Roller-Derby 20XX: Mega Islands of Awesome (my April 2010 Ludum Dare entry) has been rebuilt from the ground up, sponsored and released under a shorter title “Roller Derby 20XX”.

Play via Kongregate (English Leaderboards)
Play via MiniJuegos (Primary Sponsor) in “HD”

I always intended to revisit this game post-compo but it took many months before I actually did anything about it. The talented musical stylings of Amon26 and exquisite pixel-artistry of Paul Veer made the game come to life. As for me, I rewrote a lot of the code and tweaked the controls significantly from the original release.

Actually going through the process of releasing a game, finding sponsorship and distribution was hugely rewarding. I learned so much that will put me in a stronger position if I decide to do another sponsored Flash game. Financially, Roller Derby 20XX was a break-even proposition. I was able to pay the artists and FGL’s 10% cut. Which is fine. The experience was far more valuable to me than any monetary gains.

Ludum Dare has been a life-changer for me. I don’t have much free time and I’m not disciplined enough to spend an hour or two on game development every day. But I can free up a weekend and know that I will have something prototyped after 48hrs. Sometimes these prototypes are worth expanding on.

I recommend to anyone: take one of your compo entries, polish it up and throw it up on Flash Game License. Just experience what it’s like to go through that process.

Total investment in Roller Derby 20XX: About 150 hours. Value gained from the experience? Priceless.

Happy voting and commenting everyone.
Have a great holiday season and I hope to see a bunch of you at GDC in February.

Abarrane - A game about self-discovery

It’s now 26hrs post LD #19 compo end. The dust has settled, my brain has had a chance to wind down. It’s time for a post-mortem.

>Play Abarrane

>Watch the Time Lapse of Development

The Theme & My Idea

Ludum Dare 19′s theme was “Discovery”. I wasn’t a fan of it considering a year ago the theme was “Exploration”. But the bonus is it did give everyone a lot of creative leg room. On my ride back home after derby practice on Friday night I started brainstorming ideas. I settled on focusing on “self-discovery”, doing something a bit surreal, and having levels based around Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The idea would be that the player would battle through each of their stages of needs only to reach self enlightenment.

The game would play as a side-scroller / RPG hybrid. This gameplay concept is something I’ve wanted to prototype for Granville for months now.

I knew immediately that my idea was ambitious. I’ve never made a platformer with levels before nor have I ever coded an RPG battle system.

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Pretty pleased with where I’m at. Since I was only able to start in full today I got a lot done. The RPG and Platformer bits are all working relatively good. The atmosphere is hitting exactly what I want. I’m not content complete as I’d prefer to be at this point, but I’ll just have to hustle tomorrow. There wont be as much time for polish.

The concept is about self-discovery and fighting through the various stages of needs to hit self-actualization. Working title: Super Maslow RPG.

Playable build available here: http://www.refrag.com/gamedev/LD19/bin-debug/LD19.html

Panic starts to set in during Ludum Dare theme voting week and by-golly this week has gone by fast. I wasn’t able to participate in LD #18 so I’m excited to be getting ready for #19. My machines are all rebooted with a clean desktop and ready to rock.

Computers:
- iMac 27″ Core i7
- HP Laptop (in case I need to use any Windows apps)

Coding:
- Flash Builder 4
- Flixel 2.35

Graphics:
- Adobe Photoshop CS5
- Wacom Bamboo
- iPad apps (maybe)

Audio:
- sfxr
- Audacity
- GarageBand
- iPhone/iPad apps (maybe)

Other:
- Chat Mapper (if I go with a dialog heavy game idea)

Time Strategy:

Unfortunately I won’t get a chance to start right away on Friday evening so my usual plan will be out of whack. But roughly this is what I’ll stick to:

- Friday night: Think of an idea that fits the theme
- Saturday Morning: Prototype
- Saturday Afternoon/Night: Drive to Alpha (core content, fully playable, submittable if needed)
- Sunday: polish, tuning, nice-to-haves.

First, thank you to everyone who’s played, voted and provided feedback on Roller-Derby 20XX: Mega Islands of Awesome. You guys are the mega awesome ones!

Some responses to some of the comments:

1. Music: I’m glad everyone likes the soundtrack. As requested by skintkingle I’ve uploaded the MP3s and they are accessible here:  http://www.refrag.com/game-dev/roller-derby-20xx/
2. Title Screen: Glad you liked this Terry. I had so much fun making myself into an NES style titlescreen. I saved extra time on Sunday just for this final touch.
3. Collisions: Feedback around the “fishy” nature of collisions is good feedback to hear and very valid! In reality collisions are working exactly as I coded them. When you intersect an enemy there is a dice roll based on their “aggro-level” (which is randomly generated at spawn). There is a chance they will hit you. If they hit you you will either bump forward, or there is a chance you will fall. But yes I can totally see how this isn’t very intuitive. Surprisingly this dynamic tests better with more casual game players who seem to accept a “fuzzy” logic to collisions. The more experienced gamer seems to expect either binary rules or a way to pre-determine the result to better strategize. (Neato!)

I have some ideas on how to build on this game concept (thanks to your feedback!) and hope to flesh out and expand on this “world” in the near future.

Another great weekend. Ludum Dare is such a special event. You go into it knowing it’s going to be a boatload of work. You know you’re going to lose sleep and probably not eat very healthy. But all the pain and suffering is over in 48hrs and all you’re left with is a game you made yourself.

Play > Ludum Dare Build
Watch > Time-Lapse Video of Development
Link > Ludum Dare #17 Vote Page

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And I’m done. I had full intention of sticking more closely to the theme, but I was just having too much fun with this game. Would love to hear any feedback you may have.

Timelapse and full Postmortem coming later this week.

A huge thanks to everyone that provided feedback during development and of course a gigantic thanks to the organizers at Ludum Dare HQ. It was an awesome weekend as always.

Saturday is over! I spent far less time this Saturday than I did during LD #16 which is probably for the best. I’m fairly pleased with where I’m at. I’ve spent 16hrs of development time so far and I expect to log about 7 more tomorrow.

Flixel is a life saver. I find I’m not worrying about tech at all. I don’t feel like I have any tech risk on this project and anything I want to do is coming fairly easily. I’m also really really enjoying Flash Builder as a development environment.

I realize that my game has drifted from the theme a bit, but I’m having fun and that’s all that matters. Right?

Latest build available here: http://www.refrag.com/2010/04/23/ld48-go/#more-668

Good night!

I love breakfast. Here’s my first breakfast of the day. A tasty Americano with 49th Parallels Epic Espresso beans plus a yummy Pop-Tart. Mmmm! Sugar and caffeine! Day Begin!

Not a bad start for my first night. I spent my first hour mulling over ideas during dinner. Over the course of the other 3.5 hrs this evening I got some initial gameplay working and am feeling confident with my codebase. Looking ahead, I have a lot more graphic work I need to do this time around which will be a challenge for me. Oh well, should be fun.

You can play my latest version here: http://www.refrag.com/2010/04/23/ld48-go/

For now – it’s time for sleep.

My basecode is set and ready to go using FlashBuilder/Flixel 2.35/Flex 4. My skeleton app is viewable  with source-code here: http://www.refrag.com/2010/04/23/ld48-go/

I’ll have less time this weekend but I hope to make up the time with a smarter workflow and using a much better core set of code.

Let’s do this!!!!!

First off: Wow. What a weekend. So many thoughts I want to share. So many emotions flooded out during the experience. Let’s see if I can try and compose this a bit.

LD Entry URL: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=rate&uid=1277
Time Lapse Dev Log: via YouTube, via MobileMe

The Plan:

My high-level plan for the weekend was:

• Friday: Prove out key tech elements needed for the game concept.
• Saturday: Build the game. Make it playable from start to finish. Get to “content complete”.
• Sunday: Polish, Tune, add the nice-to-haves.

I’m glad to say I was more-or-less able to stick to this plan.

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Wooo… what a ride. With 2.5hrs to spare EchoExplorer has been submitted to LD #16. My first “real” LD. Total development time was around 30 hrs.

I’m really glad I was able to spend today just worrying about the little things. It’s given me the time to put a lot of small touches to the game including  a proper ending. I’m quite pleased with the results. I’d love to hear your feedback.

Submitted here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=preview&uid=1277

Time sure flies when your eyes are burning.

My project is in a good finaling state with most elements complete. I’ve spent a few hours this evening on polish and tuning. Hell – I even fired up Garage Band to throw together a small audio track.

Tomorrow I’ll formalize the intro and ending and then it’s just remaining polish and bug fixing.

Screens from the Alpha Build.

Almost at the half-way point. I’m fairly pleased with where I’ve gotten.

The core gameplay tech is implemented and I’ve been able to iterate on it as I go.

I’ve rewritten my tile engine to use a .csv file instead of XML which has allowed me to use Excel as a level editor. While this took a good hour to do, it’s proving invaluable as I iterate on my level designs.

In Build 007 Levels 1 & 2 are playable at a prototype completeness level.

Playable version here: http://www.refrag.com/gamedev/ld-16/

I’m on-schedule. My plan was (and is):

• Friday: Prove Out core gameplay tech (done)
• Saturday: Build the game. Make it playable start to finish. Get to functional Alpha.
• Sunday: Polish, Polish, Polish. Add gfx and audio as time permits.

Spent a lot of the morning fixing my cobbled together code from last night. Things are looking ok from the tech-side though I’ve spent more time than I wanted.

Build 004 is available here: http://www.refrag.com/gamedev/ld-16/ It includes character movement with the arrow keys and sonar blasting by clicking any of the black area. My game concept will revolve around the player only being able to see through tiny sonar blasts. They need to navigate the terrain with very little visibility.

My goal today is to get the bulk of the game done so I have all of tomorrow for polish.

Time for my shower!!!

I was able to think of a very rough game idea on the walk home so I started sketching some ideas on paper. I knew that I’d need to get Alpha Masking working in Flash to make my idea work. I’d never done Alpha masking in Flash so I started to prove out this tech.

Build 001 took a couple of hours to get working. Note to everyone wanting to do Alpha Masking in Flash… .cacheToBitmap is the trick. Do this on the target Bitmap you want to mask, as well as on the Sprite you are using as the mask object.

For Build 002 I decided to try and hack together some of my old tile engine code. This again took longer than anticipated mostly because I was copy and pasting from wrong directories. Doh. Anyway, an hour or so later and I had this working. You are seeing a tile layer being masked by a sprite that has alpha blobs moving through it. The hero object is not affected by the masking because she exists in a separate object.

I’ll muck around for another hour or so tonight before I rest up for tomorrow.

Yay! So excited for this weekend. I will be making my entry in Flash.

Screencap TimeLapse is setup and ready to go so I’ll be able to upload a video after the event.

Blog updates will hit www.refrag.com first and I hope to cross-post here.

I’ll also be webcam live broadcasting via Ustream here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ludum-dare-16—48hr-game-making

Best of  luck to everyone!

My clock officially started Saturday at 9:48 A.M. PST. Unfortunately as I’ve approached bed-time on Sunday, I’m not yet “Done”.

But I’m going to submit my Work-In-Progress anyways. The first 2 levels (of 4) are available. I should be able to complete the others tomorrow evening.

Literacy Damacy is a game about the importance of education. The player must traverse through four stages of literacy. Within each stage the player will be able to “absorb” tasks or objects they can comprehend at their literacy level. Some objects will help the player improve their literacy level while others will be out of their reach.

Play Literacy Damacy (WIP) Here

UPDATE: I’ve completed Literacy Damacy to the level I was planning (12 hrs after the end of my 48hr deadline). The above link will still take you to the latest build. The 48hr compo build is saved and available here. The difference between the two is only 2 work hours.