I guess it’s time for me to do a postmortem of sorts (Tho I’m still working on the game at this point, but I should be able to wrap it up this weekend, you can check the compo and WIP post compo version at my entry page)

First of all, I would like to say that this has been a great experience, and I want to thank everyone for making it possible. So thanks everyone that participated, to the organizers that somehow managed to keep this afloat during the server situation, Adam Atomic for his awesome awesome Flixel Framework, and special thanks to Dogbomb for his terrific “65 Indie Games in 10(ish) Minutes” review, and to Oujevipo for his series of Ludum Dare game reviews.

So without further delays, a screenshot and then The Bad, The Good and a Desition:

Intro Screen

 The Bad:

Actually nothing went bad at all, I wish I had more time during the compo, but I had to attend a meeting on saturday that ate half of the day (I coded through half of it anyway, while nodding hehe), and the compo theme is announced right around the time I’m falling asleep (I’ve learnt that it’s better if I read it, then scribble down some notes and go to bed, instead of working through the night like I attempted last time).

The Good:

There’s just too many good stuff so i’ll break it up.

The theme:
I loved the theme the moment I read it. I had been thinking about non-combat, non-pewpewpew games for a couple of weeks before the compo, and what better theme than Escape to approach indirect conflict? I felt it was perfect.

The tools:
Flash Develop and Flixel are rock solid, I can’t explain how comfortable I feel with this combination.

GXSCC, usually frowned upon by the chiptune community, allowed me to achieve the sound I wanted without needing to learn the many layers of complexity found in a Mod tracker, so I only needed to borrow a friend’s Oxygen midi keyboard and I was set for music.

SFXR and Audacity for sound effects did the trick (plus some coding that make my game sound like it had lots of different samples, yet it only has 5 samples per kind of sound, that are layered and played at different intervals when triggered).

ASESPRITE, for graphics. While not great, it certainly delivered (except the newspaper cover that got made in GIMP because I had no time to dither the gradient by hand).

Pixel Bender Toolkit, my only gamble as I had never used it before, was really simple to develop and implement, really happy with it, gonna look into number crunching with it for my next game.

The planning:
1- Brainstorm, watch references.
2- Write down the concept.
3- Scope.
4- Write a Schedule.
5- Map input.
6- Create a Screenflow Chart.

This took about 4 hours. Screw Excel, Project, Qubity, Wikis, etc… Notebooks, Post Its, napkins and my cellphone alarm clock work just as good, or way better. For this part I took the keynote as some sort of divine commandment and followed the pro style advice to the letter.

After that, I jumped into developing the screen flow, slide presentation style, then jumped into the game logic, and the rest is history.

A Desition:

I really love making games, I really do. Ludum Dare helped me confirm my gut feeling. I love every aspect of it: The designing, the planning, the coding, the art and sound creation, the polishing, EVERYTHING.

I’m already on the path to make this my livelihood, I’m on the process of getting a game design diploma since earlier this year, and because of that I was thinking about throwing my CV around different companies once I got my portfolio finished (I’m a pretty competent 3d modeler). But the thing is that I don’t want to be another over specialized cog in the machine, pushing vertices or voxels around from 9 to 7, realizing other people’s vision.

I’ve attempted to collaborate with other people on game projects, and I’ve failed every single time, vision and consensus do not mix. I got tired of people telling me “no we can’t do that because it’s too hard”, I got tired of people telling me “that’s not the current market trend”, I got tired of ideas dilluting into homeopathic levels to please everyone, and maybe the problem IS ME, but who cares, if I can’t work in groups, what’s wrong with that?

 
I just got to try and do it on my own. So starting tomorrow I’m gonna go fulltime Indie, and I’m flying Solo!

What can I say, I *LOVED* the theme, as soon as I read it I got a burst of inspiration, and managed to finish my game  :-D

But i’m getting ahead of myself, this time I used:

Flash Develop: http://www.flashdevelop.org/
Flixel: http://flixel.org/ (older version, 2.3)
Pixel Bender: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pixelbender.html
Asesprite: http://www.aseprite.org/
Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net
Aria Maestosa: http://ariamaestosa.sourceforge.net/
GXSCC: http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley-SanJose/8700/P/GsorigE.htm

I’ll be posting my submission once I wake up (it’s 6 AM down here in Chile), Good Luck Everyone!