I am pleased to present the final version of AVOIDAL. It has gone through heavy changes since my last post-compo post.

I’ve been working very hard on it since Ludum Dare concluded and have put about 30 more hours of work into it (or about 50 or so total on this game so far.) I wanted to be able to get this finished in time to submit to August’s Experimental Gameplay Project since I was aware of their theme of “Zero Buttons” while I worked on this and I was able to do it!

Big thanks to Sparky who has given me a TON of invaluable feedback and ideas while tweaking this final version.

The menu should read v1.0.7 or greater in the top-left or your cache is old.

RECENT VERSION HISTORY

v1.0.7 – Posted 8/30/2010

• Made HUD a little less cluttered

v1.0.6 – Posted 8/30/2010

• Combo introduced and capped to x5 multiplier
• Mines now can start moving around at higher levels
• New “Mine Streak” bonus awards at 10,25,50,75,100,150,200
• New menu layout
• Tracks local highscore, highest streak and difficulty for local replayabilty and challenge
• More sounds added for new notices and awards

v1.0.5 – Posted 8/30/10

• New visual effect and sound effect for when a spike hits a mine (to differentiate and add variety from when a seeker hits a mine)
• Smoother angled robot effect when mouse moves left and right
• Smoke toned down to be less distracting
• Mine lifespan increased at beginning to 6 seconds instead of 4
• Added a 10 frame damage image to the robot torso to also help show player health
• Adjusted game to run at 60FPS instead of 30FPS
• Smoke now appears behind player sprite
• Fixed score bug

v1.0.4 – Updated 8/29/10

• More changes to difficulty curve based on feedback
• Added Animation on How To Play screen to easily explain game mechanics instead of having as much text to read

AVOIDAL – Post Compo Version!

I’ve made a bunch of improvements to AVOIDAL since the compo and I’d love your feedback!

Play the post compo version of AVOIDAL here

The LD48 official compo version for judging is here now

Changes to the new version:

• Added 1 second of invulnerability if you take damage (this helps a ton!)
• Rebalanced the difficulty curve to make it progress a tad slower
• Mines spawn a tad further in from the edges to help player not get stuck on walls as much
• Reworked How To Play screen to be simpler and clearer
• Changed ‘Energy’ to ‘Health’ in UI
• Fixed some sound volume and playing issues
• Added a nice visual effect of little random twinkling stars in the background

I’m gonna keep listening for feedback and working on this game but I think it is pretty close to me calling it done at this point. Thanks for the great feedback I’ve gotten already to everyone who left me comments on my rating page.

SUMMARY

AVOIDAL page here on Ludum Dare (for rating and comments!)

Gameplay Trailer (watch me score 1.5 million points!)

Watch my TIMELAPSE

Play the LD48 Official Compo Version of AVOIDAL

Play the Post Compo Version

I had a lot of fun this Ludum Dare! After missing the past few it was good to participate again for sure. I’ve never done one of these post mortem entries but I enjoy reading the other ones people post so I thought I’d take a crack at it.

POST MORTEM

You can read my detailed post mortem below:

(more…)

I worked on AVOIDAL for 26 hours and took screenshots every 30 seconds. This three minute timelapse video is the result. There were a few times I forgot to restart my timelapse so there are a few tiny things missing but most of all the interesting asset creation (like graphics and sfxr and music) is in there.

Here is my timelapse for AVOIDAL on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKtZNylG74M

I submitted my game to the form with 5 minutes to spare! Phew…

Play it  here in your browser!

My game page here on the Ludum Dare blog.

You can play the fifth build of AVOIDAL here.

If anyone has a minute or two I’d love any comments on the difficulty ramp over the levels.

New features this build includes:

• All game parameters are tuned and tweaked every 5 mines collected to keep increasing the difficulty
• All mines, seekers, and spikes have their own warp in transitions for cool visual effect and to let the player know safely where they are going to appear and activate
• Introduced a CHAIN counter for big points. As long as you don’t take damage or let any mines expire and explode on their own you increase your chain counter for every mine you destroy with an enemy

Time to get cracking on sound effects and music at this point and then keep playing and tuning the hell out of it to make sure it is as fun as possible.

Got a new playable version posted. The biggest changes have been making the game 20 pixels taller to move the UI off the playfield, making the yellow mines have a lifespan which ticks down till they explode showering the screen with very damaging spikes. This is too add a final bit of player tension and motivation to collect mines quickly.

TOAST

Good morning Ludum Dare. I had one bite of my toast before I snapped out of it and realized I NEED A PICTURE OF MY FOOD!

Made my coffee.  Opened the window blinds. Eating my toast.

Got 5 hours of sleep again last night and am trying to stay both calm and pumped for the next 15 hours that remain. My game will hopefully change and improve a lot over this day.

FLASH GAME HIGHSCORES TUTORIAL

One thing I wanted to post about that I remembered last night as I finished dropping in online highscores into my Flash game was that with such a large and new crop of LDers here there may be a few that use Flash and haven’t got an easy highscores option to encourage some friendly competition on their score based game.

Well have no fear! One option is to check out a tutorial I made here a year ago about how to drop MochiMedia global highscores into your game. You don’t have to use their wrapper or ads or anything–you can use just their highscore widget.

You can check out my tutorial here and feel free to ask any questions that may come up if you are using Flixel or FlashPunk I know people here have used it with those though sometimes you have to adapt my tutorial a bit I think.

Plus you can see how they work in my current LD entry here.

Posted my third playable version of my game.

Spent the last part of the first day here getting the preloader, menus, highscores, and other assorted UI ephemera working. This way I won’t have to think about all that stuff during the last day when my brain starts shutting down trying to do game state flow. Always a recipe for last hour bugs!

The third version still needs a bunch of gameplay work but I have activated the local and global highscores.

I finally picked a game name of “Avoidal” too for this creation.

I have my plan for tomorrows code, graphics, sound, and music. Time to get to bed (about 1:30am here) and wake up in about 5 hours for the last day of the compo. What a marathon this LD beast is.  Good luck everyone!

So I figure I may have about 5 more hours of game dev in me today. My goal is to get as much code finished as possible so that tomorrow can be mainly 12-14 hours or so of game tuning/polish, graphics, sound, and music. We’ll see what happens!

Well I’m back at my home after a fun day of in person game development with two other LDers over in a Portsmouth NH cafe. It was so cool to meetup and work in person a bit and share game progress and talk shop a bit.  Plus it was great to get the odd looks of people while I photographed my lunch and while we talked about our game mechanics.

Stopped by my favorite Indian Restaurant and picked up some Chicken Tikka Masala and Vegetable Pakora. Time to enjoy this feast and then get back to the game dev!

This is my second playable Flash prototype.

Try to draw the enemy spikes and red seeker boxes into the yellow mines for points. If you hit anything on screen you will take damage. Your energy recharges over time. If you lose all your energy it is game over.

Finally managed to get some lunch here at “Me and Ollies Cafe” in Portsmouth NH. I’m working here with Johny D and BillNye downstairs in a great community room with great tables, food, wifi, and AC.  It’ll be open till 6pm so any other nearby LDers that want to stop by are more than welcome. Gotta finish this lunch up and get back to work on my game!

Now to counter act the sleepy chicken sandwich I ordered a nice iced mocha with whip cream. Soon it’ll be time to make some real progress…

Good morning Ludum Dare!

Managed to catch about five hours of sleep–my regular nightly amount for most LDs.

I was thinking–if timelapses are fun after the compo to watch they are certainly fun to watch during a break while the compo is going right?

Before I head over to the Portsmouth NH Ludum Dare meetup I figured I’d render out the timelapse of me creating my first playable prototype (always an important milestone for me) in the first four hours of the competition.

Not sure if you can embed videos here so here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lR4MMAiA9s

This is my first playable prototype. This represents a little under four hours of work in Flash.

Try to draw the enemy orange spikes and red seeker boxes into the yellow circles for points by using your pink pentagon to lure the enemy in. If you hit the enemies you lose points. Basic proof of concept at this point is finished.

It is 2am here and I think I’m quite happy with what I’ve got down for the first evening to sleep on. I’ll be meeting up with 3 other LDers tomorrow over in Portsmouth New Hampshire to continue the game dev in the fun company of others. Sleep now!