I had a friend call me today and ask why he was receiving an error while trying to play my game – Atlantic Flight One.

Terrible, terrible, terrible error message.

I immediately realized that I’d built my game without changing the target profile in the XNA settings from “HiDef” (the default) to “Reach”.  This means that the game suddenly demands a much more powerful video card than it even comes close to needing. Overlooking something this simple means I’ve potentially risked limiting the number of people that can run (and vote) my game.

Lesson learned …

Always review your project settings.

If only I would’ve taken 5 seconds to double check these settings when I started the project …

I hope everyone gets a chance to get out my entry.  I really enjoyed the competition and am already looking forward to April 2012.  Hopefully, no one runs into this problem with my entry.

Okay, so it’s time for a post mortem of Someone To Love! There’s also a timelapse, if you didn’t see it. Let’s dive right in – what went right and wrong, and what lessons are to be learned from my experiences during this Ludum Dare!

What went right.

• Graphics. I mean, I usually think very little about my art skills, but this time I feel that my approach was perfect (for me, at least). I’ll admit that simplicity wasn’t something I thought of at first, but at some dead end while coding, I figured I could as well create the graphics. I used a total number of 6 colors, the main being white, with cat being 10×10 pixels and human 10×24 pixels. Then I used FlxG.camera.color to change color tint of the scene, depending on the distance between player and the human. I usually tend to overdo things, so this simple solution (achieved after many hours of experimenting with other options) is brilliant according to my standards. Like the last time, at the beginnig I used placeholder graphics, which is always a great idea and I recommend it to everyone.
• Music. Wolfram Tones. That’s it. Go, check it out if you don’t know this. I’m actually really interested if it’s possible to use this generated content in a commercial game – anybody got any info on this? I mean, I understand the technology is copyrighted, but I don’t think that this also aplies to generated music (I mean, Wolfram doesn’t have rights to every CA there is, does it?).
• Flixel. I have issues with this piece, so read on below. Here I can write that Flixel is a great framework, especially if this is your first contact with AS3, and especially if this is your first contact with game programming framework. Automaticly done collisions, very simple map loading, many options, Flixel Power Tools for GREAT effects and much, much more.
• Mood. I like the overall design of the game, the colors and cat monologues, and the direction it was heading when it was time to finish. I like that there are endings, and that there’s a few of them (last time I didn’t have time to make an ending for my game). It’s definitely not flawless, though – read on, below.

What went wrong.

• Over-coding stuff. I didn’t have any idea regarding the theme, so I started programming some kind of platformer. I wasted a lot of time on nice effects when player leaves world bounds, only to design level in such a way that it’s impossible. I prepared my object model to be very flexible, but in the end it was a waste of time, because I didn’t need this flexibility.
• Flixel. Yeah, when you’re used to programming, doing it with Flixel may be pretty crazy non-intuitive. I mean, collisions are done automagically for you! I know this speeds up the developing process, but this wasn’t something I expected, and made me scratch my head a couple of times (what if I wanted to do something non-standard? – at the end, I stuck to the simple things). I think Flixel’s general design is best if you know what kind of game are you making, and the physics at least resemble something common, like platformer, shot’em up, top-down movement, etc. If you need something else, you CAN program collisions yourself, but this wasn’t clear for me at a first glance – however, this might be due to my idea of learning the framework on-the-fly, during LD event.
• DAME. Well, I definitely want to use it in the future – it’s just that using it during this LD’s was way too much for me to learn. In the end, I did my level design in paint.
• Design. I should’ve cut the platformer elements to the minimum, so that finishing the game would take more like 3-5, not 15 minutes. If someone wanted to see all five endings, he would need to waste way too much time, going again and again through the same story. Yep, didn’t think about that. The worst part is that the level is completely static – so if someone wants to try bringing more fish to the human, or find the special item, he always needs to go up the platforms, using the same path. This is much more boring when trying to see other endings.
• No balancing. That’s mostly why it’s so unnecessarily long. I should know better – I played my game a few times. Now I’ve got some ideas how to make it better: have randomized parts of the story, change level design every time a fish is brought to the human, or at least make time between events much shorter. Also, replaying the game could be much easier, as everyone who will play it more than once, do it only to see other endings.
• I’m not even gonna write about eating, drinking too much coffee and bad time management. It was bad.

Things to consider.

• Are you doing art/ story game? Make it SHORT. As in “5 minutes short”. If you have more than one ending, or some additional things for player to uncover, it can be even shorter, because it can easily be played many times.
• Is ANY KIND of gameplay good for your idea? Do you need that platformer-style gameplay, with enemies, bullets and things to do, if you’re creating a STORY game, or maybe “some kind of interaction” would be enough? Don’t overdo things!
• Is learning stuff during LD event good for you? If you love it, like me – here’s a suggestion. Pick the stuff you want to learn – do some research before LD and check if the amount of stuff to learn suits you. It’s BAD to waste TOO MUCH time on learning, when you’re supposed to create a game.
• Very low-res pixel-art is GOOD. Easier to create, but still recognizable. Manipulating color from inside the code can give great effects. Learn some simple graphical tricks to make your game even more appealing!
• If you’re programming in AS3, learn to incorporate TweenLite/TweenMax into your framework. It’s GOOD.
• MUSIC changes the mood of your game astonishingly. Use anything you can use – be it Wolfram Tones or any other generator, or whatever. For instance, I’m quite sure that without that ambient music, my game would be much, much worse.

Okay, that’s all folks. Big thanks to everyone who motivated me during my development, I’ve had a GREAT time and YES, I WILL PARTICIPATE AGAIN, and again, and again… forever! Last time was Flashpunk, this time – Flixel, so next time… don’t know yet!

So, I’ve taken part in my first Ludum Dare. It was also the first project I’ve actually finishd in Unity, the first project finished in over a year and I must say: it feels good to have made something. Here’s how it went (in my opinion):

What went well?

Keeping my ideas managable. I initially kept the interactions to the bare minimum needed to achieve what I wanted, then I added extras (such as averting the eyes from those who look at you) later. Even with these “extras” I still managed to get all the basic interactions working on the first day, leaving the second for sound design, level layout, figuring out how to enter LD and a bit of polishing/tweaking.

I also did fairly well at saying “good enough” with each aspect as it was made. Usually I spend hours on the most minor of details, which obviously wouldn’t have worked here, and I managed to not obsess over any particular aspect too much.

Sound. Maybe I’m biased, but I think the sound works pretty well. It’s very minimalistic like the rest of the game, but I think that actually works in its favour.

What didn’t go well?

I spent far too long just trying to make a very simple piece of music. It turns out that I didn’t really know what I was doing with FL Studio and my idea of just picking it up as went along wasn’t all that great. Audacity, which I’ve actually used a little bit before, was a life saver allowing me to do simple editing of the sounds that I couldn’t figure out how to do in FL.

There are still a few bugs, though most of them are quite amusing and don’t happen if you play “properly” so I didn’t really make any effort to fix them.

Not knowing how to use dropbox to share webplayer files (that took me a while to work out).

Lots of other things like “is the lighting quite right?”, “Should I have used more sound effects?”, “Is the pit of fire really necessary?” I don’t know how much difference these would have made though.

My indecision towards the end over what I should work on led me to faff around a bit and ultimately do none of the potential improvements (though this may have been a blessing in disguise since building and submitting took me longer than expected).

What I’ve learned?

I can make games in short periods of time

I can just let go sometimes when things are good enough and the world won’t end (I hope I can apply this one to real life a bit more).

I am really indecisive even when it matters. People who know me would laugh at this one since I’m always indecisive, but I usually delude myself into thinking it’s because I generally don’t care. That’s not really the reason.

Knowing how to play one instrument to some degree and another to almost no degree does not mean I can use music creation software with ease, there’s actually a bit of learning for me to have there.

Little bits about finishing a game, sharing it online and the problems that don’t appear in the Unity editor.

All in all I’m happy with my entry, I’ve gotten a little feedback so far (mostly positive) and it seems the main thing I need to work on is probably my visual presentation. Hopefully I’ll get some more feedback soon… And if the themes stay this interesting I’d definitely like to compete again.

EXTRA: Here‘s what Procrastitracker thinks I did that weekend (minus 1hr 30mins I worked past midnight. Plus I don’t think it’s very accurate).

Below is the timelapse vid for my LD22 entry: The Lonely Arena.

If you haven’t played/rated it yet, please do so here.

If you haven’t already played my game, go for it, it’s a text adventure called “Desert Adventure” !

Here’s the timelapse of its creation:

That was hard! It was a trainwreck of failures.

• First, i had about 143.472 image files captured. That looked a bit worrisome.
• The images were having serial numbers in the ld22-frameXXXXX.png format. However, as mentioned, there were more than 99.999 images, so half of them were using an extra digit and, thus, not sorted correctly.
• So i had to write a script to fix that.
• Then there were a lot of gaps. I’m using the screencapture Mac OS X command-line program to take the shots, but if the screen has blanked out, nothing is saved.
• So i had to write a script to fix that by using a filler image for that.
• Then i had to wait for almost a half-day for them to be converted to a (huge) .mpg file with ffmpeg.
• And after that, iMovie (the editor i usually use and so far has worked well) decided that it won’t support .mpg files.
• So i had to wait for a few extra hours for the huge .mpg file to be converted to a huge .mp4 file that iMovie can open.
• iMovie, however, saw through my scheme and decided that, no, it won’t open the file. It didn’t even tell me why – it just acted as if i decided at the last moment to cancel the import process.
• So i had to search for another editor. While doing that i noticed that all open source video editor for Mac OS X are either abandoned old editors from the PowerPC era that Mac OS X Lion doesn’t support anymore, or experimental ports of mostly Linux-based tools that may work if you are lucky enough and willing to compile from source.
• Fortunately, i also noticed that Blender, the 3D tool i use, has a video editing mode. Wtf, how i missed that for so long (ok, i had heard of it, but i thought it was some sort of simple annotations or whatever…).
• So i spent an hour learning how to do video editing with Blender.
• And finally made the video as i wanted it. That is, i added an intro image and removed the big delays while i was sleeping.
• Then i had to wait for another half-day (or so) for Blender to export a huge .mp4 file. I hoped it wouldn’t be huge, but it actually was about 2.2GB :-/
• So i decided to do the conversion properly with ffmpeg to H.264 and MP4 myself. And these formats were mandatory since i wanted to have (a bit of) control over the video quality and YouTube doesn’t seem to mess with the video encoding with these formats.
• Unfortunately the ffmpeg version i had wasn’t compiled with libx264 support. So no H.264 encoding for me.
• So i tried to use a version from Linux using VirtualBox since Debian would probably have it an apt-get install away and i was so tired of all of this.
• After another hour configuring repositories (because, apparently, Debian didn’t have it an apt-get install away due to licensing issues…) i managed to have a x264-capable ffmpeg converting the file.
• Only it was way too slow. Like, 1fps slow. Making that video would take more than the game itself.
• So Debian idea scrapped, let’s go back on Mac OS X. And compile our ffmpeg with x264.
• And thus i downloaded code for libx264 (i already had compiled ffmpeg previously), yasm (that libx264 needs) and a couple of others.
• I spent a couple of hours just trying to get ffmpeg compiled. Incompatibilities between (default) flags, the installed version of gcc, features, etc and almost no mention of it on the web. Bleh. But i finally managed to do it.
• And so, yet more hours of waiting to get ffmpeg convert the 2.2GB video to something i can upload…
• That would be a 415MB video.
• So, i left it uploading and went to sleep fully tired… and finally:

Making of
“She Loves You”
Ludum Dare #22
timelapse
Sorry, i couldn’t figure out how to embed a YouTube video

After watching it, i also figured out what exactly was missing from the game:

What was missing from She Loves You

Next time i’m going to fix that

So I found this thing which makes custom Santa messages.. sort of. So I made one for all of you

Another night well spent playing some great LD48 games!

I found some real gems tonight, and I want to share them with you. Also, if you make a rate/review post, make sure to tag it accordingly (with rate/review or something) so that other people can find it. I would love to know what games people are enjoying out there.

Anyway, the highlights for tonight go to:

The Love Letter — Out of every 10 games in LD22, 4.5 used a lone hero and called it a day (nothing wrong with that). Another 4.5 decided that “alone” means “I hate the world” and made an brooding, boring game. And then we have this game. You received a love letter, and you want to read it. But your classmates won’t let you alone, so you need to get away from them just enough to read the letter. Such a fantastic, and yet simple idea! The execution is also very good, even if the game is not finished (you can’t win yet).

Colorless Hope — A well polished platformer. Cute graphics, lots of hidden goodies, and smooth gameplay. You can feel the love that was poured in making this game

The Darkness You Wander Alone — Another platformer. This time the author aimed for a retro feel, and I think he was quite successful. Also, the game was devilishly hard, but in a way that made me want to take on the challenge, not put the game down. Worth it for the nostalgia value.

VOXTERIUM — Amazing. Fun. Addictive. Creative. A shoot-em up, where there is only one enemy, a growing virus, and you move around it. This is a take on the shooter concept that I haven’t seen yet, and I think this has a lot of potential. Also, kitten power-up.

Screaming — This game is not quite there yet, but it has a couple of features that I found interesting. A zombie apocalypse platformer, but you can type, and words appear above your head. If you “talk” near a zombie, it will try to mimic you. Also, sometimes you can talk to the mysterious entity that is following you. I think there is some untapped potential here.

I hope you liked my picks for today! Stay tuned for another selection tomorrow!

So it looks like my web hosting is having issues right now. I’m not entirely sure but it may be that I’ve spiked up to about 6Gb of bandwidth a day for the last few days. So if you get a broken link in the download then maybe check back in a day or so when hopefully I’ve had a word and figured out what’s wrong.

Ludum Dare 22 marks my fifth entry into the 48 hour game design competition of the GODS. My most critically successful competition thus far … was my first. Way back with LD 16 and the “EXPLORATION” theme, I created a Wall-e meets Fallout sidescrolling adventure that didn’t even have 75% of my planned features. Maybe it was because there were only 121 entries that time, but my game somehow ranked 8th in graphics and 20th overall. I was pleased with the warm reception, but I knew I could do better.

Fast forward to NOW… with Ludum Dare 22 and over 800 entries… wow. There are some AMAZING games floating around out there, and I can’t wait to dive in and try them out.

So what happened during this LD? The most important thing that happened is… I LOST MY MIND. I have never really been able to take a game from idea to completion in 48 hours. It haunts me. Even when I scaled back my idea for the “ISLANDS” theme with Savory Sea Hoss, I still ended up with a game that just felt incomplete. I decided that I would do whatever it took to release a ‘finished’ game this time, and it nearly killed me. I didn’t sleep during LD22.

Did it work? Sort of. I ended up with a much more ‘complete’ game, but I felt horrible throughout the entire competition. I flooded my body with worthless snacks and energy drinks to stay awake, and I made some stupid errors that wouldn’t have existed with a WELL RESTED perk.

I was desperately hoping that the theme would include an actual GAME MECHANIC and not a setting or ‘idea’ theme like before. I wanted RANDOM GENERATION, as that’s one area that I don’t have much experience in. I wanted to learn how to do that. I certainly could’ve incorporated that into the “ALONE” theme, but I ultimately decided against it.

WHAT IS AB-ALONE
Ab-Alone is a hybrid adventure/survival/crafting/puzzle game that combines BEING ALONE with BEING IN A STRANGE/NEW PLACE.

From the official page:
“An alien creature crash lands on an unknown planet and ends up on a remote island. With no way to repair the spacecraft and no way to call for help, the stranded alien is forced to survive while attempting to find a way home. The small island is covered with sand, grass, rocks, and trees… but no other life forms can be found. A startling discovery reveals that there may be more to this world than originally thought…”

FORMING THE IDEA
The “ALONE” theme immediately made me think of a deserted island. I knew right away that there would probably be MANY, MANY games based on this basic idea, but I decided to go ahead with the brainstorming phase. I knew that the core of my game would be based around being trapped on an island, and the overall goal would be to escape. I decided very early on that I would take the theme literally. I didn’t want there to be any other characters in the story, and I wanted to create a sense of desperation by making the player as clueless as possible without creating a complete TRIAL AND ERROR experience. That’s when I decided that the main character should not only be alone… but alone on an unknown planet. Instead of a space marine with guns and gadgets… it’s an alien with NOTHING. The player is just as clueless as the alien, as there is no tutorial or extensive explanations/labels. This is a design decision that I made early on, and I stuck through with it even after realizing that it had the potential to create an incredibly frustrating game.

WHAT WENT RIGHT
• A Beginning / Middle / End – I wanted the game to start and end with a story sequence to frame the action. I did it, and I’m happy with how it turned out.
• SOUND – Thanks to the beauty of SFXR, I was able to create a large amount of custom sounds in a very short time. I even had time to make two songs that really add to the feel of the game. The ‘main theme’ that plays during gameplay is a mixture of island ambience and breezy melodies that work with one another without feeling too repetitive.
• Pretty Lights – I wanted a day/night system. I also wanted the ability to make a fire. I knew that this would require lighting, so I spent a large portion of my Saturday designing the day cycle/fire lighting. This eventually led me to experiment with particle creation for the fire. I decided against the particle fire, but I kept working with the particles for other effects.
• HUD Creation – I knew that I had to come up with an inventory/crafting HUD system that wasn’t too invasive. I didn’t want there to be any sort of PAUSE or pop up menu, so I decided to design a HUD along the bottom of the game window. The HUD can be switched between an INVENTORY and a CRAFT view. It isn’t the most intuitive or beautiful system, but it does what I wanted it to do, and that’s a victory in my book.
• Crafting/Building – I wasn’t convinced at first, but I really dig the ability to craft ‘structures’ and such. It isn’t much, but I think that it really adds a nice touch to the game.
• Water / Waves / Tide – I knew that I wouldn’t be able to create a fully-functional tide system in this amount of time. I designed the island as if it only had one beach… with the rest of the coasts being covered in rocks. The beach features a wave that carries in new collectibles every morning. I originally toyed with the idea of a moving sun that creates a reflection in the water but I stopped being stupid and immediately stopped thinking about it.

WHAT WENT WRONG
• Sprite / Color Cohesion – I never really stayed true with any specific art style or color palette, and I deeply regret it. The shades of yellow and green that I used to form the island tiles are just plain UGLY. There are some sprites, like the crashed space craft, that are very well done. Then there are others, like the rocks and trees, that just look out of place in comparison.
• Forgotten Features – I wanted too much. I wanted more items, more crafting combinations, more food, more EVERYTHING. I have a very small collection of items that can be found/crafted, but there just wasn’t enough time to do more. I have an entire document drawn up that shows fish, a fishing pole, and a way to grill fish over a fire. None of this was included in the final game.
  Bad art – Some stuff is just badly/sloppily drawn. The rocks are ugly. The dried leaves look like bananas. The seashell look like a jelly fish. The axe, which is made out of a seashell tied to a rock and a stick… looks like a jelly fish tied to a rock and a stick. ETC. Not too thrilled with a lot of the aesthetics this time around.
• Controls – I’m not too happy with the way the character moves, and some of the ways that you have to interract with the cursor are confusing/nonsensical. I just didn’t have enough time to iron out these details to perfect the interface.
• Delivery – I was so tired after not sleeping that I completely bombed the LD 22 entry page process. I posted a link to my game site without making the page public. I could see the page, but nobody else could. I lost several plays because people couldn’t get to my game. With over 800 entries, I may NEVER get those plays back, and that sucks.

CONCLUSION
In the end, I feel as though this is my greatest LD triumph. It may not be reflected in the voting, but I think that this is the best ‘overall’ game I have made since I started these crazy things. I took an idea that has been played to death (crafting / survival) in recent years, but I was able to put a new spin on it. The game includes a bit of humor, which is always good, IMO. It’s very hard for me to be SUPER SERIOUS in life, and this should be reflected in the games that I make.

I’m working on a guide/walkthrough for the game… as I’m sure that there will be questions. The game is meant to be a bit of a puzzle, so you won’t be able to plow through it without some experimentation and careful studying of the slight clues.

SO WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? GO PLAY AB-ALONE!

Ludum Dare Entry Page
Direct Download (Windows)
Direct Download Mirror (Windows)
Official Game Page (under construction)

Here is a timelapse of the first day.  The second day I was on my Mac and didn’t have the timelapse software.

Timelapse

There are some cool shots of me programming the mini game.  Also lots of me trying out various sprite editors.  Never found one I liked.

If you like dating sims with weird stories, come rate my game:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=5150

Susan

Edit – I can’t figure out how to embed my video.
Edit 2 – Thanks Andrew!

This was my very first Ludum Dare entry, and I had a lot of fun with it

It actually got me motivated to make a game from start to finish, even if the game wasn’t so great. That said there are some things that I learned from doing this that everyone might benefit from.

When we were all sitting there voting on the final bunch of entries, the three best ideas that entered my head were for Forgotten Places, Kittens, and Consequences. I had a solid idea for Alone, but when the theme was actually announced I really fumbled it a bit. The final idea to come to mind had nothing to do with gameplay at all, it was a story idea. You’re a kid with your dog, your dog gets stuck, and you have to try to get the dog out. The twist was that you couldn’t do it the way you’d expect. Either you or the dog died, and you (the player) had to make that decision, and I’m certainly not going to make you feel good about either of them

Things that went well:

• Livestreaming. I really only had a max of 6 viewers at a time, and all of them were friends that I know in real life, but having someone there watching you is an amazing motivational tool. Want to go to 4chan real quick? Better be content you don’t mind everyone seeing. It also opens up a channel for some good ideas to get pelted at you when you get stuck.
• Art. Considering what usually gets saved and called art, I believe that the majority of the game art ended up pretty good. It’s a bit tile-ey but someone told me that it was a bad idea to spend the whole weekend drawing art, so I tried to get done with the art as quick as I could.
• Story. It’s an implied story, since there’s no text or dialogue (Unless you count the endings). I really wanted the player to enjoy the dogs presence and make the dog seem like a standard idiot dog, the kind that just roams around sniffing and being generally useless. And then once the player really likes the dog, take it away from them, and present them with a possible way to save the dog. I think it worked pretty well, and when I get comments like “You monster!” I know that they felt the emotions I wanted them to feel when playing the game.
• Sounds. Everything that seems like it should make sound does, and there’s also the little happy dog yap at the end as it runs off with the bone. I like it
• Multiple Endings. Games that have alternate endings always seem to require an extra bit of thought into how you go about completing it, and with a game like this i feel having the two endings was a really nice touch.

Things that could have gone better:

• Level Design. The level was really just slapped together as I added more and more to the little debug area that I started with. It certainly could have been more interesting, with things like traps, and enemies, or at least some form of challenge.
• Gameplay. The game isn’t fun, at it’s core it’s a button stomping game. This is really because all I had focused on is the feeling of being separated and alone.
• Music. I have never made an original tune before in my life, the music in this game is pretty bad, which is why I added in the mute button.
• Programming. The game is a horrible mess inside. At first I wasn’t really going to have that many objects so just placing the objects directly in code seemed like a good idea at the time, but as I got farther I realized I had like 150 lines of just adding new objects into the level. I haven’t used the DAME exporter for anything more than a CSV editor with a  GUI for a long time, so I could have taken the opportunity to get used to the exporter again.

The game itself wasn’t very fun, because the idea that I had in my head was for a story driven game, not so much a cool gameplay concept. I was short-sighted when I was making the actual game and just wanted the specific scenes that are present in the game, and wasn’t really taking much consideration as to how to hold the players attention.

Really it seems like the worst part of the game is… the game. As I was finishing up I began to realize that my game wasn’t a game as much as it was a mindless button stomping adventure, and by then it was far too late to go back and really change it. If (lol when) I do another Ludum Dare, I intend to put more thought into how to make the game fun before I work a story. It’s supposed to be a game after all, and there’s no point playing a dull game.

So I finally settled down from LD22 and got time to render out the footage I took while making Isolated Assault, my entry. Some screenshots:

I had fun, but lost some sleep.

Anyways here’s the time-lapse video (The first and third music tracks are ones I created for another game, the second I created for this one. Process for the second one’s creation is shown in the video. Oh and I do tend to watch Notch’s live stream and play other people’s submissions from time to time.)

Isolated Assault – Ludum Dare 22 Timelapse

Resolution is a little large, you may want to go full-screen to see what applications I’m using.

I’m really enjoying the post-mortems, so here I go too. I made a pretty standard Zelda-like game and it was my first ever LD48. You can play it online or check out the submission page.

What went right:

• Postnatal: I spent most of the time building the engine, and even though some shortcuts were made (mainly the Level Design one below), a lot of aspects of the engine were quite robust and really nice to work with. If you get this right, adding a diverse set of game elements is easy (for instance, the concept of potions took me 5 minutes too add, including making it something monsters can drop and making it available in the town store. I guess my point is that if you take too many shortcuts, when LD48 ends, that will be the end of your game, you’re never going to want to touch that code again. If you make more of an effort to build a sturdy system, the 48 h session might just be the birth of your game and your post-mortem examination will instead be a postnatal one. I’m pretty pleased with my game in this aspect, but there are many improvements I can make until next time.
• Smooth sailing: I like building everything from scratch, so I only had 160×120 pixels to work with, and I did all the pixel manipulation manually. Sure, this meant implementing for instance alpha composition from scratch when I wanted to have that, but I think those things are fun so I didn’t mind that. This also meant that after the canvas was set up, I had complete control of everything. Getting stuck on API stuff can be frustrating, so I’m glad I was able to keep that to a minimum (I got screwed over on sound though, check below).
• Fun factor: I know the fun factor is quite limited, but there were some shimmers in there, and I did catch my girlfriend playing the game several times on Monday (quote: “Okay, this time I’m going to try to complete it with only a steel sword”). I’m really pleased with the enemies and how much technique counts. Also, even if you know the best technique, it still needs precision and skill to carry out.

What went wrong:

• Sound: My sound threads were piling up on me, causing the game to crash. I eventually had to take it all out, even though all sounds were ready. Lesson: make a more thorough warm-up round if you’re using unfamiliar tools.
• Level design: I didn’t have any software for this, and even though the forests are generated, I wanted to create the city and the houses myself. It was either going to be an image or a text file. I went with a text file, so I could easily throw in some some additional information, etc. Much more familiar with text parsing in Python than Java, I decided to just go ahead and acknowledge that some shortcuts have to be made, so I wrote the parser in Python and made it spit out Java code. It was fast, but now afterwards I feel really dirty generating Java code. Lesson: Take some shortcuts, but not major ones like this. It made me feel less proud of my final product, no shortcut is worth that.
• Name: With 700 entries, you have to be more original than “Leave me alone!”. Also, I must’ve been crazy thinking I had a pretty original idea when I decided to have a person who wanted to be alone (as opposed to the more obvious not wanting to be alone).
• Time for final touches: It was really hectic at the end, and I left a few things hanging. The houses in the city are completely undecorated, even though I even had made at least a bookcase sprite that never made it into the game. Adding them is a matter of minutes, but the final hour stress got the better of me. I also had 4 ready sprites for a bomb that never made it into the game, even though it probably would’ve taken like 10 minutes. I also had a lot more in mind for cool effects. I had for instance written a blur effect, that could’ve been used as scene transition, when hurt, or something like that. It was all ready to be used, but you forget all about that when time is up. Lesson: Leave more time at the end! Or at least, if you make an effect/image that you’ll “put in later”, just put it in right away instead. I even had a 10×10 pixel kitten that I forgot to put in!  FUUUUUUUU

After sleeping 12 hours and looking at the feedback that I got so far I think its time to write my Postmortem.

If you haven’t played it yet, go check it out . and have a look at the screenshot:

What went Wrong?
1. Lack of Sleep Management
I came from a very busy week finishing of a project on Friday and having to deal with the press, I was in a very rushed state. And also pretty tired and went to bed 30 minutes before the theme was announced. I slept for a long time and when i read the theme I was very demotivated and started to laze around not really knowing what to do. I slept for an hour or so in the afternoon aswell and played some soul calibour.

2. Fiddling around with the details
I spent a ridiculous amount of time adjusting the details of the landscape and the texturing, the trees and such. I think in the end this is what makes the athmosphere unique but i got a little obsessed with it and spend a lot of time on placing audio sources on the shore for example.
Also the textures of the landscape changed alot unitl i was happy with hte result.

3. Lack of Gameplay Instructions
Although I had lots of ideas of how to implement I got caught up in the art and didn’t start coding any real gameplay until sunday it would have been wise to do that earlier as It would have been easier for people to play the game if it would have been clear for them what to do. But then I wasn’t really sure about what to implement. so really it was a lack of clarity.

4. Lack of a Plan
I didin’t have a real plan I just started doing something and the game is what evolved out of a whole bundle of ideas. Even though I’m quite happy with the result a proper plan would have enabled me to really sit down and do some focused progress. instead I walked a more playful path adding stuff here and there. this made the process into a very joyful experience but a proper plan would have enabled me to finish more features in the weekend.

5. Lack of involvement with the community
Although I posted some progress reports, I would have liked to get involved with people a lot more. The Chat is just to fast for my liking and also on the central page the messages kept coming up in quite a rapid rate. It would have been nice to get some playtesting done before submission because that would have made the lack of instructions a lot clearer.

1. Starting with the music
I had noc idea what to do so, I just sat down on the piano and played while recording the midi. After 16 bars I stopped as i felt that I had jsut improvised a great harmonic progression I then took this progression adjusted it here and there and built the track from in about 30 to 45 minutes. Hearing the music I felt very inspired and basicaly built the whole game around it, always going back to it once i felt stuck.

2. Going for the Mood
Reading the theme and that there was a mood category this time, it immediately rang something within me and i set forth to take this as my main goal to built an athmosphere, a space of feeling.
I think that is what makes my game unique and where it really paid of to spend all that time on the art and sound, as people just love the athmosphere.

3. Proper Preparation
I took part in the warmup weekend which further enhanced my knowledge of Unity regarding game related functionality, as I have been using Unity in a non game related context.
also making myself familiar with modelling and texturing, proved to be very valuable. Sticking to the known toolset I never got stuck on anything which made the whole experience much more relaxed and enjoyable. I think Unity really showed its value as a development tool as I would never have been able to code something like that from scratch.

4. Getting involved in the Community
I posted progress reports involving screenshots and got some positive feedback which really boosted my motivation. That was good but It could have been more as indicated above.

5. Strong Visuals
I felt it was really important to have a strong artistic delivery as thats what people recognize first and which makes the game stand out among all the other entries. For me that meant having a well balanced color palette aswell as a general feeling for the forms and textures that make the game quite unique and also coherent.

All in all I’m really happy with the game, although it’s not really finished I have something that I want to keep working on and turn into a proper game.  Anyonone would be willing to pay for this?

I wrote a post-mortem for the last Ludum Dare on my blog.

Last week-end, December 17th to 19th, it was time for another Ludum Dare.

I took part in that Ludum Dare, just as my colleagues did, with our in-house game engine, the RedBox Engine.

TDWIWEEHF

The game I worked on is called 2011 : TDWIWEEHF. That title was not initially gibberish, but the line of thought I had with that original title was discarded once I realized I could not convey what I wanted to in the time I had. The game’s source is available at its bitbucket site, but not everything is made easy to build right now. I was mainly making use of BoxFactory for development. If you want to make it work, you will need to copy the libraries folder from the RedBoxApp starter project and call libbuildtool on that.

[...]

Continue reading on my blog at:
http://samuel.dionne-riel.com/blog/2011/12/20/TDWIWEEHF-ld22-postmortem.html

_{By the way, I don’t know if it’s frowned upon to post like that from another blog. If it is, contact me and I’ll work things out properly. Thanks.}

This LD I decided to throw myself into a completely new engine and way of making games and challenged myself to make a Flash game and learn Stencyl in 48 hours. Something about a definite and worthwhile deadline and the community spirit really creates a sense of urgency and also a source of motivation which definitely helped since I’m lazy and have a short attention span. I don’t really know how to do these things… Sorry!

What went well?

Well, things started out okay because I was just fucking around in MS Paint, and experimenting with the black and white setting. The Cultist scene was one of the first I drew and I was pretty happy with it. I spent a lot (probably too much) time on scenes at the start but those ones turned out really nice.  Even though I’m a bad guitar player and literally recorded the sound in one take, I think it turned out nicely.

What didn’t go so well?

Pretty much everything else. I’m pretty slow with coming up with good ideas, so a lot of the scenes in Survive The Desert feel forced and dumb. Making the game itself at first started off pretty well, but I ran into so many problems and didn’t know how to fix them that I wasted a lot of time doing really tedious code to make things work (there are 30 different objects just to handle the transitions to each different scene, and each scene has its own text box object). Because of this though, I sort of created something awkwardly long and with a seemingly strange sense of time and distance and although the desert is fairly populated there’s still a lot of space and I kind of think I managed to get a little of the theme in there. It’s growing on me. I hated it at first.

My artwork started getting really sloppy towards the end too, and I wish I’d had enough time to put in as much detail as I did in those early scenes. Also something simple like making the compass more apparent to the player, I didn’t get enough time to do.

What would you do if you had more time?

Originally I had intended to put in a hydration level which would decrease as you ventured across the desert. I also had ideas for different items you could start with which would allow for different ways to play the game. I really wanted to put an item called Danger Skull in there which when used would fill the screen and then a voice would say ‘There is danger here’ and that’s all it would do. I wanted to put in all these useless items that you could find in this large desert. I wanted more character interactivity too, but I was clutching at straws for ideas towards the end anyway so I don’t know how that would have turned out.

How would you rate your weekend as a whole?

Pretty highly I guess. I’m glad I did it, it’s always interesting to see how your mind works when a deadline is approaching. I kind of thrive under that pressure and that’s pretty much why I was able to finish this game.  I did only get like 4 hours sleep the whole weekend though, and didn’t really eat anything on Sunday which was kind of bad. But it’s done, and I’m glad I did it.

I’m sorry this post-mortem is pretty boring, you can try out my game Survive The Desert by clicking here.

They’ve been setting up SSL on the domain for the past few days, and it appears my subdomain broke, so my game can’t be downloaded at the moment. Sorry for the inconvenience, trying to get it working as soon as I can.

Hi All !

I just received my Ludum Dare Christmas gift ! The sender is Polm23 who doesn’t know what to send me so He looked at my LD21 submission which is Pastagus Fantasy. A crazy shoot’em up that is a tribute to Parodius and other amazing shmups. So He decided to offer me Gokujo Parodius on Super Famicom ! He also adds a weekly manga pre-publication magazine and some flyers of the mythic retro game shop the well named Super Potato.

His gift is just AWESOME ! Obviously like a lot of people here I’m a retro gamer and so a fan of Parodius games and I love receiving Japanese stuffs ! Fortunately I didn’t have this one and can’t wait any more to play it !

So once again a big thanks to Polm23 ! You are the best ! And here is a photo of what was inside the package.

Merry Christmas Everyone !