It’s not really a post mortem, well it sort of is, but not for the game I made this Ludum Dare. That’ll come in  a while after I sort out my thoughts on it. I might do a technical post mortem first.

Anyway

It’s about my previous ld game(again, sort of), which has been my first proper contact with game-making after a long long time. As if I put it (making games) on a shelf and forgot about it for many years and let it collect dust and cobwebs. It’s something I can do that makes me happy regardless of the end result. It’s something I can do that takes nothing and time and makes something, and at the end of the day I can sit back and look at something which wasn’t there before.

And you guys are to blame for me finding it on that shelf.

People liked this game of mine for some reason(the ones that understood it) and some made a point to tell me in IRC they remembered and liked if from all the way back then which blew me out of the water. Days later I still can’t believe that happened. So now that said game is on the android market and the ubuntu software center and desura and such I feel that I should give something back to the people who inspired me to keep going.

So what I’ll do is post a bunch of desura keys for that game of mine every day till Chritmas.

Let’s start with 2 for now and see where that takes us:

R42VR-VIU5B-ZBR2T-EL8BD-RIZIK

PUOJQ-X0BD5-I2QG2-E26MQ-KZCQC

I’ve found my raw sounds still on the phone, and I’ve uploaded them to soundcloud with the intent of posting them, but something came up and.. well.. I’m doing it now

There were two soundtrack ideas, I went with the second as the first sounded too annoying, I’d like to hear opinions on that if there are any. Good choice, bad choice, that sort of thing.

Sound effects and first draft music

What became the music

These then became audacity-ed. The impact sound for example is most of the impact noises above overlayed. And yes, all of these originate in one way or another from an old dusty mandolin.

Play the Game

After a process which was longer than it needed to be I’ve finished up a first installment of the post-compo Urth(for android only at the moment). And it works. Let’s have a look at lessons learned:

• never EVER hardcode menus ever again
• good coding practices aren’t necessarily compatible across programming languages
• having a deadline positively influences productivity
• next time use a real font and not gimp+a tablet
• some things just aren’t meant for 3D and fancy lighting

• reduced processor load
• improved the gui so it doesn’t look like it’s held together with duct tape and chewing gum
• replaced difficulty cliff with difficulty curve

Images:

Main menu: Merged two buttons and added a new one

The level menu now matches the main menu and has pagination

A sneak preview of one of the new levels

 COMPO ENTRY ~ IN THE MARKET

I like making charts, it’s a… thing. So I took some time to see how coolness is spread out over people, and how many ratings each person received. I might make updated versions on the one week mark and when it’s all over. Also I might make something regarding ratings received/coolness, but for now I got my fix. These values are from sometime today.

CLICK TO SEE

After finishing my game I noticed that I had plenty of spare hours left so I decided to add a scoreboard. Unfortunately that meant communicating with a web server, which to my knowledge meant I had to sign the thing.

Signing applets involves some console work, but most importantly it involves an annoying popup asking people to let the thing run. In my mind that’s nearly as bad as a installer and I didn’t want anything of the sort, besides I tried that on a previous project (which come to think of it was also a 48 hour game) and that resulted in people not playing it a all.

From some android work I’ve done I remembered I can call links to pages even if the app has no permissions(the browser handles the links), and I wasn’t too surprised when I found out that an unsigned applet can do the same.

Basically what I did was call

link(“http://example.com/scores.php?name=Andrew&score=asdfg”);

(processing function, no Idea if it’s the same in reglar java) where ‘asdfg’ was an encrypted version of the score.  This coupled with making each score unique prevented floods on the scoreboard.

The function spawns a popup window, and I’ve noticed that even if chrome blocks it, it still preloads the score page causing the score to go through. This may or may not be a security issue.

If anyone knows a better, or just different way to have an applet share its internal data I’d love to hear it.

VIEW GAME PAGE

Urth has a rather high difficulty, especially in the puzzles available in story mode. These require both planning and reflexes, and may seem impossible. What works on paper doesn’t necessarily work so well in the field, and I’ve learned that by repeatedly failing to finish my own levels. Of course some tweaking there and there helped, and feedback from the community helped identify the particularly tough levels which needed ironing out.

Without further delay I present one set of possible solutions to the puzzles:

VIEW LEVEL GUIDE

I don’t doubt that most players devised their own solutions, and if anybody would like to share theirs I’d love to see them.

VIEW GAME PAGE PAGE

I’ve gotten a little addicted to my own game, but much to my frustration I’m not the one with the high score. Since I’ve been playing it between ratings I decided to upload a short gameplay video.

The goal in this game mode is to get as far away from the central star as possible. There’s also a story mode which has puzzle elements to it. I might upload a play through one of these days.

VIEW VIDEO ~ VIEW GAME PAGE PAGE 

In case anybody wants to try beating my score even more, it’s worth nothing that only the web version submits to the leader board(and only after adding a name).

PLAY ~ VIEW PAGE

This was an intense couple of days, and felt more like a week had passed. It being my first ludum dare I didn’t know what to expect. I’ve made games before, and I’ve made games with deadlines before, but the ones I’ve finished were not much.

As the time of the theme’s announcement came closer I wasn’t worried too much, I had some vague ideas on some types of games to do. One game could fit several themes. Then the theme was announced: escape! I have to admit that this was one of the themes I overlooked in my mental preparation as I assumed people will want to avoid a pile of room escape games. I didn’t want to do a platformer because I assumed that there will be enough little jumping men and floating platforms from other competitors. So I sat down started pacing around the whole house and tried to think what I’d like to escape from: cities came to mind, then I thought that’s too much of a cliche since the whole world would want the same. Now that’s an Idea.

First let's get them spinning

 First thing’s first in an orbit-based game: get the orbit working. That worked easily enough. Geting them spinning around eachother was trickier though.

Then get them spinning around eachother

The coding went a lot more smoothly than I had anticipated, the only slight issue was in switching orbits where Urth (I’ve been told repeatedly that it looked like a hairy circle in its first incarnation) would randomly teleport around.

Probably my favorite level

By the end of day one I had 6 finished levels and escape mode. There were still no menus, no sounds, no interface of any recognizable sort, and at this point I hadn’t slept for well over 24 hours, not due to a lack of trying though. I’d sit in my bed, lights off and sleep wouldn’t happen. Instead what happened were the storyline overlays. Then sleep happened.

Day two started with implementing some suggestions from preliminary testing, adding the artwork, doing the menus, and generally improving the game play experience.

Music and sounds were a headache. I rarely add sounds to projects, so this was mostly new and uncharted territory. Some fumbling with lmms wasted several hours, so I just went and picked up my dusty old mandolin (no I can’t actually play it other than one song: Planxty Irwin) and banged and pinched on it (the sound effects) until I eventually managed a slow tune (the music). Some tweaking in audacity made it bearable to listen to.

Ready for my world tour, fetch my manager!

With that out of the way I still had some hours to spare. Since I became addicted to the Escape game mode, and would play it repeatedly for minutes on end instead of doing actual work I decided to make a high score table so others can show off their planetary avoidance skills. This only works in the applet though, the compiled versions will save your scores in a text file.

Escape this if you can

To conclude, some advice:

• start simple, but make it expandable
• prioritize
• do not update to a beta release of ubuntu the day before ludum dare
• 48 hours isn’t enough to learn new skills and use them, work with what you know
• do not forget to blink

Most of the functionality is done except for:

• levels
• level loader
• win/loss conditions
• menus

• better graphics
• sounds
• multiple game modes

Screenshot:

more orbiting, more graphics, more interaction

Far from playable, far from the common man being able to identify its purpose, still nameless, but with a main character name.

Also screenshots:

screenshot 1, they revolve

screenshot 2, 2 hours later, they spin better

Protip: do not install beta versions of ubuntu the day before ludum dare

Onwards to victory!

First time doing this, hopefully everything will go according to plan. Hopefully I’ll have a plan so everything will go by it.

So far I intend to use  processing with possibly one or more of its libraries. Aren’t 100% sure yet, I’ll probably have 1000+ ideas before the theme is announced and get a mindblank right after.

For graphics I’ll go with gimp and/or random items around the house and a photo camera, and for sounds I’ll probably bang pots together and record it.