Just a little postmortem on my LD #21 entry, Anthony’s Psyche: Escape.  (This is mostly a cross-post from my blog.)

This was my third Ludum Dare.  In each one, I’ve challenged myself to come up with a different interpretation of the theme than I thought would be typically done.  For the Escape theme, I decided to go with the idea of psychological escape mechanisms, or avoiding painful thoughts and memories.  This turned out to be a rather artsy, narrative-driven playable story of sorts.  This is very different than anything I’ve developed before.

I spent about 27 hours on this entry.  Friday night when the theme was announced, I spent three hours in the typical initial panic of trying to come up with an original interpretation of the theme.  I settled on the psychological escape mechanisms concept, and that it would have something to do with words on the screen representing thought fragments.  I was still unclear about the specifics beyond that.

On Saturday, I spent a couple more hours playing with ideas in my head, and settled on a design.  I then spent about ten hours writing code and debugging.  It took me much longer than I anticipated to get text with variable alpha per character working in Flashpunk. Probably five hours on that alone.  I also spent a few minutes making the “art” for the game (the one stick figure) for a total of 12 hours on Saturday.  By this point I had most of the basic functionality of the game working (moving a box of text around the screen and having the words fill in when over the character).

On Sunday, I spent about an hour getting Reason and my keyboard set up, and coming up with the short music loop and “thought complete” riff.  I then spent several hours trying to come up with a decent story.  I discovered that telling a story through first-person thought fragments is very difficult.  When I started entering the text for the thoughts, it just wasn’t coming together.  I also discovered some bugs in the way Flash renders text, so I spent a couple hours debugging and working around that.  I finally gave up on the story I’d come up with, and about two hours before the deadline, I came up with a very different story that came together pretty quickly.  I also wrote some more code for the title screens, ending screen, etc.  That made a total of about 12 hours for Sunday.

The end result isn’t exactly a “game”, but I’m satisfied with what I came up with because it’s very different for me, and pushed me in a different direction.  I like the overall feeling of the play.  I’m thinking of developing something like this a little further.

Like my previous two LD entries, I created things as stand-in content (the stick figure guy, and especially the very short, repetitive music loop) so I had things to write the code around, but they ended up being the final content because I didn’t have time to do “real” art or music.  The difference this time was that by now I’ve learned that when I create them, that’ll probably be the case.  Ludum Dare is always a great exercise in game development (and a lot of fun) because it forces you to be ruthless in cutting features and calling things “good enough”.

I’m trying something really artsy for this LD.  It’s a game about psychological escape mechanisms.  A character with a mind tormented by guilt and denial runs around the screen, trying to avoid confronting the persistent thoughts in his head.  It’s up to the player to move the “thought” (a fragment of text) over the character so that it fills in the words until all words in the thought are lit, at which point the character has come to terms with this painful thought.  The player then moves on to the next thought, thereby piecing together the background story.

Had to modify Flashpunk a bit to be able to change alpha on specific characters in a Text object, which is critical to my game.  After a couple hours research, managed to do it with only a couple changes to Flashpunk.  Yay, progress!

Not sure if I have it in me right now (been pretty fried), but if the theme grabs me and I get any ideas, I’ll take a shot at it.  If so, I’ll most likely be using Flash with Flashpunk.

Good luck everyone!

With each Ludum Dare, I am progressively more blown away by what people can do in a couple days.  There are so many cool game concepts.  I’m really fried for the first couple days after the compo, so I don’t get on and rate games right away, but just from the little perusing I’ve done, there are a lot of amazing entries.  I’ll be back to rate and comment once I can see straight.

I’ve got some basic playability in Disco?Very! now.  You’re the guy on the right.  Use left/right arrow keys, combined with shift, to do moves, and follow the other three dudes.

Click the picture to try it out.  It’s Flash, so click inside the window once it loads (or keypresses won’t register).

Still have a lot to do (more music, more moves, levels, scoring, etc.), but the basic gameplay function is there.

Got my gameplay concept for my game worked out.  The game is called Disco?Very!

Got the first still frame sprite done.  I’ll need to make several animation frames for the different dance moves.

I also have part of the music track done.  I have it looping correctly in FlashPunk, and confirmed with some tests that I can sync movement to the music.  That was something I was concerned about.

4:30 a.m. here, so I should probably think about sleeping.

After getting slammed with a couple of troll rating votes (people who rated an entry with 1s across the board, while all other votes had decent ratings), I was curious about how much this was happening overall in the voting.

I ran some numbers, and put a report here: http://spampudding.com/troll.txt

The format is username and how many troll rating lines they received (1 or 2), followed by their average ratings in each category, followed by what their average ratings would have been without the troll votes.

These five entries were hit the hardest, each losing a quarter of a point or more in at least one category due to troll votes: http://spampudding.com/trolltop.txt

Assuming all votes were logged, I’m wondering if maybe the admins could go through the database and see if it was the same couple people making these votes.

I wrote a little script to scrape all the ratings for all games and put them in a comma separated value file.  You can open this in any spreadsheet app (Excel, OpenOffice Calc, etc.).  It’s here, if anyone’s interested:

http://www.spampudding.com/ratings.csv

All done, and I’m pretty satisfied with the final product.  I managed to make a game that fits the theme, but without throwing enemies at other enemies, taking control of enemies, etc.  I think the way I used the theme is unique, so I’m pleased with that.

Would have loved to put more bad guys in, etc., but for the 20-some hours I spent on it, I feel good about it.  It’s a Flash game, so click the picture and have a go!

Shooty stuff, and enemy groupings in queue.

Finally got around to a real lunch.  Beef pot roast, corn on the cob, green beans, and cucumber.

This has been breakfast and lunch, so far.  I should probably do something about that.

Also a shot of my workspace, since I haven’t done that yet.

Okay, I think I’ve got an idea.  But it’s going to require me to draw a whole lotta different sprites, which is unfortunate since I’m much more of a coder than artist.

Is that close enough?