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:

First of all, the game:

Desert Adventure (with Kittens)

This game is a text adventure where you control a player waking up in a hostile environment.

What went horribly wrong:

• Theme, I had like 0 idea what to do with Alone (but I can only blame myself, that’s one of the few themes I voted for in the final round).
• I procrastinated way too much while pretending to be looking for an idea.
• I had other things to do that weekend, which I did during the last 5 hours of LD.
• I’ve had to rush making one third of the game’s content in one hour.

What went right:

• Using jQueryMobile for the first time.
• Choosing a text-adventure (time was short, 12h were already gone, so not having to create assets except using jQuery’s ThemeRoller for text/bg colors was great).
• Adding Kittens!
• Choosing a web-deployable framework (makes packaging 100x easier).

Although I wasn’t inspired as much as during previous LDs, I’m happy with what I came up with and I hope the final product will satisfy you, the players !

I realized that I had completely forgotten to post food photos ! So here’s what I’ve had at noon:

Pot-au-feu (French food )

I’ve also added a few features to my Desert Adventure game: first of all, the interface has a different color based on where you are ingame, and there is now something which tracks the differents ways in which you’ve died earlier in the game !

Some real life stuff is trying to distract me, but I still think I’ll make it in time: what remains is 20min to spend on gui code, and everything else can be spent on finishing up the story, and eventually making some art.
Note to self: add Kittens!

See you near the deadline !
I wish you all luck !

While the croissants bake in the oven, I find myself unsure of how I want my game to end. I think the game might become: find all the different ways in which you can die !

Of course, I will try to add kittens!

I’ve been working on adding a bunch of scenes to my text-adventure which starts to really look like something releasable soon.

I think I’ll be able to finish it in time, and it’s the first time I do something web-based for LD, so I’ll have to see how I’ll host it. It’s a simple HTML file, so that shouldn’t be hard…

I’ll try to sleep a few hours: I only slept 1h since LD started, which means I’ve been programming for more than 20h straight, with 10h spent on two failed prototypes, and 10h spent on this game ! (Of course, you can remove the time spent on IRC, but that’s part of the fun )
Good night !

After having spent an insane amount of times (around 12h) on two failed prototypes, I finally chose the path of the text-adventure ! The scene takes place in the desert, where you wake up with blurred memories…

Although there’s not much to see yet, here’s a screenshot (posting screenshots make me feel like the game really is underway):

An part of the story near the beginning of the game.

Even though I have so many things to do for school, there’s no way I’d miss LD!

As usual, my tools will be:

• Language: C++ with SFML
• Graphics: Gimp and Inkscape
• Audio: LMMS with Yamaha keyboard

I bought two new screens, next LD will be twice as fun as the last one !

Yay! 1920x1080 FTW!

And I know, I should buy a real keyboard before LD22 !

This is a second part of the postmortem for Poor Ball, read the first here.

Global impressions on this LD:

This LD was my second and it went much better, I’ve had more time to think about my game and to implement it (even if I haven’t had the idea directly) thanks to less chat on IRC, but I still talked quite a bit, because not being alone is what’s awesome in LD. I haven’t been affected by the site issue as much as I thought I would be, simply because it was slow but not unreachable when I needed it…

Impressions on my game and its creation in C++:

The development went very smoothly as I didn’t loose time on features I could obviously not create in time (I lost some time struggling with a library bug, though). I could easily add the things I wanted to because I didn’t force my to do an object-oriented design (I prefer using well-designed OO APIs like SFML but I cannot design good interfaces in a short time) and simply had one function per thread: display + input, gameplay, physics and music (which was handled by FMOD without my intervention); and one function to asynchronously play sound effects. Simple as that! I had to refactor some physics code in a new function and that’s all. The game was finished in time because I used placeholder graphics until the game was actually playable.

Impressions on the graphics and sounds:

The graphics in this game are really simple:

• A dark background image putting an emphasis on the limits of the terrain and on the danger near them with a blurring effect;
• Simple ball and wall sprites with brighter colors;
• A title menu with some nice text giving a small background story (you can cry or laugh at it, as it is kind of simplistic and unrealistic ).

The sound effects are nearly perfect in my opinion: I used some bell sounds and small melodies instead of visual feedback for this such as level up, loss of life, etc, as the game requires a high focus on the ball’s position. Using sounds let the player know what happened without having to look at the HUD, which nevertheless exists.

Conclusion:

I enjoyed that LD as much as (or even more than) the first and I’m really happy to have a complete game, which I am proud of as I am not a professional (game) developer (yet) !

Congratulations to everyone and see you soon at LD22 or before on IRC !

Poor Ball - Click the image to rate the game !

Poor Ball – Fififox – Competition Entry

Now that the stress of coding/packaging/testing/submitting is gone, the time is right to sum up what I’ve done, the good choices and the bad choices.

What I’ve done right (based on my previous and first LD experience, LD19):

• I finished my game (I haven’t been overly ambitious);
• I only made graphics and sounds after the game was working;
• I made something (relatively) nice and with good sound effects;
• I made a title screen and wrote a short story to introduce the game mechanics;
• I spent time on IRC, but only time which I didn’t miss as the deadline approached;
• I didn’t feel stressed until the very end !

What I’ve done wrong:

• I thought that good ideas would come by browsing dictionnaries and wikipedia and probably lost time by not really concentrating;
• I got used to my game’s difficulty and didn’t see that removing the two easiest levels was a bad idea.
• I spent a long time trying to repair a library instead of just replacing it by another one directly;
• I tried to cross-compile my game and the libraries I was using instead of booting that old slow Windows box.
• I should have written more progress reports instead of being on IRC for time.

(more…)

My entry features a girl called Ball, a ball.
If you didn’t know that, check out my entry “Poor Ball”.

Here is my timelapse:

Poor Ball

Yeah, I did it! That’s my second Ludum Dare, and it’s really awesome!
Go check my entry featuring Ball, a little girl, a little ball, and fight for her future!

After having done the audio, I created a nice title screen!

I’ve completely changed the mood of my game. I had a title screen which was… kind of… imperative, the player having to execute orders, but that was just too aggressive. The mood is now much more relaxed, or even a little bit sad, because of the soundtrack, which I love (who said it’s just because I’m the one who made it ? ).

I’ll have to change the title screen to match the music, and then I’ll submit my entry ! That should be doable in 6 hours.

PS: I would have liked to attach the title screen music to this post but WordPress refused to do it. So you’ll have to wait for the finished game to listen to it !

Since, the site now works, it’s time for a progress report. I quite moved from the original idea, but the game in now playable! You have to prevent the ball (which goes always faster) from escaping. You can do this by placing blocks on the ground against which the ball will bounce.

I know you prefer a screenshot rather than a long text, so here you go:

The game itself is ready, sound is being worked on.

Here we are: the whole physics are working, the ball bounces against the walls created by clicking ! I’ve created some sprites using Inkscape, and SFML2 is really awesome to work with (it doesn’t get in your way and it gets the job done easily) !

Next on my task list: creating a level, probably adding scrolling and maybe some music and sound effects ! The title screen also needs some polish, but it does its job for now.

That's a bouncing ball !

Okay, time to eat. The collisions are detected and I need to code the response (make the ball bounce).

Collision detection !

Meal

Here we go! I’ve had an idea that I believe not being as bad the others ! (I had thought about a colored space-shooter featuring the Nyan-cat… but that wasn’t really what I was looking for) So I came up with a ball game: you can only interact with it by placing obstacles which it will bounce off and the goal is to bring the ball to the exit of a maze…

Let’s code !

Here I am, entering my second Ludum Dare compo! Hopefully I’ll come up with something awesome enough for me to sell it ! (just joking, or rather dreaming)

See you all next weekend!

The “I’m in!” video (geez, my phone has better video/sound quality than my webcam o_o):

Bye.

PS: I’ll be using C++ and wxWidgets or SFML… and also Gimp/Inkscape for graphics and LMMS for music (this time, I’ll do this when the game is ready ^^).

The title says it all… or maybe not. Let me explain the basics of what I’m gonna work on: you have some sort of convoy to protect and it has to travel from point A to point B in a given time. To do this, you can only use two commands which affect the physics of an area: you attract or repulse the objects in that area (each having differents properties, such as weight, damage caused around it when destroyed, attraction/repulsion (pulses) or bonuses such as more shields for your convoy, extra time or even time freezing).

Let’s code !

Woah, this weekend is full of things to do. I’ll try to make something playable this night, because war is such an inspiring theme that I’ve already come up with a few ideas, only a few minutes after having read the theme !

See you all on IRC (although it might not be such a good idea if I want to make something before the deadline ) !