Took us (a team of 5) 4 hours to come up with an idea. The concept art you see here doesn’t make any sense, ignore it.

This is my port-mortem for Biodome, my 4th LD entry, first Jam.

The Good

» Working as a team was a lot more fun than expected. I was on a team of 5 people, talking over on skype. We’ve known each other for quite some time, and decided to get together to make games, and this was our first game, kind of a experiment, to find out how each other work and how to coordinate our efforts.

» Defining right at the start what each one would be doing. We are pretty much all pixel artists, but I’m the only one who can program, so that was decided beforehand (our composer also can, but we couldn’t sacrifice our only composer). Each of the other three were assigned to sprite work, scenery work and general artwork.

» Using Construct 2 to make the game. It’s easy to use, has a ton of cool features, and is completely stable (contrary to construct classic). But recent updates were kinda buggy, like using “or” statements with key press not working. Also, thanks to Construct’s HTML5 exporter, we could get a lot more people playing.

The Bad

» Our idea got too big. Starting with the concept of a puzzle platformer with 3 characters at the same time. First of all, a puzzle for LD is not a good idea, cuz it’s hard coming up with good puzzles in such short time. Second of all, platformers are not my strong point, so the movement was kinda weird at times. And finally, having to program 3 characters with different abilities and properties took a lot of time, and making the puzzles was hard because of their different characteristics.

» God-damn buttons and doors.

» The guy in charge of making the tilesets didn’t know anything about making tilesets. This resulted in it not being correctly aligned to the grid, tiles missing, tiles not tiling correctly… a big nuisance.

The Result

» People seemed to enjoy the game, despite a couple of flaws. They said the puzzles were good and they loved the music and the art, so I guess the whole team did a great job.

» We will be working on new projects now ^^ We formed a gamedev group, at Dead Pixel Games (temporary website), or @indiedeadpixel

My timelapse:

Some progress ^^

We had an idea pretty fast, and started with the concept of characters. I begun coding everything. What you see here is the 3 controllable characters, and one of them can carry boxes around, and stack them.

The other guys are making the art and the music, and it’s all looking pretty good

Maybe someone can answer me this. How can I have the times in between my timelapse to be black? For instance, if I turn it on at 9am until 11am, then turn it off, and turn it on again at 1pm. How can I fill that time in between in my final video?

Me and some buddies (X-wing9, Renato, Mat and Guax) are going to be in for the jam

We just joined forces as a brasilian gamedev group called Dead Pixel and this will be our first work together

Dead Pixel @indiedeadpixel