new block types that can be used for level designs.

I’ve also used PhoneGap to compile my HTML5 + box2d source code into a native Android app and it runs GREAT on my phone with super smooth FPS.  Coming soon to an app store near you… =)

Anyone who made an HTML game, be sure to check out PhoneGap – you can compile your app to Android, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, etc.  Completely free, open source goodness.

As I’m going through and rating your games, I try to keep a mix of less-rated games (for fairness) and more-rated games (to check out the more popular ones). I’ve stumbled upon quite a few really awesome games, good work everyone!

That being said, do you have any favorites that I might have missed? Have you seen any games that you think deserve particularly high ratings in a particular category? Or even just games you’ve enjoyed for no specific reason?

I’ll start things off with a link to my favorite so far: Coin Runner

Well, first off  ”post-mortem” suggests this game is dead, that’s far from the case. In fact I will be enhancing and completing this game for some time yet and have some cool things planned. So instead of a postmortem think of this as more of a summation of the contest and the game to date.

When ever I approach something like the Ludum Dare contest I try to focus on a specific discipline with the aim of using the contest as a vehicle to improve my skills in that area. For this contest it was art and I think that although it went very well in general I spent perhaps a bit too long on polishing things and this hurt other areas. Also I really had no idea how to make good tile sheets! Hint for anyone reading this, there is a very handy plug in for GIMP that will help!

As for code, well I started with no pre-crated material at all, I like to write everything as much as possible within the contest. To me, starting with nothing seems more inkeaping with the spirit of the challenge, mostly though this way I end up with a bunch of new code that I can pull the gems from that might not have been written if I was locked into an existing framework. Using HTML5 and JS for this game was a lot of fun, and I am left with the feeling that I have barely scratched the surface of its capabilities. It will be excited to continue experimenting with it in the future. Choosing a language that I have relatively little skill with did prove to be a challenge but I think adding something new into the mix helped keep me motivated and interested. So over all it was a good choice.

And then we come to sound, well yeah, that should say it all really. Sound was very neglected in my game and really only got bodged in in the last 30mins before submission. Its a real shame that a tool as powerful at creating emotion, interest and atmosphere as sound is so lacking in my own person skill arsenal. So, improving this will be the focus for my next Ludum Dare!

Finally  the tools I used, I develop on Linux and my tool choices reflected that with one exception,  Mappy. This little tool is windows only and so I had to run it through Wine. Really the only reason I picked it as my map editor was familiarity, the tool itself isnt bad but using it via Wine was very cumbersome. So, inspired by tools like bfxr I will look into building an online tile based map editor using the tech I created in this LD. Hopefully this will prove useful to other LD’ers as well. Other than this I used GIMP, bfxr, MyPaint and Geany IDE, all were really good bits of kit and I will be using them again.

So thats a wrap, but look out for future versions of my game as well as a new map editor that may help with your next LD!

- Callidus

P.S. I guess I should link my entry here, on the off chance it gets a vote or two. Link

Viral – Entry

Viral represents my first entry into the Ludum Dare. I’m quite pleased to have actually finished it. I’m not entirely pleased with the results, but I will bring that up in the What Went Wrong section of my post mortem. The objective of Viral is that the player is a Virus and has to run away from the big scary anti-virus programs. To assist with the virus’ flight, the player has the ability to lay two traps which hinder the pursuing anti-virus programs.

I chose to complete the Ludum Dare in AS3, using Adobe Flash CS4 as my IDE. I ran into some rather annoying issues during development, including the debugger no longer attaching itself to my game when I tried to debug. Unfortunately, I didn’t really have the time to figure out why. This particularly was painful, as many bugs that could have been caught much more quickly relied on the ‘ole debugging standard of dumping trace messages to the screen.

I have plans to clean up and further develop the game. I feel as if it has a strong base and a good potential to be fun with (much) more polish.

What Went Right

Planning
Surprisingly enough, within 30 minutes of the theme being announced in IRC, I had already determined what the game play was generally going to be. I was able to get a significant amount of code done Friday evening before going to bed. This was instrumental to being finished on time.

Productivity
This sounds funny, but I started from scratch. No base code or libraries were used. This meant I had a lot of work to do. A lot. I was able to get it all done. I ended up writing just a silly amount of code on Saturday. I had generally high productivity through-out the entire 48 hour period. This was the sole reason as to why I was able to actually finish on time.

What Went Wrong

IDE
Maybe I’m just spoiled by Visual Assist X and Eclipse. I just feel that Adobe Flash CS4 is just not up to the task of heavy duty Actionscript development. I’ll be trying out other Flash IDEs for any future projects in Actionscript.

Just-one-more-featureitus
Before the compo, I decided that I would feature freeze on Sunday morning and spend all day Sunday polishing. Of course when Sunday rolled around and I was behind in my envisioned complete feature set, I decided to just add one more feature and then one more, and then one more. My third anti-virus was implemented about 30 minutes before the end of the compo. In fact, I had almost no time to play test. I had other people do my play testing while I was busy implementing features, composing a 4 second loop of music, etc. Next time compo, I will definitely enforce a hard feature cutoff, which allow me to polish and play test more.

Wasting time on things that should have not happened in the first place
I wasted around a total of 3-4 hours on things that should have not happened in the first place. I spent a significant amount of time trying to debug a chunk of code. I eventually just got fed up re-coded the whole chunk. Surprise surprise, it worked nearly perfectly. Additionally, I lost a significant amount of time on a character encoding issue. Flash was treating my text file as Unicode locally when I would parse it. However, my FTP program uploaded the text file in ASCII. As a result, Flash would treat the file after upload as ASCII, which resulted in my game not loading properly at all.

This is a second part of the postmortem for Poor Ball, read the first here.

Global impressions on this LD:

This LD was my second and it went much better, I’ve had more time to think about my game and to implement it (even if I haven’t had the idea directly) thanks to less chat on IRC, but I still talked quite a bit, because not being alone is what’s awesome in LD. I haven’t been affected by the site issue as much as I thought I would be, simply because it was slow but not unreachable when I needed it…

Impressions on my game and its creation in C++:

The development went very smoothly as I didn’t loose time on features I could obviously not create in time (I lost some time struggling with a library bug, though). I could easily add the things I wanted to because I didn’t force my to do an object-oriented design (I prefer using well-designed OO APIs like SFML but I cannot design good interfaces in a short time) and simply had one function per thread: display + input, gameplay, physics and music (which was handled by FMOD without my intervention); and one function to asynchronously play sound effects. Simple as that! I had to refactor some physics code in a new function and that’s all. The game was finished in time because I used placeholder graphics until the game was actually playable.

Impressions on the graphics and sounds:

The graphics in this game are really simple:

• A dark background image putting an emphasis on the limits of the terrain and on the danger near them with a blurring effect;
• Simple ball and wall sprites with brighter colors;
• A title menu with some nice text giving a small background story (you can cry or laugh at it, as it is kind of simplistic and unrealistic ).

The sound effects are nearly perfect in my opinion: I used some bell sounds and small melodies instead of visual feedback for this such as level up, loss of life, etc, as the game requires a high focus on the ball’s position. Using sounds let the player know what happened without having to look at the HUD, which nevertheless exists.

Conclusion:

I enjoyed that LD as much as (or even more than) the first and I’m really happy to have a complete game, which I am proud of as I am not a professional (game) developer (yet) !

Congratulations to everyone and see you soon at LD22 or before on IRC !

Daily Fourth? O_o

I somehow managed to get the Daily Fourth on Newgrounds yesterday. I’m amazed

Wow, my first Ludum Dare was a lot of fun.

Some things I think we did well:

• Practically as soon as the theme was announced, me and my artist came up with an idea. A simple one, and we decided to stick with it and not bother brainstorming other things.
• Letting the level designer…well, design levels. He spent practically as much time as me working, and I liked the end result.
•  Last minute decision by me, the programmer, to redo the artist’s stick figures into something a little nicer.

Some things that went wrong:

• Last day spent begging people to test, and fixing their tiny suggestions, while ignoring the big problem-the collision engine.
• Artist only worked for about 2 hours, so she never had time to make helicopter animations or anything.

What’s next:

Well, I liked how those human sprites turned out. I’m working on a game using them as a template now. I don’t think I’ll keep working on Escape from Shimishland. Depends on what my team thinks.

Not that my game is that interesting, or have some kind of potential, but I spent a few hours today adding some of the original planned features and touched up some of the graphics.

Unfortunately it has pretty much 0 replayability so it might not be so interesting for those who already solved it (unless you really like monkeys with their arms swaying hypnotically).

Still no sound effects though

Hey again all,

I’m looking for a specific game that I know I commented on, but I can’t remember the name of it or the name of the developer. Is there a way to list all my comments?

This would also come in handy for keeping track of the various conversations I’ve entered in comment threads.

I know I can go to the comments section and search my name, but that only returns the most recent 20 comments. Is there a way to see them all?

i know ludum dare 21 is over now except for voting but i was wondering if your entry had to be a .exe or could it be in its original type (for xample if i made a game in python could it be .py or does it have to be .exe?)
any help is appreciated.

I guess I’m going to write a bit of a post-mortem here about Escape the Fate. My other blarg post focused on bugs, this is more about the development process.

See, I’m a first-timer on Ludum Dare. I initially didn’t think I’d have a finished game in the end, I just wanted to try it out and see how far I’d get in two days. It turns out I can work quite efficiently under pressure. Simply having a submission exceeded my expectations, but not being ashamed of it was even more of a milestone.

I did know about Ludum Dare before, but I hadn’t thought about entering. The TIGSource community mentioned it shortly before it started, and this time I went with the flow. There were some promising themes in the voting; I was hoping for something specific enough to narrow down the entries a bit, but also something general enough to not produce gimmicky games. Waking up and finding out about the “escape” theme was satisfying in that sense.

The event started at 5 AM local time, so luckily I had gone to sleep early enough to wake up at 7 AM. Didn’t even need an alarm clock; it’s as if my body was ready for the competition.

I realized most games would take the theme literally, as in there would be a threat you’re escaping from. I wanted to do something different, and the idea of “escaping your body” by killing yourself quickly struck me. It took me just about half an hour from getting up to getting down to business.

I decided to follow others’ advice and do most coding on Saturday, leaving the fancy presentation stuff for Sunday. Since I’m still a bit hazy in the C++/SFML department, I went for the safe choice of Python/Pygame. Once I had a basic engine running, I started designing levels.

So indie.

Then ideas just started flowing, and I repeated the cycle of adding a level/programming a game mechanic for the rest of the day. Moving platforms, switches, blocks activated by them, collectibles, springs… They’re very universal and recognizable features, but in the context of a suicide game, I managed to give them whole new meanings. It was interesting trying to prevent the player from killing himself before the intended part. I paid special attention to the level progression: the first levels are more puzzle-like, the later ones require more reflexes.

I found myself ahead of the schedule, so I started making graphics and music in the evening. It was an okay decision for me. Meanwhile many other people, even previous participants, were still only trying to think of an original idea at this point. This reaffirmed my previous beliefs that schadenfreude is motivational.

I went to sleep early and quite optimistic, with something playable and occasionally fun on my hands. But as you might expect, Sunday was more problematic. My code was fast becoming unreadable, and even worse, broken. The pushable blocks in particular caused incidents that were hilarious when they happened, but tragic when I realized I have to fix them somehow.

Luckily, I managed to avoid that for a while by derping around on IRC and polishing the presentation to what it looks like now. I fell into a coding trance in the evening and escaped my own body, but I did eventually have something to submit. Little did I know it wouldn’t work on anyone else’s computer.

I’m impressed by how py2exe packaging was still incomplete after all the added weight. I did manage to isolate the cause to the freaking font and repackage painfully, making unnoticeable perfectionist tweaks after each upload.

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The consensus on my game seems to be “polished and challenging” in a nutshell. The concept is distinctive, the levels are memorable, the controls are responsive, the graphics are a step up from programmer art, and the audio suits the mood. However, people have asked for more instructions on the experimental game mechanic. While figuring out level solutions is in the spirit of a puzzle game, I think it’s a reasonable response, and I now know what concerns to address if I ever do an improved post-compo game.

What I regret most is that I had a bit of a rough release. At least I’ve tried to swiftly fix any game-breaking bugs that didn’t show up on my end. If I could do something differently, I’d make more people test my game before submitting, so I would have to do less patches afterwards. Even though bugfixes are allowed after the deadline, I’d love to have just tossed the game on the site before running away and not looking back.