Well, my game didn’t turn out too bad! I’ve received some encouraging comments on it, and hopefully some generous ratings. If you haven’t played it yet, here’s the link and a screenshot to catch your attention:

Take this! (and everything else)

I have to say, making this game in 48 hours was really fun. Hadn’t I been busy after the weekend, I would have pounced on my other project(s), and started working on them like I was on a 48 hour deadline, from all the adrenaline pumped in my veins. I probably had more fun making it than I had playing it! So after hearing the feedback on my game, here’s my own judging of it:

When I was thinking about what my game would be like, I tried to design something that would be easy to implement, easy to learn, but challenging. It worked more or less. It was simple, but because of the time limit, I wasn’t able to make difficulty settings or levels or game modes. This, like I was afraid it would, made the game hard to balance in terms of different player skill. It works if you only play it one or two times, as it becomes “hard” pretty fast. However, once you get the hang of it, when you reach the maximum difficulty (which you will, very fast) all the challenge disappears. I myself got to over 800 points and then stopped because I was so terribly bored. Players who played it once or twice reported between 102 and 60-something, but I’m sure they would have gotten the same score as I did if they kept on playing. I was only able to face this issue by the very end, since I had been making the engine up till then, and I was pretty tired.

So that was the main issue: The game advanced too quickly in the beginning and didn’t advance enough at the end. I think it would have helped to have more than 6 characters (I found that having a lot of items really spiced it up, especially after there were more items that fingers on your hand. Besides that, about the graphics, in terms of prettiness, they are simplistic and overall look like they were made by a child, but in terms of being practical, they’re very informative and really helped the players learn and play the game without becoming confused about what’s happening (one could expect this to become an issue in a timed reflex game about a crowd barging into your home). The sounds and music are non-existent due to the deadline, but like someone noted, it’s “Better than bad sounds”. Like the same person said, “the lack of polish is obvious”. So I’d like to apologize once again for the default Game Maker message box and highscore table. It was added right at the end. It was late, I was tired and realized that I needed something like that. Sorry! But I was very happy with the initial splash screen, which was also added at the very end.

After this very long reflection on an insane weekend of game developing, I’d like to end by saying that I’ll probably be polishing and expanding this game a fair bit after the competition. Hopefully I’ll fix the difficulty issue by adding more characters/levels, add some more gameplay mechanics (restoring health), giving it audio content and polishing it a bit (at least remove the default Game Maker stuff). Maybe I’ll include it as a mini-game in the main game I’m making.

Thanks for reading, thanks for playing and thanks for the feedback!

Well, I the “engine” is nearly done. I just need to give the game difficulty progression. I’m confident that it’s going to be fun, and the design is simple enough to let me concentrate on what I have more difficulty in.

I have 4/12 characters. The was unhappy with the 5th, so I’ve decided to redraw it tomorrow. I still have no sound effects or music, and I have no idea how I’m going to come up with some, especially with over half of the graphics still not done… I guess I can record some sounds with my microphone or look for some sort of sound resource generator? As for the music, I can’t exactly compose a tune out of thin air.  Any tips on these would be greatly appreciated. So here’s another screenshot (In the final version the items will only appear when their respective character starts showing up):

First time Ludum Darer here. I was born AFTER the original LoZ and never played it, so the “Take this!” meme doesn’t really mean much to me. I still decided to make a game despite that awful theme, and since there’s a category for posting, here’s some progress. Since I figured everyone in the world and their cats’ daughters would be making dungeon exploration games, I decided to just go with a Zelda theme. You’ll play as the old man in the cave, then people come in and you must give them what they need, like he gave Link the sword. Hopefully the simple gameplay will be fun and will give me time to draw something that’s more or less not too terrible (I suck at drawing). Here’s a screenshot:

I think it looks bad enough to be funny. Nothing worse than being caught in between “not bad enough, not good enough”. By the way, I use Game Maker.