It was my first Ludum Dare Jam, and here is my post-mortem.

I made a game “Tiny planet”.

What went right:

1.  I`m familiar with coding. In fact, “Tiny planet” is a sequel to “Tiny world”, which used the same engine.
2. No time issues. I have no difficulties organising my work, and all shedules were completed. Testing also was quick, due to minimalism of my game.
3. Graphics. All graphics were easy to make: I already had stickman, kitten and powerups are small, other things were built in editor itself. Even the fact i`m bad at drawing didn`t bother me.

What went wrong:

1. Music. I`m bad at composing, more than that, i never used music in games before. I barely made the background music, but i couldn`t make sound effects. Gonna do warmup next time.
2. Difficulty. At first I thought like “What a nice quick game I make!”, but then I realised it`s hard for other people. I had to add a bunch of hints to make it possible.

What I learned:

1. Making music for games.
2. Harder isn`t always better.
3. Too little gravity is bad. At first i had usual 9.8 gravity, but i had to change it to 49.
4. Basic embedding swf files in html.

I added a small gameplay video of my game.. Enjoy!

Little Blue Box on YouTube

I Just Created a New website for My Applications Visit It here

https://sites.google.com/site/shubgames/home

…also filter by platform

So, i quickly lost track of what i’ve played and it seemed a bit hard to find games that run in my platform (Mac OS X). To fix that i decided to code a solution: Ludrator!

This is just a simple html page that puts a sidebar with all the LD48/Jam games with a nice checkbox near them. Also adds WIN, MAC, LIN and WEB “tags” for each one (based on a small heuristic that seems to work) with checkboxes at the top to filter-by-os.

The checkbox for each game is supposed to be used to mark the games you’ve played/rated. Its state is saved using HTML5 localStorage so you can close the browser/computer and later come back to it and it’ll still be there.

How Ludrator looks like.

You can find Ludrator here: http://runtimelegend.com/pages/badsector/gimme/ludrator/.

There is both a zip version and an online version. Unless you have reasons, prefer the former since the latter will be slow and the former contains the Python script used to make the sidebar (so you can hack it for a new LD or whatever).

I unfortunately fell sick on the weekend, and couldn’t really work after writing couple lines of code in the morning. I’m feeling better now, so I moved my desktop near to my bed, and pretend it’s still weekend. I wrote animated sprite class, and now I will pretend like today is sunday, and work till the day finishes.

After all, LD is all about challenging yourself, there are no prizes . It’s better to make your game even if it’s past the time limit than not to make it at all due to silly restrictions like rules

Also, it’s my birthday and what I say goes . So there! Back to coding!

Name: Basic Game Designer

Description: make uber simplistic games

Version: Very early version of what came to be the Non-Existant Ultimate Game Maker Deluxe

Download: Basic Game Designer

First up, here’s the voting link:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=7360

Here’s the Game Maker sandbox link, if you prefer:
http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/games/191280-a-manor-of-speaking

I don’t have a video because none of my machines are capable of recording and playing with a good framerate at the same time. If someone could make one for me I would be forever grateful. Apologies.

The first thing you see of the main character.

Post Mortem

First, the theme, ‘Alone’. It sucked. There, I said it. When I saw it I thought “Great, there’s something that half of the games out there have.” I didn’t really think much of it at that point. So without much inspiration I decided to make a game that had side-scrolling. Maybe a platformer. But everyone makes platformers, so I can’t do that. alright, how about a fighting-slash-exploration game from a side-on perspective? Yeah, let’s roll with that.

So I started with a brainstorm. I went from ‘Alone’ to ‘Escape’ to ‘Horror’ to ‘Death’  and then realised I didn’t want a Horror. Scrap that. ‘Alone’ to ‘Seperated’ to ‘Lost’ to ‘Unknown Place’ seemed to work better, and I then started to think “Well, where’s this Unknown Place?” A few things ran through my mind but I liked the idea of a mansion. Then I thought of Castlevania and Alone In The Dark. Castlevania seemed like my inspiration for the enemies (or maybe Luigi’s Mansion ) and Alone In The Dark for the gameplay.

I liked the idea of a night-time setting. Most Horror things happen at or near night-time. Then I thought of Knights. Then I thought of a name for two characters: Knite and Dae. Then I remembered the film ‘Knight and Day’ and scrapped it.

Sprites. The first thing I went for was something small – that’s my specialty. Small sprites, no bigger than 16×16 or thereabouts. So I went for something bigger: 48×20-something. I liked the Knight idea, so I went with a Templar (Assassin’s Creed had a part in that choice). I drew a Templar Knight; you can see him at the end of the game.

Then I realised that I had to animate him. Nope. It had taken me an hour to draw this guy well and wasn’t going to waste more time animating him. Back to the drawing board – rather, my Pictures/Pixelart/ folder. I liked the little blue caveman alien guy I had drawn and decided to copy him. I couldn’t use him since that was against the rules.

So I drew a little blue man. That was my character. How strange. Anyway, now I had something to make a platformer with (didn’t I NOT want to make a platformer? Oh well) Movement/Jumping engine came easily since I had already written many of them, trying out slightly different methods of execution in code. So now I had a great Platformer engine with collisions and such.

Next Stop: Enemies. What do you find in a scary mansion? Ghosts. What else? Possessed Suits of Armour. Oh, hey! I can use my Templar design for the armours! So I drew a suit of armour with a red cross on it. I liked it. Then I drew a ghost, which was easy. My ghost was a mix of a Boo and a Pacman Ghost. I liked it.

Then, still in MSPaint, I decided to draw a chest. I did. It looked good. Then I realised that there are enemies called Mimics that commonly take the shape of a chest and eat unwary dungeon explorers. So I copy-modified the chest to have teeth. I was starting to like my characters at this point. All except the blue man. He needed to be a normal man. A few skintoned-pixels later he was a little boy, not unlike the one from Up (Pixar film).

Then I got stuck into coding. Hours pass and I’m still trying to think of a good story. I love my stories, see, and didn’t want to have something like an arcade game. It would be harder, sure, but I just made the choice without thinking. I then remembered that I had to go to work, so I scrambled into my clothes and left. Worked. Came home, went straight to be since it was already midnight. End Day 1. Hours used: 5

Next day I got up with a page of notes I had jotted down during the night. I had fresh ideas and was raring to go. It was about 9am when I started and I had to get a LOT done in ~24 hours. I got straight to work coding all the bits and pieces that needed doing. Fixing up my platforming collisions, making enemies walk/float properly, keys, doors, levers, pressure plates. were all done before dinner. I had regular breaks too, since I knew what had to be done and didn’t think it would take until tomorrow morning to do them.

Code was mostly done. Sprites too. Then I realised I had gameplay, mechanics, enemies and loot, but no story or tutorial. Oh bugger. The tutorial code took a while to get right but only had to be written once. No bugs. Excellent.

The story, however, was half-assed. I didn’t have an ending or any levels except for my two or three debugging/test rooms. And I needed environments as well.

This was when I realised that I would be up most of the night and into the morning.

I made a post on here and then got to work drawing. I drew a table, chairs, banners, pictures, a bookcase, windows, everything I could think of that belonged in a mansion. Then I switched to level design. It got boring real quick, and I managed to make a single wallpaper tile I had drawn earlier fit into each room as I didn’t have time to make anything else.

Then I discovered I had forgotten the ending, again. I needed something quickly and it had to be half-assed but not look it. Items. I could make the whole thing into a quest for items. But what item? Next to me on my desk was a candy cane. Perfect! A knight that likes candy canes. Corny, strange, different and it would work. So that went in quickly with a slight change to the chest code.

So my sprites and tiles were done, my enemies and gameplay was done, my story worked (barely) and I had everything ready for a test run. I did one, found some bugs, squished them and THEN made a post about audio. A google search later revealed a beat-mixer by Aviary and I went with that. Ooh, a randomise function! Low piano notes, slow beat, randomise times a million. Hey! This one sounds good, and it loops well. Download.

Now to SFXR. Lot’s of randomising in there too. Now I have everything. Time for a test run – about 1 or 2am at this point. I’m going to get it in time!

Heh, nope. Computer decided to take FOR EVER to compile the code with this new-fangled audio thing. I left it and went and got a drink and cleared my work area.

3 am. Computer doesn’t like the audio and the game together but they work separately. OK, that’s all right. I can work this. I added one-liners to each thing that needed a sound effect then commented them all out. Fixed a few little things, removed the audio from my assets list and saved. Test game!

Nope. I’mma crash on you!

Computer restarts. Oh god. Well at least I saved, right? …

Back up and running, I load the game and all is well. Phew. Test game, reveal bugs, fix bugs. Add audio, compile, wait an hour. I had a kinda daze-like nap here, because the game seemed to be suddenly making music. Oh good.

It’s 4am by this point. The sun is rising. Good god, I haven’t stayed up this late in a while. Okay, testing. All is well in the first half of the game, must be OK in the rest. Take some pictures, zip up the game and the source and upload it.

Submission time. I felt proud that I had finished with about 5 hours to spare. Time for bed. I turned off the PC and did so.

Three hours later, my Dad comes and wakes me up:
“What time did you go to bed?”
“Uh, around 5 um, thirty?”
“So you’ve had three hours sleep.”
I look at the clock. 9:30.
“Yeah…”

I got up, checked the site and was able to catch the end of the 48 hours. Woooooo!!! I made it!
“We’ve extended the submission time to 2 hours. ”
Well, ok I suppose.

[THIS POST IS GETTING QUITE LONG, SO I'LL CUT TO THE CHASE]

Found out too late that my game was broken: one of the levels that had a candy cane in it (a quest item) didn’t link back to a room properly. A one-way street basically. So I set to work documenting how to get the candy cane and get back, since I had an extra key in the game. But no, it didn’t work. Now it’s well after the submission time, and the game is still broken. I check LudumDare’s twitter, send a message about after-submission bugfixes and then end up submitting the fixed game for the Jam instead. It still fits under the Compo’s rules, except for the time limit.

So all in all, I’m happy about my game, ecstatic that this is my first go and I did it, but sad that it couldn’t be submitted for the Compo.

Thanks for reading this massive wall of text. Have a good one.

… and here’s those links again:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=7360

http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/games/191280-a-manor-of-speaking

Im just wondering if we Can use Game Maker to make a Game In 48 Hours as it is easy to use

As with all crazy ideas that people don’t think will work, mine actually did. I chose to learn Java over the weekend while creating my game, in Java. I learnt a tiny bit of command line output (no input) over the week and set up a compile batch script. I’ve looked into Java development in Eclipse previously, but gave up due to the complexity of the interface. Instead I made my own development environment.

As for snacks, day 1 I lived off of a small roll, 2 cans of coke and some M&Ms that where picked up later in the day. I drank plenty of water and was sitting in front of a nice fan (Summer in Australia…). I worked from 10AM start time to about 8PM solid, trying to get the base of my game up and running. Lots of googling and viewing of public source code helped me to build my game. It was then time for a dinner break so I grabbed some Cheese Lowers pizza. After eating I went straight back into code in an attempt to get the basics for my game out of the way before midnight. I hit the sack after that, but being restless and eager to continue work I drew up all my cut scenes meaning I went to sleep at about 2AM.

Woke up at about 8AM, showered, grabbed a snack and relaxed for a bit. I was back into my game with image editing. Since I had hand drawn the cut scenes I tried to vectorize them. I wasn’t going along very fast so I swapped to Paint.Net and used some of their tools to make the cut scenes look a bit better, but still hand drawn like. After finishing the cut scenes I implemented them into the code and started doing a level system. After finishing the level system I had a few bugs that would pop up every now and then, but I couldn’t see where in the code they were coming from. I threw in a 5 line bug fix that checks for it and now it’s all fin and dandy. Finished work around 5PM when I stopped for a lunch break, uploaded it and wandered around, trying to stay off of my PC for as long as possible.

All that time I was live streaming and streaming radio, whenever someone popped into my live stream chat I tried to say hello. I’m currently in the process of compiling my time lapse. I’ve been replying to everyone who has commented on my entry, and from doing that I have another game idea which is currently in development as work is so slow. Planning on turning one of my parked domains into a temporary game site, implementing a nice high score system and adding some sounds to it (after judging closes of course). I may even redo the artwork!

~Mitchell

My Entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=2884

Live Stream: http://www.twitch.tv/bob_george33

P.S. 300 people have visited and loaded my completed game I’m happy cause that’s more people who have played a game by me than ever before!

TL;DR Version:

Didn’t know Java before, know Java now.
Sleep deprived.
Ate nothing, but kept fluids up.
Streamed Radio, drew cut scenes.
Plan on making changes later, as well as a new game before Christmas.
Live streamed whole thing.
Time Lapse Coming.

Greetings all.  This is a postmortem for my first LD entry, the game I Should Go Back.

Linky:   http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=842

It’s a really weird puzzle/adventure game where you make a choice to not die at the time you were supposed to.  Why?  Beat the game to find out. (Hint: It has to do with the theme.)

THE GOOD

Graphics – I was able to make simplistic, retro-style graphics without spending too much time or generating much stress.  I might not have been pushing any artistic boundaries, but everything flowed together pretty well visually, and I ended up making more art than I thought I would.  I especially like the main character sprite.

Music – Again, this was something that I spent very little time on, but which gave me a pretty large payoff.   I was simply able to record myself improvising on my parents’ piano.  I do not expect my game to do well in any category, for reasons I will get to in a second, but if it had one area where it had a chance of success, it would probably be audio.

Everything worked – I was scared to make an adventure/puzzle game, especially since all my projects before now had been platformers, but everything came together into a functional game with a high amount of content and five different endings.

I volunteered at a homeless shelter during the 48 hours of the competition – That’s pretty cool, right?

THE BAD

The Puzzles – Unfortunately, the main core of this game, which was ten distinct number puzzles, was wildly inconsistent in its difficulty.  I knew I wanted ten puzzles because of how well it fit with using the numbers 0 to 9, but I simply could not come up with enough good ones.  Some are too easy, some are too difficult, and some are simply uninteresting.  The high difficulty of the puzzles combined with the long introduction cutscenes makes the game very inaccessible, which is exactly the opposite of what I want for a game to be noticed and played by many people.

The Plot/Mood – I set out trying to make a really deep, interesting game that explored the notion of loneliness and how far people are willing to go to avoid it.  Unfortunately, everything seems really deep when you are sleep-deprived, and looking back I can see the game for what it really is:  ARTFAG.  The game just seems kinda weird, preachy, and very, very serious.  In addition, the jokes that made me crack up as I was implementing them now simply seem out of touch with the serious mood of the game.

THE UGLY

Fun – The game is just not fun at all.  I took mostly uninteresting puzzles, combined them with a forgettable plot and forgettable characters, and had very little area to explore.  Only a very small portion of the game is spent actually solving puzzles (compared to talking and watching cutscenes), and that should just not be the case for such a short game.

And finally, most importantly:  THIS WAS A BLAST.  I am DEFINITELY participating in the next competition, and maybe bringing some friends along as well (people to keep me grounded and tell me my ideas are stupid, or else I’ll end up with another game like this).  Thanks for reading and best of luck in the voting period!

I am happy to announce that Lonely Planet is now available on Windows, OSX and Linux!

Windows | OS/X | Linux | Source

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=4598

We put a lot of love into this game, and we are confident you will like it Please test it and rate it if you can!

Love, the Lonely Planet team <3

The World Of Arzea

During this past weekend, in addition to streaming, I made sure to screencap my main monitor every 10s for the duration of the competition. From this, I created a timelapse for you to watch how Arzea was created from start to finish.

If you would like to play or rate the game:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=4155

Otherwise, enjoy:

http://youtu.be/WcFZQaoMdCM
http://youtu.be/WcFZQaoMdCM
(Issues with embedding…) 

You can find ALONE with K.I.T.T.I. here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=7263

What went wrong?

There was an unexpected family emergency that took up the better part of 10 hours. The emergency was unavoidable, and unforeseen. It was unfortunate, but I absolutely do not regret missing the 10 hours.

That said, 10 hours is a lot of time in a 48 hour competition. After sleeping for about 10 total hours and the family emergency, I was left with about 28 hours of total work time. Not bad, but it was not evenly distributed, requiring some energy drinks and long periods without sleep. If I had had the 10 hours, about 4 of it would have been for sleeping on Saturday night, and the rest would have been time spent on polish.

My first time sync when working on the project was going with the sprite.js library — it’s an amazing library, but I hit a wall when I realized the support for Tiled, which I was banking on, was not really all that complete. I was going to use melonJS from the outset, but then a couple of days before the competition, I decided sprite.js would offer a better experience. I had tested it out before the competition, and thought I could get everything to work based off of one of the libraries examples, but you know how that goes.

I ended up switching everything over to melonJS, which has faculties for reading Tiled maps directly. In the end, I think this was beneficial to the overall project, but it did eat up time. If I had just used melonJS from the beginning (like I had originally planned), I would have had at least another 3 hours of work time.

My second time sync was maps. I initially built a small test map, and iterated features over that map. The test map was an excellent strategy I think, but coming off of that I jumped into a really large map — bigger than I needed by several factors. I wasted a lot of time just trying to fill it in and make it playable. I eventually shrunk the map down, but I spent an awful lot of time with a map that I ended up throwing away.

I think if I would have just did a little more level design up front on a piece of paper, I could have avoided this time sync, and probably got several more hours to work on polish and other levels.

More experience with the Tiled editor would have helped to, but it’s pretty easy to pick up.

What went right?

Tools! I knew my tool chain fairly well — I’m certainly middle of the road competency wise, but I have been using gimp, vim,  and javascript/html/css for quite a while and was at least comfortable with how they worked. I think this saved me a lot of heart ache.

The things I didn’t know well were sprite.js, melonJS, sfxr, Tiled and the music generating python script that GreaseMonkey posted about: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/12/13/if-you-find-it-hard-to-make-music-read-this/

However, I did practice using these tools before the competition, so I was comfortable using them, and they didn’t offer any surprises, or set backs (other than plain inexperience).

melonJS was fantastic to work with, and really easy to pick up with the great examples on their website.

Tiled is an amazing editor — combined with melonJS I think it really saved the project after the 10 hours I spent away from the competition.

And, of course sfxr really added a little something to the game. I’m no sound engineer, but having absolutely no sounds in a game is almost as maddening as eating at a restaurant without background music. sfxr is amazing. On top of that, it’s really easy to use!

And the Autotracker-Bu script from GreaseMonkey gave me something I thought I wouldn’t have. Perhaps the music isn’t perfect for the game, but it does add something.

Summary?

My experience? Positive. I’ll definitely be doing this again. Next time I’m going to hopefully avoid emergencies, pass on the energy drinks, get some nice evenly distributed sleep, and know exactly what my libraries/frameworks are capable of going into the competition.

Happy Hacking, and I’ll see you all in April! (and possibly before that for the MiniLD’s!!)

My Ludum Dare entry is, a Untiy3D based arcadey space shooter. It is either my first or second game, I have another Unity 3d project I’ve worked on, on and off, for the past few months. That’s a somewhat less interesting and complete game than my LD entry, and has less content as well, so I’m willing to call It’s Space my first game. I’m honestly still reeling from how much I got done and how well it turned out, and my mind is spinning with ways to expand it.

What went well:

The art: I used tools I’m quite familiar with, Wings3d and Photoshop, and I’d already experimented with getting assets from them into Unity3D before the competition, so everything went smoothly there. Some of the models I made turned out to be surprisingly effective, and for the most part they seem to evoke the right reactions in players that I’ve been able to observe.

Unity3D: I’d spent the week leading up to the Dare trying to come up with things that’d be useful for games and learning how to make them work in Unity, such as being able to click on objects and whatnot. As a result I didn’t find myself hitting many walls where I just didn’t know how to use the engine, and was able to spend most of the time making things instead of figuring out how to make things.

Coding: This is probably going to be damning myself with faint praise, but I was very pleased with how much I was about to write code to be reusable and flexible, which saved me having to write lots of duplicated behaviors for new objects and enemies. As a result I think I would have been able to add more enemies into the game in the final hours, had other things not intervened.

Preparation: I food in advance so i wouldn’t have to stop to cook but would still be well fed. That worked out great, and if I did another Dare I’d do that again.

What went wrong:

The art: Though I’m pleased with a lot of the art, the most important visual in the game, the player’s ship, turns out to be a formless grey rectangle from the camera’s position. It looks more interesting from other angles, I swear!

I’ve already started work on a replacement ship that should look more interesting.

The theme: I don’t think I engaged the theme very well. I had some ideas for a slightly more thoughtful take on the theme, but couldn’t think of any real gameplay to go with them. In the end I essentially said “Screw it, I like spaceship games, I’ll make a lonely spaceship game!”. That said, I did want to make the game about exploring a grand and empty ruined civilization, and I think that would work with the theme fine. I intend to expand on what traces of that there already are as I work on the game in the future.

The code: There are some boneheaded things in the code right now that stemmed from me doing things wrong and not bothering to fix them, such as player’s velocity not being independent of player’s rotation. Motion was to be, and should be, more Newtonian than it is, but alas.

The pain: Several hours before the deadline I went to pour hot water into a mug as part of the construction of a hot drink designed to keep me going for the home stretch. Being at that time somewhat impaired in my motor function due to lack of sleep, I proceeded to pour just-shy-of-boiling hot water over my hand as well as into the mug. At that point coding ceased early and I submitted what I had at the time. I consider this to be my biggest mistake of the Dare.

Minor burns aside(they’ve already healed) I found the Dare extremely enjoyable and rewarding. I’d do it again, and I hope to turn my entry into something greater over the coming weeks. Thank you all for this exciting event, and I look forward to playing as many games as I can stand as I work through my ratings responsibility.

Created using a script that took screen captures every 30 seconds, and then stitched together using ffmpeg at 15 frames per-second. (That means, what, 7.5 minutes/second?)

Now that i have corrected my Loading texture / security (due to server bad config)  issue, i’m happy to see what i have done in 48 h , with flixel + flare3D

What i learned ? :
Smoothing a mesh for a “cubic” environment is not a good idea.
But i’m sure that using flixel as “background” for small little 3D games in flash can be an easy solution.
Now i can clean my code to release it .

Hope you like my game,whas very happy to participate to #LD …

You can Play
or rate it

http://www.gliiz.com/565-cardiac-and-fireproof-kitten-alone-in-alps-after-a-plane-crash.html

Still working on my game! Heres a preview of the art now that I got some extra time to work on it:
BEFORE:
AFTER:

Added some more lush colors and removed some of the noise. The tiles are somewhat less tile-ey too, but still keeping that noisy artifact charm. Somewhat prettier, no? More readable too. I guess it does reduce the noisy style a little, but its a trade-off I am pretty okay with for now.

Im really pumped about my game guys. Pretty goddamn pumped! Its gonna be sweet! And it already is kinda, except its riddled with bugs!
If you havent yet, check out the Ludum Dare compo version of my game HERE.

Well, if you spent the last few years being slapped around a table all day, you’d be grumpy too! This ball just wants to be alone on his blocky islands.

Entry is here.

(And yes, the .eel files are plain text source files, so that’s the full, hackable game source right there. The language is a bit like Lua with a C-like syntax.)

Well, the other balls don’t really do anything, as I didn’t get around to implement any AI. And I didn’t get around to do any music either. And, it might have been a good idea to “tilt” the terrain of the higher level maps towards the viewer, or just select a few good areas from the Perlin terrain, as it gets a bit tricky when you can’t see what you’re doing.

What went wrong

Decided to go for isometric 3D, so I had to code the engine for that, along with some physics. Not strictly a bad idea, but it was actually my first attempt at that particular kind of engine, so getting it to work correctly while not melting the CPU might have cost a few hours extra. And, I still got the depth sorting wrong in some cases…

Also got this crazy idea of coding a tiny MIDI sequencer, instead of just typing music in as ChipSound script, but the net result of that was just a wasted hour or so, as I didn’t have enough time to do any music anyway.

The biggest problem, however, was that I just caught a cold with fever, and couldn’t cope with the kind of tempo and short naps I planned for. All in all, I put in 27 hours of effective work time. Could have used 5-10 more hours – and they would have been there, even in the 48 h compo, had I been in proper shape.

What went right

Initially, all I had was this vague idea that the game would be about someone or something that wanted to be left alone. I decided right away that I’d go for isometric 3D and focus on low level game mechanics, so I drew a block in GIMP and coded away.

I realized I wouldn’t have time to do a proper character with walk cycles and stuff with the tools and (lack of) skill at hand, so I considered giving the rubber pig starring in my Fixed Rate Pig SDL example a call – but then remembered I need to work alone, and drew a shiny steel ball in GIMP instead.

Going with a steel ball actually turned out to be a brilliant move, as it became instantly obvious that the game mechanics would focus on bouncy physics, which can be a fair bit of fun in it’s own right, without any “artificial” game rules. In fact, there’s only one rule: A ball that touches the lava dies.

And of course, I did finish in time to submit for the Jam, so failing the main event wasn’t a complete disaster. (Actually did try to submit in time, but it just wouldn’t work – and probably for the better, as that version was pretty useless anyway.)

Lessons learned

No real surprises here, but well worth pointing out:

1. Coding a custom engine for a time limited event like this is a gamble, unless you really know what you’re doing. Each kind of engine has it’s own set of problems, and unless you’ve written one of that particular kind before, a few hours will likely be lost understanding and solving problems that are brand new to you. That can be fun and challenging, but the gamble is real: If you fail, you’ll still be struggling with the engine by the time of the submission deadline.
2. Make sure you have a functional, complete and efficient toolchain that you’re up to speed with, for anything you want to use in the game! I could have leveraged ZeeSpace and ChipSound better, but I don’t yet have a functional authoring tool for the former, and I don’t have a proper music setup. I’ve been having the same problem with Kobo II, and the LD #22 just made it more obvious that I need to fix this ASAP.

Conclusion

One would think that after a full weekend of being ill while working frantically, especially after previously having worked for weeks in a similar manner to get the Kobo II tech preview out, one would just want a long vacation – but I’m more excited than ever to get back to work! I’ll probably start by adding some more gameplay elements to Kobo II for a Christmas Special Tech Preview 2, and then I actually will take a break – by hacking a sequencer/editor for ChipSound…!

UPDATE: Timelapse video uploaded!

David

This is the title screen from our game, Shaped.

It’s been a few days since the Jam ended for our team (Send More People) and I thought I’d throw in a few thoughts on the Ludum Dare Jam experience. These are in no way organized or comprehensive – just a few thoughts that came to mind.

I was surprised how much fun it was
Maybe I shouldn’t have been. I had expected the main fun of Ludum Dare to be hanging out with my partner Eric as we worked on a project. Eric is a rad guy and generally everything is fun around him, but truth be told I was nervous that any game we would make would feel stinted and unfinished, and that this would diminish the pleasure of our developing. Part of the reason for this was our prior experience. Eric and I have been working on a single, very ambitious project for months. Drift is an endeavor with many highs but also a lot of lows, particularly because we keep altering the concept. We are ambitious people and have big goals. So, before this project I wouldn’t have thought that we could finish a title together so quickly. Now I know that we are totally capable of it, and the project was more fun because of it.

Sometimes time crunch can be a good thing.
As I said, we’re ambitious and our projects have a tendency to expand, expand, expand. One benefit of doing a project over a weekend is that we were forced to stay focused and on task. The game we made was largely the game we planned on, and any additions to the project occurred as a natural development of features we were working on. We made decisions and were pretty much forced to stick with them. This was actually liberating, in a sense, since we weren’t constantly rehashing the same topic.

Good lord, I love 2D!
Our other game project is 3D. Shaped is 2d! It’s a simpler design, but we were able to get a much more refined look out of it. Again, simpler is often better. Drift could be interesting but unpolished. Shaped, by comparison, seems smooth even without a whole bunch of refinement. That’s not skill, its just the benefit of the medium and the simplicity of the art style.

Friends made it work
Eric and I were essentially attached at the hip for 48 hours over the course of Ludum Dare. That might have been a terror if we didn’t get along so well, but the reality is that I was enjoying myself every minute of the experience. Getting along well with your partner(s), having fun, seems to be a really important part of the coding experience. We actually made the game-developing process fun, laughing and joking throughout the day even while we were setting our minds to work on challenging puzzles. It smoothed over the points where we disagreed on where the project should go, and made the successes where we agreed on a concept feel shared. I was very doubtful when Eric suggested a seek-pellet… I thought it would be making the game too easy… but it turns out that it was a central component of the feel of the game. I trusted Eric even when I disagreed with him, and that allowed the game game to be much better.

So! Probably nothing mind bending here. like who you work with and simple is ok seem to be the major lessons I’ve walked away with. It may not be much, but it certainly made the development of Shaped into a satisfying and meaningful experience.

So here we are. Ludum Dare 22 is over.

I didn’t finish.

I’m going to try to stay positive.

What Went Well

I was reasonably familiar with the processes behind making the art; I have made pixel art before, even though it’s not usually my style.

I had a pretty solid idea, as well.

What Didn’t Go Well

I was too ambitious for the time. I didn’t have basecode. I chose something that required too much art. I changed platforms halfway through. I did a lot of things wrong, okay?

Seriously, though, most of what could have gone wrong went wrong. I don’t want to talk about it in detail.

What I’ve Learned

So… here’s the part that isn’t so negative.

I’ve learned that my ideas are often too ambitious for my time and resources. I try to do two weeks’ work in a weekend and I suffer for it.

I’ve learned that I need to choose whether I want to make lots of art or write my own basecode. I can’t do both, which is what I tried to do. I’m going to make that choice from now on, at least in Ludum Dare.

I’ve learned to prepare. I had the warmup weekend, but I didn’t do it the way I should have. I could’ve avoided these mistakes.

I’ve learned that I should be ready to surrender an idea if it isn’t working out. The main reason that I didn’t finish was that I wouldn’t give up my original idea (even when I said that I would) and wound up losing hope at around 8h before the jam deadline, getting distracted, and not finishing.

I’ve learned that I need to stick to a d*mn platform. I failed partly because I derped and decided to switch to a completely different platform. I switched to C++ and SDL, which was a big part of why I failed.

I’ve learned that I don’t enjoy these big projects that much. When the deadline came, I looked at what I had, flopped back into my bed and thought “Thank Sekhmet that’s over with, now I can let that thing go!” I didn’t want to continue with the game that I was working on, and I still don’t.

Where to Go From here

I’m going to move away from these huge projects. It’s really killing me to work on these things and not get anywhere.

I’m considering moving to app development. I can develop a simple game in less than a month, be finished with it, and move on. With publishers like the Chrome App Store and eventually Android and iOS, I stand to make a little bit of money from my work instead of laboring for years on one big thing and not getting anywhere.

Hopefully, developing smaller games will be more fun for me.

People in IRC can expect me to ask them to playtest some of these games, certainly. It’ll be great fun, I think.

Peace, love, and nowhere to go but up,

- Henry