I’ve held off on writing this because I was waiting for reviews and issues to come in so I’d have something to post-mortemise about.

I have been sat here most of the afternoon playing and rating games, whilst reading the ratings on my own game in case things were broken.

Actually, nothing is broken apart from Audio – which is the usual story with HTML5 games even in these days (sadface), so I uploaded a fix that on platforms where it wasn’t going to work, that audio could at least be disabled (it was only generated fuzzy noise anyway).

Lesson learned there, TEST ALL THE BROWSERS

What else have I learned? Well, I actually finished my entire game by the end of Saturday, by doing the following things

• Using an engine so I didn’t even once have to worry about collision, pixels, rendering, etc
• Focusing on the game, rather than art or sounds
• Keeping my features to the bare minimum and making sure there was an end-to-end experience in place

Following that, I spent a few hours when I was tired

• Making some art
• Generating some sounds
• Playing and noting the things that annoyed me
• Getting other people to play it and noting things that annoyed them

The next day was solely spent just making the game fun to play

Yes indeed, after spending about 8 hours building the game, I then spent about 8 hours in the following loop

1. Play the game
2. Note down what wasn’t fun
3. Think of a way to fix the problem raised by #2
4. Implement the fix for the problem raised by #2
5. Goto 1

It seems to have paid off, as the reviews being written are favourable indeed, my favourite being

“Easily gets into my top 3 of LD25! Keep it up!”

I am strongly encouraged by this as a note of the things I have learned at past Ludum Dares and now cannot wait until the next one where I might try to be a bit more ambitious but still try to “finish the game by the end of day #1″ as that really seems to be the best way forward.

Well that’s a first, not only did I start 12 hours after the event started, I ended 12 hours before the event ended.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=7112

That’s most likely because I kept the scope small and stuck to basic arcade features, I’m quite proud of it however as

• It has a relatively sane difficulty curve
• Surviving is skill based (based on the people I’ve tested it on)
• It works on my iPhone and my iPad and my Laptop
• It is bordering on actually being fun (a novelty for my creations)

Now to go and drink some coffee.

Time to eat some cold pizza and get coding!

I left myself a to-do list last night and I want to get cracking through it as I’ve got ideas about sound that I want to explore with all of the spare time I have given the game is already ‘finished’ !!

Playable at http://centipede2013.herokuapp.com/

• I’ve managed to get it so that it’s not too easy from the very beginning, and you can actually die if you’re not careful (hurrah).
• I’ve also added animations and drawn a load of stuff in SpriteSomething on my iPad
• I’ve made sure it’s obvious that you get hurt when you’re hit by a bullet
• I made a decision to only give one flower at a time as it keeps it difficult

I’ve actually probably spent about 6 hours putting together the game, and another 6 hours tweaking, tweaking, tweaking – it turns out it’s really hard to make a game ‘fun’ and ‘difficult’ etc.

I’m not quite there yet, tomorrow I’m going to

• Add an on-going score counter
• Add code for ‘game over’
• Add touch controls for mobile devices
• Add instructions on start so you know what you’re doing
• Add sounds

That is all pretty trivial and then I’ll get onto adding more things to make the game more “interesting” and “fun”

• There is a tendency for the ‘cover’ to erode by the 10th level or so, might consider a way to keep it coming back
• Power-ups would be cool. but not really sure what sort of power-ups to use

http://centipede2013.herokuapp.com/

A rudimentary asset-less game is up there, it hasn’t got a game over screen but with the arrow keys you can move around to steal ‘flowers’ and avoid being shot at by the defences.

I’m not really sure how to make the gameplay less sucky though, it’s not as addictive as I’d have hoped.

Gameplay is becoming a bit more apparent now

http://centipede2013.herokuapp.com/

Really quite pleased with how well this is going, might treat myself to pizza soon!

Time flies when you’re sat on a train, I’ve now made it to a friend’s house and am sat in a chair writing some code.

A few hours in and I have a centipede, and a deployment plan and a server and the basic gameplay of centipede vs defence unit vs bullets done

Not very sexy I know, I’ll do all the graphics tomorrow once I have all the bits put into this. I’m quite enjoying using an engine for a change – makes things a lot less stressful for this sort of compo.

It’s currently deployed to http://centipede2013.herokuapp.com and I am pushing there pretty regularly, give it a go!

So I’m the Villain? I’m currently sat on a train on the way to a gathering in Reading where they’ll be working on a jam and I’ll be doing a solo effort in about.. err 30 hours.

I think I’m going to write a clone of “Centipede”, the classic game from ye olde, only you get to control the Centipede and avoid being shot at whilst picking up all the gardens flowers and vegetables.

I’ll be using ImpactJS to get me ahead of things, and probably SpriteMe on the iPad to create my assets.

Wish me luck!

http://tinyprotector.herokuapp.com/

I need to do some tweaking, but if anybody wants to do a play test and see if this damned thing is working – please do!!

I’ve been maintaining radio silence for a few reasons

• I want to concentrate on writing the game
• If I’m not concentrating on writing the game, I want to be eating or watching DVDs
• I’m trying to relax

I’ve probably spent about half of the weekend working on Ludum Dare, and the other half watching Star Trek and stuffing my face

I’m creating an HTML5 Canvas game, and focusing on effects and having a little bit of fun (with a bit of an obvious bullet-hell type thing)

It looks pretty cool, and given I have 12 hours to complete it I’m fairly confident that with MOAR effects and MOAR power-ups this could actually be a fun game to play.

Yo,

I am in, and I will be doing my entry in HTML/JS fo-shiz.

I will likely be using https://github.com/robashton/swallow for my assets, and I will be throwing up another small OSS library for doing camera/scaling in a pixel-independent manner this week, (extracted from a game I’m working on).

If anybody wants to come to my house in Belgium on Friday and hang around until the very end of all this, then they’re completely welcome (not a game-jam effort, just working solo , together). It’s more fun with company.

LET’S DO THIS

Entry found here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=7112

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mp_nxjhx6yY

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=7112

Or just go straight to the game if you want http://ld22-ashton.heroku.com/

This is the most complete game I’ve ever worked on, and sure – it has wrinkles around the edges, but it is my game – I made it and I’m dead chuffed with how far I managed to push it.

It has MUSIC, it has SOUNDS, it has GRAPHICS, it has a PLOT, it has a KITTEN.

The Kitten holds the key, will you find the kitten?

Time-lapse coming soon, just as soon as I work out how to make it.

Wow.

I’m getting tired now, there are 6 hours remaining and in it I’d like to achieve the following:

• Sounds
• Music
• Images that have ‘states’ so I can show which way the player is looking
• Stick the loading sequence in a background worker or at least yield some control to the UI thread
• Player health bar
• Boss health bar
• Kitten
• Alternate ending
• Pre-load assets

There is no stopping me – now onto the scenery!!

Okay okay.

I’m getting excited now.

The game now runs from beginning to end, the plot works properly, I’ve added particles and player death (and checkpoints – there is no gameover – that would suck on a small game like this).

Now it’s just polishing polishing polishing.

Time to put some proper textures in for the scenery, make everything look better, and add noises!!!!!!!!!!

*pumped*

Yikes,

So I slept for about10 hours.

That was kind of an accident, but I guess I’m totally up and rearing to go now.

• I’ve added bullets,
• I’ve added enemies
• I’ve drawn the map in its completeness (at least structurally, still no art)
• I’ve done most of the plot, just need to do the final 20 seconds of it

• Making some “real” art, or at least better than what I currently have
• sound effects
• music (if I have time)
• alternative ending
• kittens
• particles

I think I’m in a good place to at least submit ‘something’ complete, which makes me happy as this is my first Ludum Dare and it would be a shame not to.

As per usual, the WIP can be found here:  http://ld22-ashton.heroku.com/

EXCITED ME IS EXCITED

I’m getting to the point where I’m able to script, script and script – which bodes well for completion of the main plot and game to the point where I can do a full run-through by the time I go to sleep tonight.

That’s good news, as it means I’ll be able to get a good night’s sleep (hah, who am I kidding?) before I make real textures, add real sounds and tweak things like physics so the game is a bit more playable.

Quite pleased by how how this works, got a script in the Gimp which exports a large image as a tileset which I can then use in the game. Clearly I’ll replace the black lines with some more effective hand-drawn scenery once the game is done (not that that will improve very much given I can’t draw for toffee)

The game is likely to only last a minute or so, which may even turn out to be a good thing if it means more people will complete it

• Sleep since competition start: 1 hour
• Coffee count: 7
• Orange juice: 2 litres
• Food so far: Cereal, bacon + eggs with toasted baguette, 2 apples, half a pack of tasteless biscuits

Oh man,

So I’ve had a nap and written a bit more code, this is my status

• make sure I can write a script to tell the story I want to tell,
• sort out a splash screen, loading, and basic application life-cycle
• add NPCs
• add environment objects
• write the story from beginning to end
• Make sure the game has a logical beginning, middle and end
• Tweak tweak tweak, polish, real  graphics and real sounds

All the mechanics appear to be functional (or at least as much as they need to be), obviously it looks awful but I’m not going to touch look and feel and sounds until tomorrow evening (about 8 hours before the deadline).

As you can see, it’s going to be a story about friendship, the ‘alone’ theme is covered by the plot . If I can get the plot done – that middle task of “write the story from  beginning to end” is looking quite daunting – I need to complete that in the next six hours or at least get close. I don’t mind if the game is only 5 minutes long, but it needs to make sense and actually work for those five minutes!!

• Sleep since competition start: 1 hour
• Coffee count: 4
• Orange juice count: 6
• Food so far: Cereal, bacon + eggs with toasted baguette, an apple

That’s story-telling, loading screen, menu, etc taken care of – that leaves me at this point.

• make sure I can write a script to tell the story I want to tell,
• sort out a splash screen, loading, and basic application life-cycle
• add NPCs
• add environment objects
• write the story from beginning to end
• Make sure the game has a logical beginning, middle and end
• Tweak tweak tweak, polish, real  graphics and real sounds