I sort of ran off the road and ended up in a big fractal ditch… this is arguably not a game but I submitted anyway

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=6835

Hated the theme at first, but I’m starting to see some fertile ground for exploring WebPlayer/Browser interaction.

Minimalists examined their entire medium, if you use Unity consider the space around the WebPlayer window

Something about winter makes working on games all day much more appealing… Time for another ludum dare!

Tools:

• Unity (most likely using iTween & NGUI… might use SmoothMoves or GameDraw)
• gimp / inkscape
• animoog / audacity / garage band

This time I’d like to get in more of an artistically creative zone… must restrain my inner engineer.

Guess I’ve procrastinated long enough, here are my thoughts on my LD#22 entry Moving Day.

Statistics

These are probably pretty typical stats for games that don’t generate much buzz during the rating period.  I tracked my clicks using bit.ly and so far the source code has only been downloaded 6 times, total game clicks of 111 and total timelapse views of 144.

I also posted a link to facebook late at night, but that link saw very little traffic. I’m guessing it got buried in the flood of posts and most people saw it in the morning when they couldn’t play a flash game. I don’t think my social network made much of an impact on the statistics… it would be better to post such things just as work is letting out in your target location. The demographics were also interesting, you can see how this is really a global community:

What went right

• I’m pretty pleased with my tool selections. FlashDevelop + Flixel has been fun to learn and I was able to come up to speed fairly quickly.
• Inkscape saved the day for graphics as I quickly realized that I lacked the skills to make decent animated frames with pixel art. I’m pretty satisfied with my run animations.
• Recording a timelapse was actually pretty helpful for me. When you  get into the zone it is easy to lose track of time, the timelapse helped show me that the time I spent browsing was really pretty trivial when compared to the time I spent prematurely tweaking gameplay.

What went wrong

• I spent too much time tweaking gameplay before implementing randomized game levels. I usually get stuck obsessing over gameplay in my other prototypes and I’m glad that Ludum Dare forced me to go beyond that but I still wasted way too much time here.
• The innovative part of my game was supposed to be a physics-based gliding system that let you trade speed for jump height. I spent many hours tweaking these equations with a static game level and that work was basically wasted once I replaced the static level with randomized one.
• Animating the death scene was also pretty tedious. I should have learned how to use a tweening engine before the compo.
• Last minute bugs. I ran into a randomized null pointer error in the last hour of development… which was solved with a comically stupid hack: while(x==null) x = randomobject();

Next time around I’ll make sure to implement basic gameplay, levels and a win/loss condition before spending time tweaking any specific parts.

Here is my timelapse of creating Moving Day. ( play it!)

Perhaps I should call it a noob-lapse as I stumbled through learning Flixel for the first day and only really got into the zone half way through. Post-mortem coming soon!

Moving Day is finished! Play it!

Features include:

• infinite running… to the LEFT!
• pixel-perfect footsteps! (such a waste of time ^-^)
• gliding physics
• a token kitten
• You can win! (temporary ‘feature’)

This was my first Ludum Dare and I will probably be back for more! I really appreciate the motivation provided by the community and time limit.  I did record a timelapse, but I’m undecided if I will post it. I’m not sure if there would be much interest in watching a noob such as I.

Things I learned in the last 48hrs:

• How to animate a run sequence
• Flash + FlashDevelop + Flixel is a very pleasant and forgiving coding environment.
• premature gameplay tweaking is about as evil as premature optimization.

Hopefully someone will enjoy Moving Day, now I’m off to play some of the other entries!

I’m currently tweaking the mechanics of an infinite runner where you have become insanely lonely and start chasing imaginary friends. Here are some of my horrible placeholder gfx:

Oh, right… you will be running TO THE LEFT! (although I’m already seeing why it would be easier to make the game run to the right.)

This will be my first LD, I started learning Flash yesterday so I can submit a web entry. So far my perl/c++ skills are translating well and I think I can probably finish something.

The kongregate tutorials have been really helpful, now I’m looking for some library specific tutorials. (suggestions would be much appreciated )

Language: ActionScript (maybe haxe)

IDE: Flash CS5 trial (maybe FlashDevelop)

Library: Probably Flixel

Graphics: Gimp, Inkscape, Flash

Audio: animoog!