Massacre at Misfit Toy Island

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=rate&uid=258

I know my entry is way too hard. Changes I made at the last minute turned the game from way too easy to way too hard. And I didn’t have time to balance it. That’s the breaks with a 48 hour contest I guess.

Also, stupidly, I set the key to continue from the Win screen to “space bar” and during the game you fire by pressing the “space bar”. So what that means is that if you do win the game, you are sure to bypass the win screen!! Haha, well, just reward yourself by viewing the win screen in your favorite graphic software I guess if you actually get so far.

But I have actually completed the game. It is possible, though definitely CHALLENGING.

My idea of the game came from the great PS2 game Shadows of the Colossus. In that game, you roam around a landscape looking to fight a few gigantic and incredibly difficult to kill bosses. So I wanted the misfits to all be difficult boss battles and my influence on boss battles is pretty much from the 90′s SNES games where killing bosses takes figuring out the bosses weaknesses and then applying a huge number of hits using a repetitive process. I guess I just have the belief that a boss battle should be like playing a match of tennis, that is to say, exhausting! Call me Old School, hehe.

Well, that’s exactly what it takes to beat the Misfits. For example, the Tootsie Roll takes 50 hits. If you are able to kill it, you will get 25 health from it. Some bosses require as many as 600 hits to kill. Generally, the bigger the misfit, the more hits it requires to kill. The key to beating the game is understanding that you get half the hit points of every misfit you kill, so what you have to do is find the biggest, easiest to kill misfits out there and kill them first. I would recommend starting with the Jägermeister or the Electronic Battleship game. What you want to look for is big misfits that have a slow rate of fire. The slower the rate of fire, the easier the kill. If you kill the Battleship game, you’ll get 300 health.

Now that extra health will really come in handy. You see, if you touch a misfit, immediately death to either you or the misfit will occur, depending on who has the most health. This can be very dangerous at the beginning of the game. Once you have built up a lot of health though, you can quickly kill some super tough small misfits such as the bottle of Bengay or Snoopy by just touching them. You will know they are super tough when they unleash an endless stream of bullets that make them virtually untouchable.

Some big misfits you will need to battle rather than touch because they have so many hit points. The teddy bear is a good example of one of these. During these tough battles, you need to figure out the weakness. What you will usually find is that you can position yourself so you are at such an angle that it is difficult for them to hit you, but you can hit them repeatedly. Usually you need to play around with the angles, and aim for a corner of the misfit that maybe sticks out a bit. Eventually you will find a location where you are relatively safe, yet able to hit the misfit with regularity.

Also, after each misfit you kill, you move faster. So by the time you get to the last misfit, you are really able to fly around the screen and can pretty easily dodge the bullets. So in this sense, the game does get easier as the game progresses. I had also intended to increase your rate of fire as well, but I guess I forgot and this never made it into the game.

Hope this helps you conquer those misfits!

You guys, a good feature for the website would be for game developers to be able to reply to comments on their games. It helps to say thanks and clarify things. I love that people play my games and I’d love even more to be able to tell them personally. This is the only way to do it currently.

C418: Brilliant. Shame I couldn’t get the Spacestation into my little space ship

I lolled. Thanks.

eli: The lonely, introspective feel is really great. Artwork is excellent, the music is cute. However, the back-and-forth mechanic was a bit tiresome for me. Overall effort: 5 stars at least.

Thanks for the comment. Music is cute? That’s different! The back and forth mechanic was kind of on purpose, the idea was that the game was forcing you to travel further to get more valuable items so you could upgrade your ship and make getting even further than that more viable. I wanted to have things to shoot, like space pirates but I never got round to it, so I would have added more mechanics eventually.

SonnyBone:This game looks REALLY NICE in motion. The pictures don’t do it justice. The game is very relaxing, which is what I think of when I hear: EXPLORATION. Everything works well together. For a 48 hour game this is incredibly polished, as others have said. NICE!

This LD I made a very conscious decision to polish things as much as possible as I went along, assuming it was viable in the time. It only takes a few lines of code for me to make something popout or fade, or highlight etc. It seemed worth it as it enhances the overall feel of the game. It seemed to pay off. (Thanks for the trophy recursor!)

refrag: Beautiful. A simple premise, beautifully executed. Well done!

Thanks! My initial idea wasn’t simple. Infact the debris sucking up and upgradinfg thing was meant to be a side thing that you could do in addition to the main game, but as time went on I decided to shift my focus to it.

madk: Good and well-executed concept, and it’s a relaxing game. However, more variation of gameplay would be nice. I got bored of just riding around and absorbing debris after a short while; some sort of enemies would be a good addition.

Go further.

Codexus: Nice little game with a good ambiance soundtrack. I would have appreciated the option to play in windowed mode, playing low-res games on a 30″ monitor isn’t too great. (with distorted aspect ratio too due a nvidia bug :/)

Jees, it’s ludum dare! What more do you want from me?! Hehe. Really this comment confuses me, how many LD games let you decide to play it windowed or fullscreen. I felt having it in a window would ruin the insular feeling  of the game.

TenjouUtena: Great game! Full of fun stuff to do, fun places to go! Great to play, will probably pick it back up after the compo.

Thanks! With luck I will too.

ExciteMike: I love the atmosphere! I played for a long time before I got down to the enemies. Form some of the other comments it sounds like many never made it that far. Two biggest problems: 1. Hold meter catches up too slowly, it looks like I still have room when I filled it, it just doesn’t show it yet. 2. The enemies were killing me before I even got to see what was shooting at me, and it’s really not easy to dodge so that’s where I stopped.

You’re not the first person to make that comment about the hold meter, I noticed it upon extended plays after the 48 hours too. I know how to fix it, but it didn’t occur to me at the time. As for the enemies they are kind of meant to stop you going down there since it’s where the most valuable items are, I appreciate that their range is perhaps a little on the long side though. If you hear the pew sound then just run, you can outrun the lasers easily!

Arne: I like this. I think I’m going to write a clone, if that’s ok.

Uh, that’s a bizarre comment. Okay, I guess.

recursor: Wow. This game has an impressive amount of polish for a 48 hour creation, and it is quite fun. This is one of my favorites so far. I hope you do even more with it.

Thank yoooou! With luck I will!

localcoder A couple of things almost stopped me getting into this game. First, I pressed escape to get out of the inventory screen and the game quit.

Then on my second attempt, I collected junk because that’s what I thought you were meant to do, and when I sold it and got no money I thought the game was bugged.

But once I worked out what was going on, I really enjoyed the game. I love the creative items, both the funny ones and others that suggest the story of the destroyed fleet.

The variety keeps the game interesting and I wanted to keep exploring to find bigger and better treasures. The surprise hostilities at the end were great too. The only disappointing thing is that there is no ending, so once I had all the upgrades I was left with no reason to use them.

Yeah the escape thing is silly. I’ll mentally put that aside. Even though I had time to have a start screen, a quit screen never occurred to me.

The not really knowing what to do aspect was definitely part of the design. I intentionally didn’t say much about the game (if you notice I don’t say that you can even tractor with the mouse button, you just sort of discover these things). To keep with the theme as much as possible I wanted to make the game mechanics themselves explorable as well as the playing field.

Once you twig that the further you go in the more items are worth you end up all “Oh alright it’s on now.” and try to get to the end of the field, about half way you run into a mine and don’t know what the hell. Putting the turrets right at the end was definitely the right decision I think, the shock when they first blast you apart after there’s been nothing like it for the whole game is cool I think. Discovery and exploration go hand-in-hand.

Yes there’s no ending, I had big plans but time and all. Thanks for the nice comments!

And thanks very much to anyone who has played it but not commented!

LD16 was a lot of fun, despite continually running into killer bugs that took ages to fix.

What went well:

• I managed to pull it all together in the last couple of hours and actually end-up with a game. I very nearly didn’t.
• People seem to like it, too! Didn’t expect that one.
• After releasing, I managed to locate and destroy one last memory leak. Otherwise it would have been unplayable.

What went badly:

• The aforementioned bugs.I probably spent at least a third of the time I was working on the game trying to fix memory leaks, infinite loops, and the like. These were often related to…
• I didn’t prepare. DESPITE knowing very well that I needed to get a basic framework, in the end I was just too lazy, and started the compo even without most of the libraries I needed.
• I didn’t spend enough time at the start thinking about what my game would be. Instead, I charged ahead with a turn- and tile-based engine, assuming I’d think of something later. Fortunately I did, and the idea was reasonably fun.

What I would improve:

• There are still a couple of glitches – one is that sometimes monsters manage to get on the same tile as you and you can’t attack them – not sure why.
• The view is too small. This is mostly so I could avoid trying to do any ray-casting and what-have-you. Though since I let you see monsters for an extra tile away, you can still see through walls. Whoops.
• You automatically climb down ladders, which isn’t ideal. In fact, I think I accidentally left it so that you’ll go down a ladder if you attack a monster which is standing on it. I ran out of time, and it was easier to code like this. Sorry!
• I had ideas for more things you could ‘explore’ and earn XP from – such as each time you come across a new animal or plant. But I never got time for it.
• The difficulty increase is really naff. Or at least, what’s meant to increase the difficulty – each time you go down a level, the monsters get +1 to attack, defence, and hp. But each time you level up, which can occur 2 or 3 times per level, you get +2 max hp, are fully healed, and your attack and defence increase by 1. So it’s very, very easy to quickly outpace the monsters. I didn’t take the time to balance it, as it was about 1:30 am by then, so yeah.

Final notes:

• I do have some ideas for expanding it, and I hope I actually get around to doing so this time. I think I will do, as I’ve wanted to make a roguelike for a long while, and after I lost all the code to my other one (Nooooooo!) this is a good opportunity to get back into it.
• Hanging out in #ludumdare made the whole thing a lot more fun, even when it seemed I would end the competition with only a mediocre level-generator.

Seen that people have found my game boring (which it is, tbh)… but there’s a note I’ll have to make: the “correct” way of winning the game is by destroying enemy ships, you’ll get 10g for each one you sink, get 100g to buy a map, and go to the map location…

You can find some enemy boats to the West of the starting position, for example…

Don’t forget you have infinite lives, the only drawback of sinking is that you lose half your gold…

Think I should have given the player a starting map and/or some money, so they feel more the need to explore more…

I would add this to my entries post, but I couldn’t find a way to edit it…

Bring back the ability to comment on my own post!

Okay, so I was baffled by some of the comments on 5 Colors that indicated that some of the structures in the game were partially invisible for some people (when people compared playing the game to watching the walkthrough).   I was completely unable to reproduce the bug on my system, and the really puzzling bit for me was that the background sprites used in the game are one-piece sprites.  So it seemed that random bits of otherwise visible sprites were invisible for some people.

The mystery was solved when I was finally able to reproduce the bug by playing the game on my wife’s netbook. It turns out that non-dedicated graphics cards have a hard time handling textures that are longer than around 2000 pixels on one side, which some of my background sprites were (my laptop has a low-end Geforce 8400 GS, and there’s no problem, but I’m assuming some people were playing the game on laptops with no dedicated video at all).

I chopped the larger sprites into bits (a process that is going to make any changes I want to make in the future incredibly painful), and the game now plays as it should on my wife’s netbook — and I’m assuming it will work on everyone else’s laptops as well.

So you can see that the bug was not entirely my fault, at least, not in the direct sense that my programming caused it  — though I will take responsibility for  it, since my ignorance did cause it .

Thank you very much to everyone who has commented on the game so far: I wouldn’t have found this bug without your help! I would be incredibly grateful if some of you who were experiencing this problem could try the game again, and let me know in the comments if the it is now working for you properly. Incredibly grateful.

You can download the fixed build here.

Well this is my 2nd LD and I must say I thoroughly enjoyed it once again.

Tools I used

Novashell

Paint .NET

Notepad++

Audacity

sfxr

Here are some random thoughts both good and bad about my experience making Bees n Flowers:

• This time instead of spending time trying to do pixel drawings, I drew my graphics freehand, scanned them in, and touched them up using in Paint .NET. I got this process down pretty good and felt pretty good about the results.
• Aside from a few annoying bugs I fought with, the Novashell engine worked out well for me and it also has the advantage of being able to generate both Windows and Mac packages (which I still need to do). I know, Unity can too.

• I had originally intended to learn Unity beforehand and do the game with it, but alas I just … dropped the ball and didn’t get to looking at it until it was too late.
• I really wanted to get random generation of the sequences, and at least one enemy (a wasp)  into the game but was unable to do so before the deadline
• I think the game could have used actual levels that change after you get a certain number of sequences. Then the locations of the flowers could be changed and maybe keep things a little more fresh.
• I had more flower types but they didn’t make it into the game
• I wanted to do more with the flowers as far as player interaction goes but again with the time…
• I had a list of features I wanted in my head, but I still found myself thinking “now what?” every so often

In the end it all comes down to how prepared you are beforehand and how well you manage your 48.  A few things I want to do do better next time:

• Get all my tools installed beforehand and familiarize myself with any new tools I plan to use.
• Figure out my process for generating art and sound and practice executing it.
• A written and prioritized list of the features I want to shoot for broken up further into ‘must haves for a complete game’ and then ‘icing on the cake’ features.

Tools
Visual studio 2005 express, paint.net, sfxr & Turtoise SVN for development
DestroyTwitter & Chatzilla for community
Firefox, wikipedia & google image search for information gathering

Languages & libraries
C++, sfml2, boost & stl

The good
Retained focus on a easy game and trying to polish it. I originally wanted to do something with a hex-based map, but since I hadn’t done anything close to that, I decided to go with a traditional square based map. I also decided to make a random level making my need for a level editor pretty much null.

The bad
There was no time for polishing.

Missing, but wanted features

• A better gui, with buttons and a in-game tutorial
• More than 2-players game
• Increase the positive reinforcement when picking up treasures, with animations etc
• Computer opponents!
• More treasures, I had plans for some inca gold and some western/money treasure too
• More environments such as rocks/mountatins that you can’t pass, quicksand that forces you to wait a turn and, in general, more pleasing enviromental grahics. I guess once you stop working on a texture, in ludum dare it is finished
• Bonus items, such as binuclear that allows you to see far and lantern that illuminate the area around you.

I’m updating my entry with a couple typos fixes and using much more coherent wording in one sentence.

There was a pretty severe memory leak in my game which either caused the game to slow down to an unplayable state or crashed entirely. This issue has been fixed.

Furthermore, a readme has been included which specifies the goal much clearer (well, at least I hope so). Also there was a problem with shooting cannon balls which prevented the player from winning if used uncorrectly, so shooting has now been removed completely. It didn’t really work anyway.
And I found out that you need the Visual 2005 C++ Redist package to start the game, so the required DLLs to launch the game have been included as well. The Mac OS X version also works on Mac OS 10.5 now.

The links have already been updated. If you had any problems earlier, I strongly suggest to try this version. For those of who already downloaded my game, you can download a patch here (90 kB). (Just replace the exe.)

Thanks to everyone who played and rated my game and especially to those who gave their feedback. Much appreciated.

Xplorer the timelapse

I will soon be spending Christmas vacation in a land where non-dial-up internet access is somewhat hard to come by.  So to prepare, I have downloaded offline copies of almost all the games.  Now that I’ve put that together, it occurs to me that maybe others would like that?  If one giant download of (almost) all the LD16 games would be useful to you, you can get all 327 delicious megabytes of it here.

I think there are only 2 games that I couldn’t get working offline copies of.  One was Linux only and the other looked like it would be nontrivial to steal from Kongregate.  For all the games whether I could rip them or not, the folder contains shortcuts to that game’s page on ludumdare.com.

EDIT:  Link fixed.  Thanks, Jonny D!

If you’re having trouble finishing the game, this walkthrough should get you there.  (Otherwise, don’t watch before playing, as the video contains MASSIVE SPOILERS!)

YouTube link:  5 Colors: Pandora – walkthrough

Entry: Echolon (check it out here)
Timelapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_toZ_YeZ6U

Summary:
Nothing is a more effective motivator than a hard dose of reality and time constraints. Also it’s way easier doing something you’re familiar with than trying something new in 48 hours.

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Now that the ludum dare is over I get to laugh at myself. I made a spaceship that shoots yellow balls in my game that would help players get higher up and guess what… I never used it. I spent time drawing it, programming it, balancing it and never used it… I do the silliest things sometimes.

On the plus side everyone seemed to like the music in the game. Funny part is I spent about 10 minutes making the music and 10 more minutes adding it to my game. Whereas I spent a total of about 5 hours on my game.

Another funny thing… I gave my game 2 names. One is Reach for the Stars and the other is Shoot for the Stars.

Ok I’m done mocking myself for now. Have fun everyone.

Shoot for the Stars

Two days after the end of Ludum Dare 16 I finally write my post-mortem. And you will find it after the break.

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Bah.  My game is crashing for samel on OSX, but the comments system for entry pages is a bit … unwieldy for communication purposes.  If someone on OSX can get my game to crash, I’d appreciate if you could

1: launch the ‘console’ application and let me know if you see anything there relating to the program (ideally paste the results in the comment to this)

2: let me know what version of OSX you’re using (I only aim for intel osx 10.5+ , so if samel’s crash was on PPC or 10.4, and other people can get it to work, I guess I’ll just relax and forget about it )

Probably a linking thingy, but I don’t know.  I used a completely new setup for building this version, so amn’t sure what might be going wrong exactly.

This was my first Ludum Dare, but have been following the competition for the last couple years if not longer.  I did not manage to finish my entry in time, but did really enjoy the process.  Having family time at the weekend is very important to me, so my coding time was limited to around 5-6 hours over 2 days.

Time lapse:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeIedoXsfIQ

Game play: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALXlAzhhi30

Download Game: http://blog.codheadz.com/file.axd?file=2009%2f12%2fJungleExplorer.zip

Download Source: http://blog.codheadz.com/file.axd?file=2009%2f12%2fLDExplo.zip

To run this you will need either the XNA studio 3.1 or the XNA redist from the link below:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=53867A2A-E249-4560-8011-98EB3E799EF2&displaylang=en 

What did not go so well

• Did not finish the game to a level ready to submit before the deadline
• No sound
• No prepared engine, other than XNA
• Lack of time
• Giving up with an hour to go, when so close

What went well

• Keeping the concept as simple as possible to give me a hope during the very short amount of time available
• Coding with high velocity freed from my usual constraints of IOC and unit testing
• Ignoring my ball of mud engine and coding from nothing
• Getting 90% of it done

Here’s looking forward to the next one.

So I thought I’d write up a post-mortem on my game, so I’ll just outline the key points which I have come up with.

What went well

• The art – I’m quite happy with the images I created for it, it could have been a little better in some cases, but I’m quite fond of it.
•  The audio – A lot of people have commented on how the audio is cute, or funny, the voice of my boyfriend proved rather successful for Rex the dinosaur.
•  The menus – I quite like the colour scheme of the menus, although looking at it now it’s very Bonsai Barber. However there aren’t many clicks needed and it’s easy to navigate around so I’m happy with that.
•  All the little bits and bobs – I love that in the last remaining 5 minutes I managed to pull together an icon file along with all the other little touches that makes it feel a little more finished.

What went wrong

•  Not being a coder – I was limited in what I could make, so I thought making a seek n’ solve game would be easy. However I was wrong as it was a lot harder than I thought.
• The pop-ups saying you found an item – I had to keep these in to have it work properly.
•  The fact that it repeats items and never ends – I couldn’t figure out how to get my game to work the way I really wanted it, sadly this is the huge downside of the game, showing no progression or reward.
• Items staying there – Yes I realise they still stay there for everyone that seems to point that out, I couldn’t make them disappear and also because the game doesn’t work how it should, so no need to point out something I already know please. I know this means it shows know progression for the player, why else would I add the quit button, it was the only way I could make the game end.
• Not enough images – For the game to work really well I’d have to of increased the number of images by about 500% as this would then add the complexity needed for the game, and then the gameplay would be down to the placement of the items.
• The controls – Having right click as a drag button would not be the first thing  a player would think of, I could have fixed this many ways, either by telling the player when they start the game in a pop-up with arrows or something, or the better way. By having items over the edge of what is visible on the right side of the screen, then encouraging the player to look. However if the player reads the instructions they shouldn’t encounter this problem.
• Zelda – Unfortunately The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks came out so I had to stop myself from playing it all the time, although I did play it a bit over the weekend at times.
• Sleep – On the Friday night I didn’t actually stay awake for the theme to be announced, and had a large amount of sleep, although this was mainly down to having a long day at work, doing food shopping and my podcast in the evening. So I was quite tired, and I had about 4-6 hours each night, so that knocked a fair bit off my development time. However if I had less sleep I’d not work as well as my brain wouldn’t function properly.

What I would improve

• More images – I would add a large amount of images to populate the space and make Rex’s living room more junk filled, originally the game was two times the size it is currently, unfortunately I didn’t have the time to make enough, but now that I can improve on the game in my spare time I will attempt to create more assets to populate the space.
• Learn a bit more code – It was pretty much the first time I’d really made something on my own in Game Maker, which was so vey hard, I am a designer, however not a designer in any way of programming. I hope to try working on my programming skills a little, not that it’s really essential for my job, but it’s always good to know a little of everything.

Final thoughts

•  I intend to work on the version and perhaps make a version 2, when I do it’ll be posted up on my blog
• I’m extremely happy with the outcome of the game, not being a programmer, I made something that i feel was a little successful. I know of its failings, and I hope to work on them so it can then become a better play experience.

You can give Rex’s Junk Hunt a try if you want, don’t expect an completely engaging gameplay experience though

…I updated my game to have diagonal movement too. (Linklink! And it is faster as well.)

But don’t worry, the main windows download on the entry page is still the old version.