Do you remember Evoland? I made this little game as part of the LD 24 Compo – the theme was Evolution.

Evoland LD Version

Apart from getting good votes at the LD, he also got very good feedback with more than 300.000 people playing it (and crashing my DropBox link).

Since at that time I was creating my new indepedant games studio Shiro Games, we thought it would be nice to expand it further and make it into a full game. I’m sure you know how frustrating the LD time limit can be and how sometimes you wish to have put that and that in your game.

So after a few months of work, we are proud to announce that Evoland “HD” (to compare to the “LD” / Classic version) is now available! We got great feedback from the community when releasing our trailer early this year, which enabled us to get “greenlighted”, so the game can be downloaded on our  website, but is also available on Steam and GoodOldGames.

We are very proud of it, hope you’ll enjoy it as well. HUGE thanks to the whole LD crew for their hard work, I really enjoyed all the LD I made so far, and while I will not be able to participate in the April one, you can definitely count me in for the next!

Get it on http://evoland.shirogames.com

Here’s a few screens of the game :

Finished the music and the gameplay, will go back home to submit and sleeeeeep

Here’s the official name and the Title Screen that goes with it

Gameplay is working well, I’m quite happy with the way peasants react to your actions. I need more gameplay now (money, weapons, etc.)

It’s now getting better, and the city is actually quite lively now

Some Dynamic lights and sprites. I’m not so much happy with the result, needs some more work

I was quite surprised by the theme this time, I really didn’t expect this one to show up. Anyway, had to think of some gameplay ideas, found something interesting which I haven’t done before, and started with the graphics first.
Here’s a screen after 2 hours of work :

I was not expecting to be able to attend this LD but since my newborn little girl is sleeping very well it seems like I can make it !

I’ll be using the following tools :

• Programming : My beloved Haxe
• IDE : FlashDevelop
• Libraries : most likely none, maybe h3d/hxsl if I make things in 3D
• Graphics : GraphicsGale
• Sfx : LabChirp
• Music : SunVox Synth or Benjamin’s MML Player

Also, I’m very happy to see more and more LD games being made in Haxe, and not only by my usual ex co-workers at Motion-Twin deepnight and Benjamin

A few recent news about Haxe while we’re at it :

• The Haxe Foundation was launched on http://haxe-foundation.org , please donate if you wish to support it
• Stencyl 3.0 is entirely based on Haxe as announced here
• HaxePunk is a Haxe port of the popular FlashPunk library, and the original FlashPunk library is working on a version 2 in Haxe

Also, based on the great results from last LD, I’m currently working with some friends on a more complete version of Evoland, here’s an exclusive screenshot

You can learn more about the game on http://evoland.shirogames.com

Have a nice LD, may the goat be with you !

Wow, time is flying and I still haven’t written my post mortem, here it is !

That was my third LD, and the first one that I feel I had enough time to finish my game.

What went right :

• I was happy to quickly find the gameplay idea for my game, which really saved me a lot of time looking for ideas
• The first day spent at my (soon past) company Motion-Twin, on which I could concentrate for 15 hours, really helped me move forward
• I was able to cut content in order to have enough time for polish, but also sounds and music, which was great
• The game had very nice reception and many press coverage, which was great and really unexpected

What went wrong :

• I could only spend 10 hours the second day on the game, since I had to babysit a bit my little two years old daugther
• Due to a lot of players accessing the game, DropBox killed my public links during the night, so I had to move hosting
• I wish I had time to add a final boss and many more ideas

Actually, given the success of the game – not sure yet about LD results, but many people seems to like it – I have decided to spend some time with my new company to make a more complete version of the game, with plans to release it for PC/iPad/iPhone in a few weeks. That will be a good training ground and team building, you can follow our progress on my Twitter @ncannasse or my company @shirogames !

I’ve uploaded the Timelapse for Day 1, you can view it here

Also, I’m happy to have my game being featured on several websites that I enjoy reading :

• On IndieGames.com
• On BoingBoing.net
• On FreeIndieGam.es

I tend to prefer to test Web games because they are usually more quick to launch and does not require any installation.

Another reason is that you might not be safe running an EXE on your computer. The original author might have a virus/malware on his own which might have infected the game he is making, without him even noticing.

AV software is nice, but something it just doesn’t work. So I’m using the Sandboxie software which runs the EXE into a sandbox that prevent them from accessing your hard drive. Works great, and can then try the most appealing Windows games.

Download it here : http://www.sandboxie.com/

Done ! The final final polish took some time, but now I’m done !

Play it there

Time to get some sleep ! It’s already 3am in France…

This time I had enough time for SFX and even Music ! Giving SunVox Synth a try, great experience so far. Not much time to experiment with it, but should be enough to make a small loop.

After some good sleep, back to the game !

Does that looks like something you know ? Maybe…

I can’t work as much as yersterday because my wife expect me to spend some time with family Hope I can do everything I wanted to for the game !

Ouch, took some time to do some not-so-bad-looking title screen.

Time to go back to the actual gameplay !

A bit of graphics polishing, I’m not an artist but I’m becoming a bit used to pixel art.

First monsters in the game. They are quite peaceful at the moment, but things might EVOLVE in a more dangerous way…

Having fun with color effects.

The basic engine is ready, I’m quite happy with my GD, now need to add a lot of things to the game !

After 1.5 hours of a bit of work. At least I know what kind of game I want to do

Looking forward to this new Ludum Dare !

What kind of game I’ll make this time ? not sure yet will depends on the inspiration coming from the theme.

I’ll be using :

• my beloved Haxe language http://haxe.org
• GraphicsGale for pixel art
• the FlashDevelop IDE

I’ll be coding at our office at Motion-Twin – that’s actually my last LD as MT member – with nice people and veteran LD such as Benjamin, deepnight or the PA team (01101101 and their friends)

I also swear I’ll not be submiting my game to the Kongregate context, and will not accept money from them, since LD should be about fun

Still need some sleep, but I least I have enough energy back to write this while things are clear in my head.

First, a big thanks to LudumDare organizers : thank you for making this event happen, I enjoy it every time. There’s so many games that were made, I’m not sure how many of them I will be able to play but I’m really looking forward to see what other people have come up with.

Now let’s talk about my own contribution : “Adventures in Noland”

The good parts

• At first, I was not sure to be able to dedicate enough time for the LD, but when I saw the them I liked it immediately and knew I had to make a game out of it. I’m happy that I could make it through and finish the game (just) in-time.
• I enjoyed  a lot making my tiny pixels graphics. I’m more like a coder and don’t do any gfx for daily work, so it was refreshing. And challenging. Trying to fit a dragon in a 7×7 pixel square is hard. I’m quite happy with the result and how quickly I could make it. I sure learned a lot and my next LD games will hopefully look better
• After some time lost looking for another game design, I’m very happy with the one I came up with. It feels really like a tiny world, yet it’s fun to explore.
• Doing the level design was great as well, I tried allowing several different ways to complete the game, hope we will see different ways of optimizing the final score

The hard parts

• I directly started (without warming up) and wrote a very quick GD : it was supposed to be a Civilization-like where IA cities would fight each others. After the world was displayed and NPC start moving around I didn’t feel anymore like doing that. From here, I took me almost a full day to find what I wanted to do.
• Time : Additionally to this day lost I was quite busy with home duties, both my wife and little girl being sick was hard to handle. I had to interrupt several times expect during the night. I guess I worked ~7 hours the first day and ~9 the second. Finished just in time for submit (which is 3am in France), didn’t have much time for polish.
• I would have like a few more hours to work a bit more on my gfxs, add a bit more hidden stuff in the world, do a title screen, add some sounds+music, and a proper font. That would have required maybe 4 more hours but I couldn’t afford them since I was always on the red line.

Play

Please play and rate my game here :  http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=8497

I would also be happy if you can leave some comments on what you like or didn’t like