I worked by accident on a soccer powered beat’em all.

You can play it here !

Please play it before reading this because it spoil a part of the game

A/ Genesis

First I want to say that the “Alone” theme was very difficult to handle. It’s hard to imagine new features for a game without adding new peoples, or monsters. Each time I could imagine fun stuff to add  it was always a step back on the “Alone” theme.

Initially I decided to work on a peg solitaire version. I was thinking that adding ninjas, a lot of bonus and special fx could make it interesting, but… the core game was still very boring on the first prototype.

So I tried to find the game stereotypes were Loneliness would be a real paradox. When Soccer came to my mind, I said it out loud and we had a good laugh ( I was working with deepnight, valandre, cardus and 01101101 ) It seemed like a good start.

I designed the soccer stadium and the bases of the soccer ball and players. I had to work on a false soccer player AI, good enough to make the trick for 10 seconds… They are not very good at it ! Always pushing the balls behind the goal or leaving the field..

The goal was to make everybody vanish after 10 of play to leave the player… alone. So I could fulfil the Theme.

But I was still failing to make it a game without adding monsters or peoples. I was thinking about opened drain covers or nails, that player should dodge… But it was not very exciting gameplay. I didn’t want to loose too much time, so I started to draw background of the city outside while thinking to the problem.

I finally bring myself to break player’s loneliness with sweet bouncy blobs, so he had something to burst with his soccer ball. Well I dont regret it, shooting ball at blob’s face was fun enough to make the core gameplay.

Here’s the timelapse 

B/ What went Right

- No Generation ! I did it ! All the backgrounds are 100% handcrafted ! No random flowers on the side of the road, no random clouds flying in the sky ! Well I’m not sure that was the best choice, but it was very refreshing to work this way !

- The public of the stadium : With just 3 animation and 2x color sets I could render a crowded stadium. Fast and efficient !! ^_^

- Focus : I could work concentrated for almost 37h. I think that taking care of my sleep on the past week helped a lot.

- Intro / GameOver / Ending screen : I started to experiment them with my first LD and I’m now able to achieve this task in a very short time. That’s all thanks to the Lumdum Dare experience !!

- MathMusic  ! That’s the terrible music you can hear on the title screen, here’s the part :

C/ What went Wrong

- I spend to much time to find the main idea. I used to spend only few time on the past LD events ( 30 min – 1h ) so it was very disturbing to watch time pass and not being able to write any line of code. It may be good to take time to find a good idea but too much make me feel nervous, and I finally lost my self confidence.

- SFX : I was thinking that 1h would be enough ( thx to Bfxr ) but I finally spend 4-5h to import a lot of sounds with differents pitches ( 3x different foot step, 3x different bounce sound, 3x different public voices etc ). I was an uncreative and boring task. I don’t even know if the game was really needing it.

- English language. I spend huge time to google each of my sentences to check if their grammar was ok. And I only have 10-12 lines of tutorial & ending… My slowlness and lack of imagination dissuaded me to use my text system in the game ( “Hello blob ! How are you ?” )

- I was far too unsociable. On sunday I didn’t take time to speak ( not a single word ) with my friends who were working on their LD22 entries, I didn’ even took time to test their game even if we were working in the same room !

- Control : one of the control feature is very hard to explain : You can press spacebar one short time to attract ball to your position. I could not achieve to explain it to the player so they could use it

…you’ll be a part of me… forever…

One year since my first attempt to LudumDare.

This is my 4th participation and I already feel like a veteran !!

>>Programming : haXe

>> Graphism :  Adobe Flash CS5 and/or GraphicsGale

>> Sounds : Bfxr

>> My personnal Library : lib  ( mostly for pixel sprite display and anim manager )

I entered this LD21 with my own additional theme : “No level Generator”.

I’m designing game for a long time now and I have always eluded the leveldesign problem by programming levelgenerator for any game. Breakout generators, sokoban generator, shmup generator, etc.
I was pretty proud of it. Knowing that my game have sort of infinite ammount of levels feels powerful and trying to make them fun althought they were not craft-handed was challenging.

Back when I was 14, My iconic game was Frontier Elite 2. I had no clue what a random seed was, but having a universe on my 3.5 floppy disk sounds magic !

When I started to read the LumdumDare blog, I was surprised by the time spent on leveldesign. Filling a .txt file with “O” and “X” was the kind of thing I totally wiped of my mind. It feels like and old age thing.

That’s a very twisted point of view, but I cant help thinking like this

Enough with the psychoanalysis, what about the game ?

In Rainbow Jail I tried to design the level instead of procedurally poping block and baddies by reversing puzzle solution.

and… Hell, it’s hard work !

For manually designing these kind of puzzle, you have to think hard ! First you have to make some easy level. Not only player must achieve them by doing almost anything, but they must feel like they made some wise move to do it. After that, more challenging levels. For achieving this, you have to test.

A lot.

And I’m awful a this too.

Spending all my time playing my own 48h game seems like a nonsense.

The hope : A Solver !!

So of course, I want to create a a LevelSolver that will check for me the ammount of solution for the current level so I can, just by blindly add or remove block, navigate between 0 & infinite number of solutions until I reach the “only 1 path” holy grail.
Well that would still be leveldesign, but it seriously take the generator twist. And moreover dealing with the fact that player can push some blocks ( sokoban factor ) is not making it easy.

Back to reality

I had to face the harsh reality. For every single level, I will have to check

•   is my level possible to finish ?
•   is my level fun ?
•   is my level erhh.. beautifull ?
•   is my 12 move ultra-smart solution is not overlaped by a 2 move solution I didn’t notice ?

I did my best and I think the result sucks

The problems :

• My urge for quantity over quality made me add those grey dots (random color block  ) so I can easily create enough room for my game. Most of these levels are untested and boring.
• Not enough testing : maybe 10% of the room are truly tested. It turned out that making a good level take me 30-45minutes. I should have spend 6-8h on 12 good level instead of this zelda-ish interconnected room map.

The good sides :

• Creating an ambiance for your game is easier with a manually drawn map, I could for example create some kind of jail look level.
• Thinking and testing each of your level really shorten the distance between you and the player.
• Testing specific features of the game is easier : Just draw the situation and test it !

I wish I could design fantastic puzzle like chocolate castle, or better,  mix procedural generation and leveldesign to produce gem like spelunky…

Well you can’t become a good leveldesigner in 48h, but a sure thing is the LD competition help me to progress in this way !

It’s the first time I try to post something during the 48 h

I’m currently working on some sort of puzzling where you must escape a rainbow prison by destroying the right tiles.

You have to reach the border without waking up the guardians ( red balls )

Play it here !

It’s my 3rd time !

Equipment

- Coding : haXe

- GFX :  Adobe Flash CS5 and/or GraphicsGale

- SFX : Bfxr

- my lib

Even if I like the theme, I lost too much time to build the platform engine and I don’t think I will be able to finish with only 12h left… Here’s what I did until now.

I will use :

- haXe

- GFX :  Adobe Flash CS5 and/or GraphicsGale

- SFX : Bfxr

- my sprite manager

- MUSIC : Milky Tracker ( I will try… :-/ )

Good luck to everyone !

I want to share some tought about my entry for LD19 : Land Of Fodnal

What went wrong

Scrolling constraints

I tried to implement a scrolling system where you have to select a unit to center the scroll zone. No other way to scroll map, so you have to build units to visit, and also you have to keep your units alive if you want to go back. Incidentally, if you loose one of your unit, your link to your main base is cut and you have to choose between explore back or go forth with what you have.

In theory it was ok, but in pratice the main system really look like a bug or some very bad control choice. Most of the player were trying to find key shorcuts or mouse control to scroll around, and I was not able to write a hint to describe a control you actually dont have… Ingame help is my biggest flaw, so maybe other gamedesigner could  have done much better with this.

Ingame Help

All is said, I knew I will mess up this part and I did.I hope  that many LD experiences will help me to correct my way of creating games.

Stress

The last 8 hours was a nightmare. The final 15 minutes ( didnt know about the 1 extra hour for submit ) I found a crash on the gameover sequence ! I added tons of aborigines on the map, to trigger gameover faster and have some tests. As soon as I fixed it, I uploaded my entry… with the test settings…

Really sad to see how 48h of work can be wasted for 5 minutes of overstressed debugging…

Interface

Creating game from scratch is fun. But spending hours for creating a button Class and aligning text really made me feel like I’m loosing my time. Maybe I will declare some interface libs in the next LD to stay more focus on the game creation part.

Writing post, read other people posts.

I intended to post step by step part of the game and I was totally unable to do it. Stress was eating me so much that I could not give enough attention to the LD blog, or even test the game of my friends that were working just next of my desk… Now I will catch up by testing the more game that I can ^_^

What went right

Minesweeper

Working on a minesweeper games is really entertaining .  I’m actually not a very good player at the classic game, but last year I played to the fantastic Onslaught of the Electrics Zombies and I had very good time with it. I was amazed on how the minesweeper gameplay could ignite some kind of exploration will. I also had good experience with Mamono Sweeper and Mine Tower. That’s why I tought that Minesweeper mechanic could be a good idea for the LD Discovery.

Sounds

Having to create sounds  was really exciting. In my everyday work I make webgame without sound because most of the users turn it off or even complain about it. Adding some sounds ( even just a bit ) in my LD game really feel like I’m creating a complete videogame. I was thinking it will cost me a lot of time, but it was easy and fast thanks to Sfxr. I also had a look to musagi but I was not able to make a good music ( need more pratice )

I just realized that the online version is a test verstion…

There’s way to much aborigines ( I was testing the game over sequence ). I was not intending to kill the player at the first error.

I dont know If I can modify my entry or not. If I could I would be happy, but It break the 48h rule…

Here’s the correct version : fodnal 1.1

Please let me know if I can replace my entry with this one ( juste one line was deleted from the original version )

This is the workspace from my company where Deepnight, Valandre, WhiteTigle and I participated to DL19 !

my place

This was my first LD and my only post for the competition. It was too difficult for me to focus on the game and writing post in english… -_-

It was a very intense experience. Saturday was a lot of fun, Sunday was Hell, the last 15 minutes was above Hell. I could have killed anyone who would have stand between me and my keyboard…

I kept a log of my activity on Land Of Fodnal during the 48h :

3:00 –>  Discovery ( Containment is second :-/ ) –>THINK
4:00 –> go for minesweeper game with island progresive discovery –>THINK
5:00 –> ??? Inside the body cells discovery <vs> fantasy
7:00  –> go to bed
10:00 –> wake-up >>Brainstorming
11:00 –> have the CASTLE MANAGEMENT idea -> start to code + base GFX
14:00 –> lunch break
14:15 –> folks structure tracking
14:45 –> Danger zone + tower ( number in zone are killing my display :-/ )
16:30 –> structure selection + scroll
18:00 –> structure interface GFX + ergonomics
18:36 –> loosing huge ammount of times on interface ( have no field / buttons / whatever libs )
19:35 –> still crawling with buttons… -_-zZ
20:23 –> At least I can build things !! It seems fun to discover map buy building things to scroll.
21:00 –> lunch break
21:30 –> try too animate folks
22:00 –> Refactoring
23:20 –> GameOver sequence
00:00 –> Decide to cycle worldmap… Always late for this kind of decisions…
00:20 –> working on sight system
00:40 –> Debugging cycled coord
01:00 –> Trying Musagi
02:44 –> Sound session end –>  debug
04:00(?) –> Go to Bed
11:00 –> Wake Up
11:30 –> Work on Aborigines path
12:00 –> FX ans parts
13:00 –> new bads
13:10 –> try to make nice border for beach but fail -> goto difficulty generation
14:30 –> working on sight system visibility ( = headash )
15:15 –> Starting the science bonus system
19:15 –> Editing world map
19:30 –> adding some hints
20:15 –> correctings few bugs
20:40 –> starting minimap o_O
21:20 –> Intro artwork + intro coding
22:00 –> Title artwork
23:00 –> First serious test on the game…
23:15 –> implements new sciences
00:00 –> adding small elements
01:00 –> balancing ( ouch, a bit late for this )
01:20 –> adding difficulty level
02:30 –> adding hiscore local saving
02:45 –> Arrrrgh my first infinite loop NOW !!!
03:10 –> Version submited !

Now I will test the other games !

Hi !

It’s my first try for Ludum Dare,

I will use :

- Programming: haXe and FlashDevelop

- Graphism : Gale and/or Flahs CS4

- Sounds : sfxr maybe musagi too

- [Edit] I will also use this lib for bitmap display and animation with AS3

Good luck everyone !