http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=12384

Go play this. NOW! I’m in love!

OK, so here’s some development shots and various assets for our game, Kumiho

This is my visual reference chart, the visual references that most influenced how the game looks. Ikaruga has a prominent role visually, even though I did play some Jamestown, Touhou 8 and Xenon II to get a feel for things. I used a 21 color palette which grew organically as I added more and more stuff. It’s the strange shape at the bottom left of the timelapse. I also tried to keep with a vertical composition and Korean text, in its (less usual) top to bottom form, was a huge help in establishing the look. Korean and chinese drawings were also a big influence on the style.

I always like to have reference for everything before I start to work. In this case there’s background ideas, spaceship designs, photos of insects and stylized korean drawings.

Here is my timelapse.
I used one main photoshop file to draw new stuff, so that I could see them relative to other assets. Essentially, a mockup/overview of the game.

When something needed animating, I just copied it into a new file and went on from there. Cases in point:

Long explosion. Again, Korean and Japanese art influenced the shape

the flappy wings of the squid boss. I realised, from looking at slow-motion squid videos on youtube, that the movement is essentially a sine wave. Even so, this took about 2 hours

The ship was my first animating challenge for this game. I had chosen an asymmetrical design, so left and right animations would have to be different, and not just a flipped over version.

The tentacles. This took 3 hours. Sine wave movement again, but these were harder. The two right tentacles are flipped versions of the two left ones, with a time delay of 3 frames, so that the movement looks more organic.

Hope this helps,
Christina

Fedor and I made this completely from scratch in three days (with little sleep):

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=13139
We’re proud of it and couldn’t wait to show this off to you guys! Please spread around, rate and comment

I will now attempt the daring feat of sharing what this experience felt for me, so we can all benefit from it as game designers/developers/artists.

Development notes:

It was exhausting and super fun. I particularly enjoyed composing the music, and how we came up with an interesting gameplay mechanic (teleportation).
Coming at it as equals and negotiating ideas did a world of good for our game. Our main inspiration was the Touhou series of games for Fedor (I’d only seen gameplay) and Ikaruga for me (finished the game several times).

I started doing graphics on Saturday morning. I worked on a mockup photoshop file full groups of layers, to which I returned throughout development. For example, when I needed a new enemy, I would fire up the mockup, draw the enemy next to all the other sprites and then paste it into another photoshop file and animate it separately. I would then export as individual .PNGs (Photoshop’s “Render Animation to Video” was very helpful).

Dropbox of course saved our lives, and we communicated through skype’s chat. In fact we haven’t even seen each others’ faces.
I used Photoshop CS5 for all animation and graphics, and Fruity Loops with free soundfonts to write and perform the music.
Fedor used Unity and I don’t know what else ^-^

Post mortem: We gave it our absolute best. A coding set-back made the scrolling clouds unusable, so Fedor had to wing it at the last moment, which left the background a little bleh in my opinion ( I had no time to make changes to the cloud graphics and scrolling). But even so, when at the last minute he managed to fix the clouds so we at least had some, it was very exciting. The level is very very well thought-out and very fun to play. It took Fedor, what, 6 hours? to come up with the patterns that complement the teleport mechanic.  The 3 hours before deadline were, for me, mostly about helping Fedor out with any requests, like changing sprites or giving him a list with all the visual elements he had yet to implement. I made a second enemy ship graphic in 15 minutes, since Fedor made enemies with two different numbers of hit points, and I felt we needed to be able to tell them apart. This was done 2 or 3 hours before deadline, when Fedor was struggling with the stupid clouds. He added the second enemy graphic in the game 1 hour before deadline.

I also wanted finite lives implemented (9 of them, as many as the tails of the Kumiho fox-spirit), shown only everytime you are resurrected from a death, in order to keep the interface as clean as Fedor wanted it. Scoring wouldn’t have hurt either. But we didn’t have time to even negotiate it, because the ideas came too late. Even if they had come early, we wouldn’t have had time. I stayed up Sunday 12am to Tuesday 6am, and it’s the longest I’ve ever been awake.

So, overall, I couldn’t have wished for anything better, I had the fastest and best coder at my disposal, we had a crazy schedule and working hours, and implemented almost everything we set out to implement, and still had time for a little polish.