Topsy Turvy post-mortem

What went right:

* The concept. I’ve had the idea in my head for a while, and I’m very glad that I used the competition as an excuse to make it rather than forcing myself to think of a game idea inspired by the theme. And the game ended up pretty much how I imagined, so that’s good too.
* Inkscape as level editor. AS3 has some rather lovely XML-parsing abilities, so reading the SVG file was surprisingly simple. It’s very much hard-coded to the specific output that (my copy of?) Inkscape generates, but it should be fairly easy to fix if it ever stops working.
* Abstract graphics. I am not an artist, so I decided to save time and just draw everything out of lines. I think the results fit the game fairly well, even if they’re not actually good.

What went wrong:

* The goal. I added the collectables to provide an incentive to get to the more difficult areas and also as extra landmarks for getting your bearings. Unfortunately, with time running out and no win conditions implemented, I made the decision that you would win if you could collect all of them. In hindsight, I should probably have added a level exit instead.
* Difficulty. The game is ridiculously hard. I knew I wanted to have some areas which would be tricky to get to, as a challenge, but when the goal became “collect everything”, those areas suddenly became non-optional.
* First day motivation. I wanted to have all the basic game mechanics done by the halfway point, but I was just procrastinating like crazy. I’d come to the conclusion that it just wasn’t technically interesting enough to hold my attention, but then on Sunday morning I added death and respawning. Suddenly my game idea was in front of me and I could start constructing devious routes through the level, and I spent the rest of the day excited by it.
* The name. It actually changed name twice between starting and submitting, and I’m still not really happy. Currently thinking about maybe renaming it “Jump-Zap-Flip”.

Lessons learnt:

* Get death/respawn implemented earlier in future
* Think of a win condition as part of the design process
* Don’t make ridiculously hard challenges required to complete the game

Once again, I seem to have made a game which only I will able to play.

You can play the current version online here.

It desperately needs collectables of some kind to give the game some objective. I can probably get away without much more level design, since it’s already fairly confusing with a non-massive level.

But first, I think it’s time for some food.

Viewable here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKdPC42_F3Q

And that’s that. It ended up… not as polished as it could have been. As is always the way. I would have liked to have got a variety of weapons and some different aliens in there. As it is, I threw in the smaller enemies literally at the last minute so I don’t really know how difficult it is.

Play in browser here.

Working title is now “F equals ma”.

I wasn’t too happy with the square cave that I had going before, so I’ve replaced it with a randomly generated cave system. Now I just need some reason to explore.

Play in browser here.

Spaceman Jimmy has been stranded inside an asteroid! He is quickly discovering how inconvenient zero gravity is.

Shoot the aliens before they hug you to death! (Disclaimer: death may not actually occur.)

Play in browser here.

My cave is very square at the moment. I want to implement some cool per-pixel collision detection on the cave walls, but Box2D won’t let me do that and I’m not going to let myself reimplement a physics engine.

Just got up; have a vague idea.

Tentative title: “Space Caves”

Going to use Flash, probably with a Box2D library.

I started late, but still went over my 48 hours.

I used my Large Polygon Collider engine for the physics (with many modifications). It would have been much quicker to just use Bullet, but I learnt a lot more this way.

Download for Win32

Download for Linux

Each of the moving buttons plays a different sound. They create ripples in time to the music they generate.

More of an interactive screensaver than a game. I didn’t even come close to adding the time travel mechanic I wanted to, and even then there wouldn’t have been any gameplay.

Update:

Win32 executable
Linux executable

Needs a fairly decent machine to run sensibly: sorry!

Play online: http://www.draknek.org/games/robo-jimmy.html

Edit: much belated source code: http://www.draknek.org/games/robo-jimmy-48hrs.zip

If I’d had time to make levels at the end, I think this could have been a decent game…