Timelapse video

Ludum Dare 21 – Coin Runner – Timelapse

Waking up at 1:30 PM in the day today with aching fingers, I felt happy.

The game is actually pretty fun to play, and not too badly balanced. There are three zones of different colors, and each zone get’s a bit harder. The enemies get a little too fast and jumpy after a while though.

I don’t regret using Flashpunk this time, it really makes everything so much easier than using just as3 like last time. I spent many hours on a stupid bug though, and realised Flashpunk tilemaps do not actually clear tiles when you call clearTile() on them if the clear tile (index 0) is transparent. That was annoying and made me loose a lot of time.

I think the leaderboard can add a lot to the game. Sadly Playtomic has disabled it’s leaderboards due to some problems, but it should be working soon again.

I didn’t really make any graphics at all, but focused on gameplay instead. I think that was a good idea, but the game could really use some better graphics. The music and sound effects could be better too, but they do the job.

A breakdown of the time spent in different applications (tracked with ProcrastiTracker):

• Flashdevelop 13h
• Chrome 6h
• Flashplayer 4h
• XChat 2h
• Photoshop 2h
• Cubase 1h

Entry page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=2311

Phew. That was stressful. Having worked to fix a stupid bug for most of the evening there was not much time for balancing the game. I hope it’s not too easy. I’ll write more later, for now here are screenshots and a link to the game: http://danikgames.com/stuff/LD21/index.html. Now I need to sleep.

I have actually felt really productive today, even though the effort is not showing much in the screenshots. Now there are a number of skills and upgrades that you can buy for the coins you collect. I’m currently working on the shop screen and it’s taking a whole lot of time to get all the components right.

I plan to implement highscores and maybe achievements if I can make it.

Shop

I got the basic idea of my game working yesterday. You are a red square trying to escape from all the purple squares chasing you. The levels are randomly assembled from a set of pre-made sections, and there are yellow squares (coins) you can pick up. I want to make a upgrade system so that you can purchase new abilities such as climbing ledges, double jumping, increased jump strength, making you able to reach higher places and more coins.

It’s still not pretty, but I’m happy with the way it plays so far.

Here is the game as it was after day 1 (click to play):

After lots of trouble getting the level to scroll correctly, I focused on the player controls and physics and made some progress. Behold.

I took a bicycle ride to get some inspiration.

Inspiration +1
Stamina +1
Strength +1

No good game idea yet though…

I’ve been working for the last 8 weeks until yesterday, so I haven’t had a chance to prepare for this LD at all. I will see what I can come up with anyways.

My workspace:

Make shift keyboard action cam:

I will be using

• Flashdevelop
• Flashpunk
• Photoshop
• Cubase
• Sfxr