Basic idea is a risk/reward mechanic overtop of a basic mouse skills game. The player decides how much/where they want to suck from the body parts. Those arm hairs wiggle around. The more the player sucks the more erratic they move but I’ll likely increase a score multiplier. So the idea would simply be to guide your mosquito to the body part areas you want to get blood from and then escape without getting slapped.

Here is the current earliest test prototype showing what I got finished in my first two hours here. I’m using Flash CS5.5 and ActionScript 3.0.

This is Ludum Dare Twenty though! It could be the crazy excitement of Ludum Dare will recharge me!

Maybe I’ll just do a game that is way different from the kinds of games I normally make.  Also I should try really hard to make a game that I won’t be tempted at all to monetize. That way I can treat this as more silly fun and not as just an extension of my normal game studio work.

If I participate it will be with my trusty Flash CS5, Audacity, BFXR, Photoshop, and Reason.

Good luck to everyone (especially you first timers… you’re in for a ride.)

AVOIDAL (my August 2010 Ludum Dare entry) and October Challenge entry has found a home!

I’m excited to report I finalized on a primary sponsorship deal with Tom Fulp of Newgrounds last week and have finished all the integration and testing work required. That work included getting to create 23 fun medals (achievements) for players to win when the game is played over on the Newgrounds site with a player account. The game will launch over there next week on November 3rd. I’ve also managed to sell a few non-exclusive licenses including one to Big Fish Games. The primary sponsorship was found via posting to Flash Game License. I spent a good bit of time in October working on, play testing, and polishing the original competition version into the final version.

The highscores have been reset so get in there and play!

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

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.

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:

FRIDAY

I had an idea within two minutes of the theme announcement. This doesn’t always happen so I’m pretty excited.  I normally spend Friday night sleeping on the theme announcement after drawing a few mockups but this time was a bit different. I had an idea that I figured would be simple enough that I fired up photoshop and drew the following mockup:

I read over my notes and the concept felt solid for fun potential as well as being in line with the scope of a 48 hour competition. For my game studio work I typically develop within the 1 to 3 week time period but I’m familiar with the 48 hour marathon since I’ve competed in about 6 or more of these 2 day game competitions. I’ve also worked on learning my lessons (failures) well!

I refine the idea into a color mockup by doodling it again in photoshop:

You can see that I’ve got the basic enemy and player elements of the final game already in place. Spike and seeker type enemies. A large and silly player character that eventually becomes a stylized robot character. The gold stars as targets for the enemies to collide into.

Having fleshed the idea out more I’m ready to open up the Flash CS4 IDE and start implementing a graphical mockup:

Now the graphical assets above are all usable as initial art once I’m finished creating the mockup in Flash. It is a really cool thing about prototyping in an IDE like Flash that I can quickly put game logic into ActionScript 3.0 files behind each of those assets.

I work for about 3 more hours trying to get a first playable prototype. Getting the first playable prototype build is so crucial to iterating on the next part of the game that the earlier you can get feedback and play the game–the earlier you will be able to see how much more you need to implement. This couldn’t be more important than in a 48 hour game competition scenario.

I manage to post the following prototype build at 2am–four hours into the competition:

You can even play the first prototype here if you want to see what I started out with.

I was very happy with what I was able to come up with at this point. I was able to know that the game idea was solid and more importantly–already very fun!  I knew that I’d sleep well Friday night and was looking forward to beginning to iterate on Saturday with a good start in the competition.

Time spent at this point was four hours.

SATURDAY

I awoke Saturday morning after about 5 hours of sleep. I checked out the Ludum Dare blog and found that a few people had played my game already and had left some encouraging feedback. This was a big morale and motivational boost as it meant more than just myself found the game fun.  I also found I had been awarded two funny LD awards: One for “Flash prototyping like Flash!” by Zlash and a second “Silver Star for Prototyping goodness” by Tyler. Thanks guys–you really made my morning!

Now today I was also excited because I was going to be driving over to Portsmouth NH for an in person meetup with some other Ludum Dare participants I had never met before. I’ve been working on getting out more into the game community around the New England area and this was an excellent opportunity to meet some other people who enjoy making games.

We met up in an awesome cafe called “Me and Ollies” and found an entire downstairs community center with AC and wifi and plenty of nice seating!

That is me on the left and billkyne on the right.

Here is a short YouTube video filmed by Jonny D of the beginning of our meetup.

The meetup went really well. It was so refreshing to be able to see what others were working on and to just talk about game development and Ludum Dare related things. I also enjoyed the strange looks I got from others in the room when we would talk about our games to each other or when I would take photographs of my food:

I ended up getting less than four hours of work in on my game but the small lack of productivity was more than made up for by getting to meet Jonny D and billknye. I was able to post version two of my game from the cafe.

I had so much fun and was inspired to drive back home after 6pm to get cracking again on my game!

Once I got home I was finally able to decide on the name AVOIDAL for my game. It took me longer than normal to pick a name this time. I like picking out unique names as well as names that often have domain name availability.

Avoidal isn’t a real word but it is in use lightly on the internet and has Urban Dictionary entries strangely enough. I decide that the low Google search noise will allow my game to eventually place well in search results for Avoidal.

I discover that avoidal.com was available and I register it and quickly setup some HTML and CSS in place on my sever to hold the eventual competition game entry. Why go through this extra effort? I enjoy crafting the entire experience for the player and I like the elegance of the idea of having my competition entry hosted on a dedicated, short, and memorable domain.

Having prepared the final destination for my game I get back to work on the actual game itself. Here is a screenshot from version three:

I spend some of Saturday night implementing SWFStats gameplay analytics. I love using an analytics package like SWFStats so I can start getting valuable aggregated play testing data to help improve the game as early as possible. It allows me to track custom metrics like average scores over the various difficulty levels and highest chain multipliers reached. Stats like that help me see graphs of what the difficulty curve is and make intelligent decisions about the mechanics and settings. I can also analyze play length data and number of views versus plays to see if my game is holding player interest or not.

I then focus on getting the bulk of the menus and game flow logic in place. I know from past competitions that once Sunday rolls around my brain will be a chaotic and spastic place. I like to handle all the mundane things like online highscores implementation, preloader and initializer, game over screens, game state tracking, main menus, pause menus, sound mute widgets and all the other miscellaneous ephemera that goes into making a polished game. I enjoy putting a high level of polish into my games so it helps to still be fresh when I implement these things.

All told I put about four hours into my game getting all the non-gameplay stuff in place. I know that tomorrow will be reserved for final tuning, final graphics, sound effects, and music composition. I am preparing myself mentally for what I know will be a long day. I head off to bed and plan on getting another 5 hours of sleep.

That brings my Saturday development hours in at this point at about 8 and 12 total for the competition so far.

SUNDAY

Final day and I am PUMPED!  There is so much left to do to bring AVOIDAL to life and it’s time to get going.

I start off by redesigning the mine asset:

Those white spikes will become projectiles that eventually fly off if the player let’s the mine explode before destroying it. Those spikes also do the most damage of any of the enemies in the game.  I want the player to be motivated to destroy the mines with the other enemies so I do two things. First the the chain multiplier goes up each time you destroy a mine. A mine has a lifespan and will eventually explode if left alone for too long. When it explodes it releases the projectiles as well as resets the chain multiplier.  The second motivation for the player is that when the mines explode the spikes move pretty fast and in eight directions so they can be quite deadly. I’m hoping that this will be another aspect of excitement and tension in the game.

In order to get my coordinate offsets and angles correct I draw the following mockup:

This will let me spawn the mine tips at the correct coordinates when the mine detonates so that it will be a seamless visual effect of the tips of the mine sprite flying off. It ends up working quite well and my Sunday is off to a productive start.

I then go through and revamp all the graphics replacing all the placeholder art.  I pick new colors for some things while others remain more or less the same. I put in animations for most of the assets.

I then spent some time to tackle the main character design:

On the left is the placeholder art for the character from the prototype. Next to that is the character I had doodled in my original mockup. I still wanted to capture the light-hearted and goofy feel of that doodle instead of the cool mathematics of the pentagon.

I initially drew the third image overtop of the original sprite in the Flash IDE. This was so I would have the dimensions be equivalent so that gameplay wouldn’t change. I couldn’t get a freehand style I liked that I felt blended in well with the polygonal style I was already working with.

I scrapped the third freehand concept and started using basic primitives to sculpt out what would eventually become the little flying robot. I even sort of think of him in my mind as being named Avoidal.

Once I saw him animated I knew that I was happy with how I captured my original intentions with the doodle of the little flapping guy with the target on his chest.

I now had all my final art in place:

When I wasn’t working on the final art for my game I was playing it as much as I could and posted two more playable builds to get player feedback and start working out balance and difficulty issues.

Here is version four and version five for reference.

Now at this point I’ve been working since about 7:30am Sunday morning and I’m starting to really feel it. I find myself zoning off into space and starting to lose track of my train of thought.

I realize that I need to grab a quick dinner since I only have less than three hours remaining in the competition and there is still final menu polish, sound effects and music to create! I run out and grab some pizza and come back and inhale it. I didn’t even have time to take a photo because at this point the game is clearly the priority for me.

It may sound weird but participating in Ludum Dare competitions over the years has really helped me to remain cool under pressure when developing. When I feel the brain-tightening stress start I remember to relax and breathe in and out. I then refocus and keep working. I find using an online todo list web app really helps me stay on track.

With just a few hours remaining in the competition I fire up the web version of SFXR and start cranking out sound effects like a machine. During this part I keep a list of sound assets I need and the game playing in the background. I tab back and forth between SFXR and my game in the browser and imagine what kinds of sounds I am going for.

Then it is a frenzied mashing of buttons and hoping I get lucky on the randomize feature. I really love this part in that it feels like I’m fishing and I don’t know what I will catch.  I score some really lucky hits on randomize as well as some old standbys from the more normal themed buttons. I import them into Flash and tie them in with code. I even take the time to add some nice stereo panning to applicable sound effects based on sprite screen location.

I also have been taking care of various other tiny polish items from my todo list. I wanted to get a slight left and right lean to the robot sprite when the player is moving quickly back and forth. I also wanted to make sure to add an instructions screen in the event that someone gets stumped and actually decides to read the instructions (hardly ever happens I know…)

I now have less than 45 minutes remaining and I fire up Reason and use my Alesis midi keyboard to layout a quick menu chiptune loop.  I compress it into MP3 and put it in place in the game.

Holy crap only 15 minutes remains to do final screenshot and upload. I’m sort of a purist in I like to have my game fully submitted by the deadline. I managed to get everything filled out in the form and turned in with 5 minutes to spare.

Now comes the relief knowing that I’M FINISHED.

Total time spent on Sunday was over 14 hours–phew what a crunch!

Total game time spent developing was 26 hours. I’m getting faster…

FINAL THOUGHTS

I’m really quite pleased with how my game came out and my weekend in general. I feel lucky to have come up with such a simple and fun idea very early in the competition. I had a playable prototype so early it really let me focus on polishing the heck out of this little game and putting in all the normal bells and whistles I’d put into a releasable Flash game from my studio. This has been my most successful Ludum Dare yet–now I just have to see how other players like it!

I have to really pump myself up sometimes to participate in something as demanding as the marathon that is Ludum Dare. I almost want to collapse or feel like I might vomit sometimes from the amount of strain and wear that hits me after working 25-35 hours straight over the two days.

Why do I do it then?

Despite the wear and tear it is just an amazing concept to participate in a global event with so many other passionate game developers. I have a strong sense of competitive spirit and I like the opportunity to demonstrate my skills and love for game development. I like feeling the inertia of 100s of other game developers trying their best and simultaneously creating awesome games!

Ludum Dare really teaches me how to distill a game down into what is critically important and make hard decisions about features and scope that I have found I can apply outside of the stringent competition to my normal game studio work.

I started my independent studio and returned to game development largely because of participating in Ludum Dare a few years ago. It will always hold a dear place in my heart because of putting me back in touch with mychildhood dream of game creation. I’m just glad it clued me into what a great game development movement was going on that I was unaware of.

I can’t wait to play all the other games here!

MY LINKS

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

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!

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…

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!

Got a basic palette picked out and started throwing things into the flash editor and so here is mockup number 2. This is going to be what the first playable prototype will look like as I seek to get a playable game ASAP. Then it will be time to swap out all these simple shapes for final art once it is tuned and fun.

The 5 sided shape is the player, the circles are the collectible targets (only score when enemies hit them), the pink squares are seeker enemies (think homing missiles) and the orange spikes are proximity shooting spikes that launch in a straight path.

Got my basic idea in place. Since there is so little time in this competition I was looking for an idea that I believe will be a good balance of fun with ease of implementation. This theme is fun and so wide open I expect a ton of similar base ideas implemented in many different ways.

My idea is simply an arcade score or collect-o-thon based around using various types of enemies on screen as your weapons to hit the collectibles.  In the screenshot above you are the target or bullzeye player which will be mouse-controlled.

You will fly around and lure the enemies into following or shooting at you. Once they are coming at your player you can move them around to hit the collectibles.

Simple and basic but it leaves a lot of room for fun and messing around with that mechanic.