You can click this link with your pointing device to see it!!

Covers about 20 hours of actual work, most of which spent with a warm cat on my lap.

Post-mortem coming soon!!

Edit: thanks Galman for helping with the embed!

My game is called “Ghost Town” (working title).

I’m tracking progress with Google Plus simply because it’s easy to toss photos and screenshots up there. I’m not really doing major blog posts this time. (Also I shoot random updates on twitter.)

I’m seeing tons of amazing stuff on the LD page, this is incredible.

Good luck to everyone!!

Look at that, just look at it. You’ll never see a more beautiful reproduction of the Link vs. Old Man screen in your entire life.

nobody steal my idea ok thanks

map made using Tiled.

Old Man made in GraphicsGale.

(Going to be using previous production version of Flixel)

nice pants, shorty

Last Things First – The Conclusion

This game (“Lost Races’ Abandoned Artifact Recovery“) failed. It is not fun (actually rather boring). It fits the theme, but not in the way I wanted. It does not transmit the information intended. It is not very funny, either.

In short, the game does not live up to any of the goals set. Let’s go over why.

The Concept

This is the only part of the game I am proud of, even if it is not reflected in the finished product in almost any way. You take the role of an exploring astronaut, scavenging old, abandoned machines and technologies left behind eons ago by advanced races (now extinct). This mechanic alone may have been interesting, but there is another twist: whilst you are busy discovering and cataloging these machines, another technologically-advanced race is monitoring YOUR progress.

I was struck by this model of double-discovery as a good take on the theme, and something that would probably be rather original. The game wouldn’t explicitly tell you that you are being watched, rather it would become clear as you played. (Also, if your actions arouse too much attention, you are destroyed.)

I decided to go with a mechanic that requires the player to upset a random distribution of “glowing stones”. As the player organizes stones around focal points (the artifacts), they are unwittingly making their presence known. I show this by using a minimap in the lower right-hand corner, which actually represents what the aliens see on the planet.

Daniel recommended using negative entropy as a measure of organization (defined here), which worked very well. I built a quick proof-of-concept in MATLAB. It’s like a poor-man’s pattern recognition algorithm, and Flash was able to do it reasonably quickly.

For the same number of points, entropy is reduced as they are clumped up

Another thing that spurred me forward: I don’t know of any other game in which the minimap plays a key part of the mechanic.

The Riddle

This is my fourth Ludum Dare competition. This compo marks one year since I made my first game, for LD16. If so, why, oh why, do my tilemaps look like this:

I know retro is in, but Windows 3.11???

Why? WHY WHY

The Failure

Ultimately, despite the good concept driving it, the game failed to communicate what was necessary.

The scary voices I added were ambiguous to the players. Along with the “alien” writing (Wingdings), they were meant to correspond to the interest level of the aliens, ie. how organized the playing field is. Similarly, the minimap was not recognized for what it was, and I was asked “why doesn’t the player appear on the map?”.

The graphics were very, very ugly (except maybe for the astronaut’s helmet, which I liked).

Evidently, the algorithm failed as well. Depending on the random starting layout, entropy would drop at different rates as clumpiness was achieved. Also, I couldn’t account for different player styles, so maybe clumping differently had an impact on the measurement. In any case, people could play through the game without losing and without knowing about the Overwatch aliens. To these players, it was a boring, repetitive game with no point and no reward.

Random distribution - no alien threat

After player "organizes" the stones near artifacts - high risk

To players who lost, I doubt they understood that if they redistributed stones after discovering an artifact, they could avoid the aliens’ attention.

Ironically, I thought of a great way to improve it, after the competition was over. Instead of piling stones on top of artifacts, the player should uncover them from beneath mounds of stones. This is more intuitive, and might be coupled with a physics element to provide a less “grindy” feel. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to test it out.

Dear Eli: For Next Time

• Try to make a SIMPLE game that does ONE THING and does it WELL.
• Don’t bother with forced artsy concepts that hold up an entire game. Maybe these concepts need to be built, but maybe they don’t need to be in game-format. Maybe it’s the wrong medium. Maybe.
• GOOD GRAPHICS
• If completing the game does not provide satisfaction, there needs to be something more than a title screen that says YOU WON!!! on it.

Hope I do better next time. Thank you for reading and I apologize for making another non-fun game.

By the way: if you have read this far, then YOU WON!!!

Dr. Astronaut vs. The Glowing Asprins

Yeah I got stuck on lots of stuff! Especially making that terrible background. Much worse for wear!

Happy about the minimap/monitor thing, though.

I guess it’s time to make a GAME out of it, wonder if that will happen.

See you tomorrow!

Secondary (temporary) monitor graciously provided by zDanielz!!!
**Disinterested Cat not included

This weekend, witness the Ludum-power of this fully armed and operational battle-office!!

iħ ∂/∂t |ψ> = H|ψ>

Are you up to the task??

Only one way to find out.

Don’t get carried away.

come on

It is a thrilling battle between the forces of good and evil, as clearly represented by these lovingly-crafted models.

Atop Mt. Brawlalot - "placeholder" splash screen!

We all know what “placeholder” means in Ludum Dare, don’t we now?

wifes-built tortillas!

Tortilla and chili!

Basically, sometimes your Ludum Dare is like lunch. You eat and eat, and then it’s gone. Same deal.

Oh and I am making a game too. I have spent all day debugging HingeJoints in Unity. No idea what I’m doing. Basically.

GOOD LUCK!

200 grams of joy

At least something will be Elite this round!

The hit soundtrack for You are me now has been released, courtesy of Indie Funk Electronic Newbie Records.

• Intro/Extro
• Island Theme

If you haven’t played the game yet, it lives on the Megastructure development blog.

Questions, comments, and criticism are all welcome (Ludum Dare entry page). Thank you to all those who have commented! I have learned much, and next time will be even better.

yippppp yip yip yip yip yip yip

Building You are me now was wonderful, mostly because it had closure, but I do not consider it complete. The central idea, using the Islands metaphor as a physical mechanic, falls short of my initial thoughts when considering the theme when it was announced. While walking around Tel Aviv’s Neve Tsedek neighborhood, I chanced upon some graffiti that seemed to fit the idea of making islands stop being islands. (Continued…)

inspirational graffiti in Neve Tsedek

Concept, plot, story

To be honest, the original idea I had doesn’t work as a game makable in 48 hours. Infecting NPCs with your brain waves, becoming a kind of hive mind, spreading your mental capabilities. Instead, the graffiti solidified a simpler concept of trading places with your enemy, using a kind of teleportation mechanic.

I liked the idea of “Islands”, and it made its way into the game as a settings and a further mechanic. This, too, could use some expansion. Lowering the water level between the islands should be more than just a switch buried in the ground. It needs to be connected to the psychic capabilities as well. Lowering the water level should connect you more with other “minds”, allowing you greater freedom. It should make your clone-self last longer, or jump higher, enabling you to visit locations previously inaccessible.

It was due to this partial thought that the ending is not very satisfying. A truer ending would include a feeling of mastery, as you have swept an archipelago populace into a transcendent state. But nothing along those lines was available in this time frame, so I opted for keeping the ending simple and blunt.

The story is hopefully somewhat implied, but it ended up being mostly absent. I didn’t get around to writing big texts, or adding any sort of characterization.

Technical

Having played around with Flixel these past few months, getting a simple game up and running was extremely fast. Approximately half of the time was spent on code as it was on graphics, and very little time wasted on bugs (though I did have a few annoying ones).

One major time-drain was getting the maps and tiles to work. I have used Mappy->Flixel in the past, but this game incorporated more layers than ever before, and my workflow is a pain. Next time, I’ll probably use a different map editor program, like Flan perhaps.

I wishy-washied between GraphicsGale and Inkscape a bit too much, and the resulting pixels are pretty bad. My friend and LD-jam-mate, Daniel Zoran, explained how I should really be making the tilesheets (make a big square page so you see how they fit together), instead of my 1-dimensional tile sheets. Definitely on my list of things to learn how to do.

What? What is, what is this thing?

I can’t believe I made music! This part really contributed to my feeling of accomplishment, when seeing the finished product. I think next time, I would want to extend beyond sfxr sounds, or at least learn how to layer them together with an external program, to add complexity. but daaaaaaang, I made a whole game, including music and sound effects, winning condition, and bad guys.

Gameplay

This one hurts the most. During the last hours of the competition, I neglected playtesting, even though multiple opportunities presented themselves. Even something as simple as tuning the jump mechanic – this could have added much in the way of playability. After the compo was over, I watched a non-gamer play, and I was ashamed that I left so many little annoyances in.

Also, more feedback to the player would have helped. It isn’t obvious that backtracking is necessary, and the checkpoint markers were misidentified as information booths (or even telephones, perhaps because of their sound when activating).

External

• DO: keep track of your time! Excel is your friend. It says I spent 20.06667 hours working on Ludum Dare.
• DON’T: drink caffeine late at night I had a very bad night’s sleep during the compo.
• DO: have a great friend like Daniel, to keep each other smashing away at the keyboard.
• DO: get the hell out of the house!!! It probably saved my life, going for walks every day. Also, this is how I found the inspirational graffiti (pictured above).
• DO: have a supportive spouse!

Thank you for reading. Thank you for playing. Thank you for leaving meaningful comments.

Play You are me now.

ps. Thank you, Ludum Dare! I can’t wait for the next one.

As you can see, things are kind of blocky, but they are moving along. The protagonist is the intrepid Pale Yellow Square, as pictured in the center of the screen.

There may be an visual island theme, but the story is quite relevant. In short, your task is to make islands stop being islands.

Well, it is 2am now. I hope to conclude this successfully tomorrow.

ps. amazing WIPs so far!!!! You guys are unbelievable.

Radio tuned to the Secret Sound Service. Take care, everyone! Here’s wishing a fruitful and productive LD48.

Edit: a nearly-pointless “song” made in Musagi a few days ago: Jungle Exploration Theme (ca. 1996)

Also, I may or may not be twittering about the process.