[ Play Abigail's Descent | gameplay footage ]

My game’s a platformer where you descend around the outside of a cylindrical pseudo-3-D tower. It’s nothing groundbreaking (I’ve seen the tower mechanic in at least 2 other games) but I still felt like I put enough into it that it wasn’t completely derivative.

I don’t usually have trouble coming up with an idea that I like. I started on the tower mechanic 21 minutes into the competition, and I had the rest of the gameplay in mind within a couple of hours.

I think I made the right choices about which features to cut and which to keep. Some highlights:

• I’m really happy with the 2.5-D tower. This obviously was not trivial to implement, and it turned out pretty well. I wish I could have made the platforms look better, but nobody has complained yet.
• I like the grayscale characters. It reminds me of Paper Mario. Feedback has been mixed.
• I really like the clouds. Nobody’s commented on them, but I think they do a great job adding to the 3-D effect and they only took 20 minutes to add.
• The dialogue/story is good, but I wish I could have spent more time on it. The knight was originally only going to be in one level, and I had other characters planned.
• I think I got the challenge level just about right. I followed my rule of thumb of making it 1 to 2 levels easier than it seems like it should be. Some players still thought it required pixel-perfect jumps, though in reality every horizontal jump has at least a 14 pixel margin of error.
• People don’t like jumping games, I know. I really like to have as simple of mechanics as possible and make the most out of them. I think if your character can jump, you should have some challenging jumps. I hope that the frequent checkpoints helped minimize the frustration.
• The sound and music are fine. I may some day be able to make my audio rather than just using whatever comes out of sfxr and Autotracker-C. But until that day, I’m grateful for these amazing tools.

I had a great time this LD, and I was pretty happy with how the game turned out! It’s already gotten twice as many ratings as my last LD game did during the whole competition, so I certainly can’t complain about that. So far I’ve gotten very constructive feedback.

Thanks to everyone who took the time!

[ Abigail's Descent | timelapse (youtube) ]

I admit I don’t really “get” the whole timelapse thing – it’s too fast to see anything that interesting. I had my webcam this time (although it stopped working on Sunday) since I was going to be LDing in a variety of cool locations (you’ll have to watch the video to find out where!). I put a big countdown clock on there too, sacrificing a good 30% of my screen real estate for the sake of this video. I still don’t think it’s that interesting!

Anyway, if anyone has any tips for making a better timelapse video, lay them on me!

I’m making a fairy tale of a self-reliant princess who has to rescue herself from a tower. Pretty crazy, right? The mechanics are pretty simple, so now I’ve got to focus on content. Here’s how it’s going:

Despite the mind-blowing 3-D graphics, this is a pygame (SDL) project. Still sticking with what I know here.

I’m using python/pygame again. After my LD #19 entry received only 9 plays, I decided I really need to learn something web-based. I started to learn ActionScript and even made a failed entry at One Month Game, but I don’t feel like I’m comfortable enough with it yet to use it for LD. So I don’t plan to get a lot of feedback again, but I still hope to have a good time!

Unfortunately my home internet is down until 29 Aug, due to a telecom workers’ strike! Since none of my neighbors were nice enough to unsecure their wifi, that means I have to take this production on the road. I plan to write my game from work, the library, and a friend’s house. Never a dull moment. I probably won’t be able to get a Windows port together until after work on Monday. I hope that doesn’t keep too many people from playing.

I hope to stick to my strengths for this game, which are humor, story, and creative use of the theme. It will probably be silent with badly hand-drawn graphics, and lack polish since I do everything from scratch, but I hope to make up for that with interesting game mechanics.

Good luck to everyone!