What went right:

• Finding an idea: I woke up early (LD started at 3 a.m. for me) and just looked at the final theme voting results. Then I pondered about possible games while staying in bed, which proved to work quite good.
• Programming: Even with a bug that took me 1,5 hrs to solve I was quite happy with my programming.

What went wrong:

• Time: With my wife and child being around and some not LD realated evening activities, time management became a problem. I had to cut almost all features I planned and keep very simple with the graphic and leave the music out.
• Motivation: Due to the ideas I had at start and the time restrictions I got more and more frustrated running out of time and realising not to make the polished game I would have liked to. So I had some moments where I thought about quitting the compo but am quite glad afterwards I haven’t done so.

Related to the last point, here is a comparison between what came out and what I planned:

LD 22 entry

Mockup with planned features.

So what did I learn?

It’s worth continueing even when you want to give up.

Play and Rate!

Here you go:

Click image for download. After unzip: DrA.exe for win, DrA.py for Linux.

To rate the game (based on LD version), click here.

After searching the #ld48 tag for actual links to LD22 games and reading a tweet about this problem I decided to suggest (courtesy @noragames):

#ldentry

Twitterers, be so kind to use this hashtag for posting your links to your LD entry. Additionally using #ld48 in the same tweet is a great idea! Both makes finding links to LD22 games (they’re 891, remember) much easier.

Just in case you haven’t figured this out already:

If you want to see the journal for a game’s author from the entry’s page, it isn’t working atm. A quick workaround (after clicking the link) is to copy or write the author’s name after a “=” just at the end of the adress bar of your browser. This would look like this:

Before:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/category/ld-22/?author_name

After:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/category/ld-22/?author_name=tcstyle

I’m doing this a lot actually to make my mind about the community rating for games I rate. So go rate many of all these wonderful games!

There isn’t everything in the game I initially wanted to. But it’s playable and works fine. So it can be considered finished.

Does anyone know how to sort out the error with pygame’s font and py2exe to make a windows executable?

Get game here

Almost there. Definitely not as much polish as I initially intended, but it’s playable now.

What’s behind it?

You play Dr. Autofober making an experiment about test subjects’ loneliness. You have to prevent them from meeting by placing walls and kittens. Placing a wall close to a test subject will induce panic which should be avoided. Screenshot:

And also:

Working title of my game: “Dr. Autofober’s experiment”. Here comes a first screenshot of six test subjects running around aimlessly. More about the game later.

I don’t know how much of the 48 hrs I can spend for LD but I’ll definitely give it a try. Hope the theme gives me some nice and fast to implement idea. If it’s kittens, then I have one idea less cause I just made a game with kittens for the warmup.

Tools:

• Python
• Pygame
• Gimp
• Musagi
• Audacity
• Bfxr

Good luck and have fun to every participant.

Here it is:

Kittenswarm

It’s quite interesting how the swarm algorithm behaves. It’s totally deterministic about the kittens’ movement. But the starting positions and movement are random which gives fully unpredictable results for swarm behaviour.

This could probably become a full game with nicer graphics, sound and more levels. So far it was a great warmup for the next weekend.

Grab that fish!

Here comes a first screenshot:

The kittens are able to follow the mouse while maintaining to keep the swarm and stop at the screen border. Probably I’ll implement a test level with some deadly areas and a goal to reach.

O Ludum Dare, how dare you?

Initially I wanted to make some progress on my TIGSource compo game for December. But this warmup seems like a great idea as I have some swarm-algorithm code ready for some weeks now I wanted to put in a game. And guess what the generator for theme picked for me:

Kittens!

So I’ll try to make a game with a kitten swarm for warmup this weekend.