New build of Grand Theft Minimal! Major updates include:

• Driver A.I.! You’re not alone anymore
• Deadly WATER! Don’t drive into the ocean!
• Vastly bigger city! Explore the alleys and parks of Metrovan (map below)
• Two types of cars! Silver Sedan and Red Sport (proper names pending)

Play v0.4!

Here’s a detailed, complete and current map of Metrovan – the only thing that’s changed is the big park’s edge.

Metrovan, the city of Grand Theft Minimal (click for full size)

We’re in the home stretch! 11.5 hours remaining in the jam, good luck everyone ♥

No build just now, but a screenshot. All the path nodes in Metrovan, vehicle spawns, intersections, everything.

Metrovan Path Nodes

Hope you’re having fun ♥

Third playable build of Grand Theft Minimal!

The vehicle physics now don’t entirely suck :3

http://kranggames.com/gtm/003.html

Pictured: The Sedan

Grand Theft Minimal, Silver Sedan

Quit looking at this, go go go! ♥

Second playable build of my game, Grand Theft Minimal!

Now with VEHICLES! Admittedly, the vehicles handle like ass. But I can work on that tomorrow (today?), after naptime.

http://kranggames.com/gtm/002.html

Also, this is what the PlayerSpawnPoint looks like in the editor:

Keep at it, you’re doing very well. ♥

First playable build of my game, Grand Theft Minimal! Minimalist GTA that takes place in beautiful downtown Vancouver, BC, Canada.

http://www.kranggames.com/gtm/001.html

Also a nice screenshot of the streets and their path nodes:

Grand Theft Minimal

Hope you folks are all having an excellent time!

♥

First screen of the game world my LD48 entry will take place in.

More coming soon. This theme is fun as hell!

In again, slightly less of a hectic schedule this time around so I should be able to spend more than six hours on it this time!

Using Adobe Flash CS6, other tools might include Photoshop, Audacity SFXR, sfx libraries sitting around on my computer, who knows. I’ll post a full list of tools used once the game is actually underway!

Remember to get good and hammered while you’re designing, it’s more fun that way. ♥

Ah, forgot to post at the end of LD24, but I finished for the compo.

Presenting Walkabot. It’s kind of like Lemmings, but with robots and no lemmings. More info in the game’s description.

Give it a play, rate, what have you! Would love to hear what you think.

Signing up for another ‘Dare, though it’ll be a bit more relaxed than usual. I’ve got a lot of different projects pulling my attention right now so I won’t be able to devote a ton of time to Ludum Dare, but can hopefully set aside 8-12 programming hours to make something half decent.

I’ll be using Flash CS5.5 for programming and likely art, might also use Photoshop or good old MS PAINt. Sony ACID Music Studio 8 for music, and Audacity/SFXR for sfx. If I use any other tools or frameworks or anything I’ll post at the time of the use of said tools.

Now, I leave you with a wish of good luck, and also this.

Just a little something from that thing I’m making:

Space is big, but the world is a tiny place.

My response to seeing the theme.

An hour and a half in, and I have my concept! The designs are coming along really well, which is good cuz there’s a lot to design. My goals for this Ludum Dare are:

• Make something sci-fi (thank GOD the theme’s not alchemy)
• Don’t make a platformer!
• STRETCH: If possible, port game to mobile!

I’m keeping my game simple, no alpha-fades and 4:3 resolution, so that maybe I can port it to mobile within the time limit of the Dare ^_^

It’s a sci-fi strategy game, heavily inspired by the only part of Spore that was really fun. It’ll be fun and quirky, but I’m also making sure it’s somewhat grounded in science. For example, if you really want to reach the furthest stars, you’d better mine for some deuterium! Sci fi rules, and I can’t wait to see what this game turns into.

No computers yet, but my god there are a lot of words.

And these are my jams, which are awesome:
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/447986

Hope your Dares are going well too!

For the fifth time in a row, I’m in! I’ll be using Adobe Flash CS5.5 for games, Flash/Photoshop/MS Paint for gfx, Sony ACID Music Studio 8 for music, Audacity for sound editing. SFX will be either as3sfxr, findsounds.com or other sound libraries from the ‘net. If I use any external scripts I’ll include those too.

Also, in the hopes that “time” becomes the chosen theme, I leave you with this:

I’m in! As usual, I’ll be using Flash Pro to develop, this time with CS5.5. I’ll likely be using custom code, with my own sfx/audio libraries for sound and music, or maybe sfxras3. Graphics’ll be in Flash, Photoshop CS5.1, or MS Paint. Any other resources I use, I’ll post of during development/in a post-mortem.

As I leave to vote, I leave you with this.

EDIT: Here’s my final submission: Nick Yonge presents: TITS! (A childish game, made for adults.)

ORIGINAL: On last minute impulse I’ve decided to enter in the 0hGame Jam. And although I’m technically in Canada and my clock doesn’t shift for another week, why not make a game now, right? Right? Right.

Anyway, I’ve grabbed a theme for inspiration. Looks like I’m gonna be making a 0h game about boobies!

I’ll be using Adobe Flash CS5.5 for, most likely, everything. See you in an hour. <3

Creating a game is a passionate experience. Doing it in 48 hours is equal parts divinity and torture. As such, a lot goes down during the development process, laughs are had, tears are shed, and ultimately you arrive at the end product – your game.
Well, maybe I’m being overdramatic. But you definitely learn a lot upon completing a development cycle, even one as short as two days. The post-mortem is a great way to share that knowledge, imparting wisdom upon those who seek it. In this I’m going to examine what was successful, what were failures, and what just plain drove me nuts during my development of The Man Who Sold The World.

Play The Game Here

The Good

Level Design Workflow (or “Levels are the meat of the meal“)

I had an excellent workflow for creating levels in TMWSTW. One of my favorite aspect of game design is creating levels, so I made sure that process would be as smooth as possible. This meant creating a method of designing, developing, testing and finaling levels in a minimum of time.

The first thing I did was create the character and camera systems, including physics and collision detection. This allowed me to get right into levels, as I knew how my player acted and moved within the first wee hours of development. The result was over a dozen enormous, hand-crafted levels that made it in-game; not only created, but tweaked and tuned for an ideal gameplay experience.

I had the time to fully explore what I wanted to with my level designs, creating many worlds in different environments, and even get experimental with more abstract locations. The process was effective, informative, mentally invigorating and, most importantly, fun.

Source of Inspiration (or “Why the Repeat Button is Your Friend“)

You’ll notice upon launching TMWSTW that a splash screen reads, “Inspired by David Bowie’s conceptual album and story, ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars’”. That’s there for a reason – it may sound silly, but I listened to David Bowie’s “Greatest Hits” album on repeat for nearly the entire Ludum Dare – having it on repeat allowed those songs to be constantly in my consciousness, influencing my design choices. Having that aural feedback not only encouraged me to keep working, but did wonders for keeping me focused and following a coherent vision for the game.

I did the same thing when I developed Nyan Cat FLY!, listening to the Nyan Cat song during development – I’ve spent over 100 hours of my life listening to that atrocious tune, but it helped the game reach its final state. Nyan Cat FLY!, like the meme itself, is cute. TMWSTW is, like the story it’s inspired by, an epic tale about the decline of humanity.

Plus, Bowie is pretty rocking, and helped me get through the long hours of the night.

Audio Design & Implementation (or “If it’s there, use it!“)

I’m proud of the audio in TMWSTW. I spend a liberal amount of time creating game audio tracks, and like to think I’m getting better at it. I primarily use Sony ACID Music Studio 8, of which I’m lucky enough to have amassed a liberal amount of assets I can use to develop custom music. However, that’s just so much bandwidth-drinking data unless you can get it to actually sound off in-game. Flash is notoriously awful at handling audio effects, and I didn’t want to struggle through creating my own audio manager in AS3.

This is where external classes and APIs come in. Guess what – you’re not the only programmer in the world, and other people have come across the same problems. I wish I’d realized this sooner, especially for audio. Matt Przybylski has creating an amazing tool in the AS3 Sound Manager v1.4, which controls the sound in TMWSTW (and all future AS3 krangGAMES projects). Unfortunately I implemented this system fairly late into development of TMWSTW, and had already lost time trying to foolishly use my own code. Had I gone straight for Sound Manager, I could’ve saved plenty of time and effort. I won’t make that mistake again, and if you ever use audio in AS3, I highly recommend looking into it.

The Bad

Unclear Art Direction (or “Know Your Limit, Play Within It“)

By no means am I an artist. I have a confession to make: while my LD19 entry PRIOR won 8th in graphics and was lauded in being beautifully stylized, the art is only the way it is because at hour 47/48, I realized, “Oh, this game needs some better art than the debug stuff.” I then proceeded to slap a gradient texture on every background I could find.

However, that was not the case in TMWSTW. Forgetting that I’m not an artist, I -wanted- to make custom retro/pixel art for every environment in the game. Ultimately, I lost several hours of work to something I ended up simply not using. The pixel environment art I made was ugly, low-quality, and took far too much time to develop (especially including the process of moving from Photoshop to Flash, then implementing it into the game). I finally abandoned that vain attempt, and moved to Flash-generated stylized art, similar to PRIOR (though, thankfully, with a bit more color. I’m kinda getting sick of black-and-white, and actually spent a few hours on the art this time.)

The moral of the story: Don’t be something your not. If you have to, do it in the easiest way possible.

Misallocation of Time (or “Why Your Brain and Time are NOT Friends“)

In Ludum Dare, time is not just a commodity, but a deceptive bastard of a resource. What I mean is, your psychological interpretation of time is never representative of true amount of time left. Even when you KNOW that you’re running out of time, you can still very easily lose track of it and waste it on badly prioritized endeavours.

If you’ve been reading this post-mortem through, you know how much time I lost working with audio and Photoshop (more on Photoshop in a moment). This happened primarily because I misjudged both the amount of time required on these tasks, and the amount of time remaining. Admittedly I’m vastly unfamiliar with Photoshop and couldn’t make a proper work-time estimate there to save my life, but that’s a poor excuse for losing the number of hours that I did. Estimating time and collecting those estimations into a proper timeline is incredibly difficult, and it’s all too easy to misjudge that and stray too far from the path of your development.

I suppose the best method to avoid this tragedy is to quantify everything you have to do objectively, at the beginning of development. What I’m going to do for the next Dare: create a task list of everything I need to do and estimate the time it’ll take to do it. Then add 15% to those tasks. Then reserve at least six hours for polish and miscellanea, and strip away everything of low-priority that pushes me over the 48-hour timeline. Hopefully, that’ll keep me on time.

Lack of Sleep (or “Quality Is Better Than Quantity“)

Here’s an unsurprising truth: you lose sleep in Ludum Dare. There’s no way around it, making a decent game in 48 hours will suck away time like nobody’s business. Spare time doesn’t come from nowhere, so if you want to make a decent product, you’ve gotta cut something away, and sleep is the most obvious victim.

Don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing wrong with that, at least from the Dare’s perspective. Staying up late can be fun, as any eleven-year-old would attest, and the constant flow of energy and creativity that arises from game development is exceptionally invigorating.

But there’s an fine-yet-extremely-important line between sacrificing sleep and neglecting your needs. Time limit or not, your brain needs sleep, even if only for a few hours. Staying up too late under a naive notion of “If I sleep, I won’t have time finish” is one of the most dangerous things you can possibly do.

Lack of sleep will take its toll, a far worse toll than spending three-hundred minutes unconscious will. Your focus will drift, your quality of work will decline, and your overall product will suffer for your self-negligence. Taking a four-hour powernap and a shower upon waking up will do far more for your product than an extra five hours of half-baked development, followed by more hours of ever-increasing tiredness. At one point I was falling asleep at my computer – it sucked, and my game knew it. So learn from my mistakes. Go take a nap.

Either that, or adopt the Uberman Sleep Schedule.

The Ugly… Sotra

Theme Interpretation (or “Livin’ By Your Own Rules In Someone Else’s House“)

The theme for Ludum Dare 21 was “Escape”. I’ve noticed that people tend to treat the theme differently. Most people take it literally, which is fine, and often produces some pretty excellent gameplay experiences (such as NMcCoy’s excellent “Planetary Mission“, which I recommend trying out). Others view the theme in a different light, more like a guiding star than a criteria point.

This is how I viewed it in TMWSTW. Make no mistake – “Escape” is the dominant theme in my game, and it’s represented metaphorically through the player’s final actions in the game. This is not some kind of excuse for my game design, nor is it an attempt at being a pretentious douche. It is simply my interpretation of the theme, and how I chose to represent it through a video game.

Ludum Dare Compo Rule #3 states “Games must be based on the theme.” Ludum Dare is all about rapid development, and creating a product out of unfiltered passion. Basing the entire development cycle on a theme, like what the Dare has done, is ingenious, and manipulating that theme in your own fashion is an exciting thing. No matter how you interpret the theme, you’re taking a universally acknowledged concept, and making it your own. So do so however you see fit.

F**k Photoshop (or “No, seriously.“)

Please, bear with me for a moment while I depart from a more eloquent dialog and instead relinquish to the world a personal opinion that I hold, in the most base and understandable form possible:

F**k Photoshop.

For real. I love Adobe, I’m a huge fan of Flash (as anyone who knows me can attest), and the entire Creative Suite is a great product. But Photoshop and I have a beef, and I’ve gotta address it. I’ve stated on several occasions that I am NOT an artist, and as such I don’t pretend to have any level of skill in Photoshop, or Illustrator or even creating advanced artistic elements in Flash. But I do know a thing or two about product design, and creating features for users of all skill levels.

In this case, the chip on my shoulder comes from Photoshop’s inability to mass-modify colors on different layers, and then export them. You simply cannot find-and-replace colors on multiple layers (or at least, after a few hours of forum-sifting, I couldn’t find a way). As my player character had many different layers for animation, this was a huge issue. I could simply place a layer mask that changes all layers beneath it, sure, but then you can’t mass export those assets – the layer mask is not included in the export, and only default images get created. Ultimately I made a keyboard macro to duplicate the layer mask, combine it with the layer below, export that layer only, delete the layer, and move the original mask down to the next layer. Lather, rinse, repeat – a major pain.

I lost over four hours to trying to change BLACK and WHITE to ORANGE and BLUE. Four hours. Now, feel free to go off and rant, “You were using a poor method/That’s easy to do if you know how/there’s technical reasons it can’t be done/You’re a PS noob!” or whatever other retorts you may have. My point is, usability design has to take novices into account – a program SHOULD be intuitive enough that users can perform simple tasks. And replacing one color with another should be a simple task, and it is, if you’re only working on a single layer. I’m no slouch when it comes to finding solutions on online forums or hunting for methods of completing tasks, but when it takes you over four hours to jury-rig an impromptu solution to a presumably simple issue, I’m left at the conclusion that Adobe dropped the ball. Photoshop is a great program, but it’s far from perfect.

</rant>

Scope, and Knowing Yourself (or “The Uplifting Conclusion“)

I think I’m masochistic. Maybe that’s more than you wanted to know, but that’s the only explanation for the decisions I make during Ludum Dare. I’m constantly pushing myself beyond my self-determined reach in terms of development. In Ludum Dare 19, I crafted a facility larger than a standard city block and populated it with a complete, twisted back story. In LD20, I created a fully-functional level editor and allowed players to not only take the game into their own hands, but record the fruits of their labor and share them around. And in LD21, I wove a Universe. With David Bowie at my side, I explored love, spirit, daring, and the fate and frailty of humanity.

Those lofty reviews aside, the point is I established the scope of my development as HUGE. I did this intentionally, for a few reasons. One reason is, I simply love creating stuff. “Stuff” is the correct word there: I love creating levels, NPCs, obstacles, stories, music, everything that goes into a game experience. So I set ludicrous goals for myself, and push myself beyond my reach. It’s risky, and it isn’t for everyone, but it’s how I generate the best personal results (usually).

The point I’m trying to make here, is be true to yourself and your habits. Take every bit of advice with a grain of salt, and find your own best practices. Biting off more than I can chew works for me, but it can be catastrophic for others (just as trying to do pixel art nearly did me in, while some people are savants with retro graphics). We’re game designers. Only through creating games can we get better at our craft, and only by being true to ourselves can we really create a game. Anyone can build a game, but to really create an interactive experience, you have to play to your skills, nurture your muse, and be true to yourself. That’s where games come from.

In summary: David Bowie rules. F**k Photoshop. Thanks for reading. <3

<3 Nick Yonge
Founder, Director, MCS-EOOEJ, krangGAMES
www.kranggames.com
nick@kranggames.com
Facebook ~ Twitter

RED ALERT! I really need Photoshop help, I’d HUUUUUUGELY appreciate it :O

What I need to do is change a color on multiple layers. I’ve got 27 layers of an animated character. Character is black with white eyes by default. However I need to reskin him a few times, one of which being orange with blue eyes. I COULD use an adjustment layer, but then when I Export Layers to Files it ignores the adjustment layer :’(

How do I replace a color (black, and white) on multiple layers?

I would HUGELY appreciate help with this, big time.

Time for my first break! After five hours of good solid work, I’ve got a great understanding of the story and some thoughts about the game’s visual style. Anyway, here’s a working prototype of my progress so far. That camera was a royal bitch, but gosh darnit, she’s a-working! Flash AS3 Profession IDE, CS5.5

http://www.nyonge.ca/Flash/WhoSoldTheWorld_00.html

One hour into LD21, and I’ve achieved the following:

• Game Concept
• Setup Livestreaming
• Basic Storyline
• Concept Art
• Camera Follows Player w/o Moving World

In short… I’m feeling good Hope your first hour has been as rad as mine!

krangGAMES LD21: First Concept Promo Image

If you want, feel free to come watch me Livestream too: www.livestream.com/kranggames

<3 krangGAMES

I’m for sure in Ludum Dare 21, looking forward to making and playing!

I’ll be using Flash CS5 for programming, most likely programming within The Flash IDE but might use Flash Builder 4 or Flash Develop. Graphics will either be made in Flash or Photoshop, audio will be done with Audacity, Sony ACID Music Studio 8, and a SFX/loops library I’ve been collected. Any external libraries or whatnot I use, I’ll notify of once I know what on earth the theme is

Happy Ludumming!