Still need some sleep, but I least I have enough energy back to write this while things are clear in my head.

First, a big thanks to LudumDare organizers : thank you for making this event happen, I enjoy it every time. There’s so many games that were made, I’m not sure how many of them I will be able to play but I’m really looking forward to see what other people have come up with.

Now let’s talk about my own contribution : “Adventures in Noland”

The good parts

• At first, I was not sure to be able to dedicate enough time for the LD, but when I saw the them I liked it immediately and knew I had to make a game out of it. I’m happy that I could make it through and finish the game (just) in-time.
• I enjoyed  a lot making my tiny pixels graphics. I’m more like a coder and don’t do any gfx for daily work, so it was refreshing. And challenging. Trying to fit a dragon in a 7×7 pixel square is hard. I’m quite happy with the result and how quickly I could make it. I sure learned a lot and my next LD games will hopefully look better
• After some time lost looking for another game design, I’m very happy with the one I came up with. It feels really like a tiny world, yet it’s fun to explore.
• Doing the level design was great as well, I tried allowing several different ways to complete the game, hope we will see different ways of optimizing the final score

The hard parts

• I directly started (without warming up) and wrote a very quick GD : it was supposed to be a Civilization-like where IA cities would fight each others. After the world was displayed and NPC start moving around I didn’t feel anymore like doing that. From here, I took me almost a full day to find what I wanted to do.
• Time : Additionally to this day lost I was quite busy with home duties, both my wife and little girl being sick was hard to handle. I had to interrupt several times expect during the night. I guess I worked ~7 hours the first day and ~9 the second. Finished just in time for submit (which is 3am in France), didn’t have much time for polish.
• I would have like a few more hours to work a bit more on my gfxs, add a bit more hidden stuff in the world, do a title screen, add some sounds+music, and a proper font. That would have required maybe 4 more hours but I couldn’t afford them since I was always on the red line.

Play

Please play and rate my game here :  http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=8497

I would also be happy if you can leave some comments on what you like or didn’t like

Adventures In Noland is now submitted !

I didn’t have much time for polish, just enough to finish some monsters animations and add some NPC dialogs !

Play it now there http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13911877/ld23/ld23.html

Yesterday was a lot of time wasted trying to figure out a good game design (+ baby sitting & home duties). I finally was able to get something that I enjoy both playing and creating for lunch today. Only a few hours left but I’m working hard on the level design now (and a bit of scenario) : fights with monsters are working well, and the whole game is pleasant to play.

Here’s a screenshot, it’s still need some refinements, and a proper game title as well

Happy to see more and more LudumDare games built with

I just added some fog of war, the NPCs are also freely wandering in the world, from city to city or following each other.

Still not sure about which gameplay I will endup with, a few ideas are floating in my head, but hard to choose and get started…

I added a few tiny in-game characters : a farmer, a wood cutter and a soldier. They are animated – not very nicely, I’m not a graphics person – but it looks cute.

Will think back about some gameplay now.

Ok I got the world nicely displayed, the graphics are still done very quickly but I guess it’s fancy enough

I was not sure to join since I was quite busy with “real life” but I just woke up a bit early, look at the theme and loved it.

Will try to make something 2D this time.

My tools of choice :

• the wonderful Haxe language : http://haxe.org
• FlashDevelop IDE : http://flashdevelop.org
• GraphicsGale for making the GFX

I’ll commit my sources live on GitHub here : http://github.com/ncannasse/ld23 so you can watch the progress I’m making (I guess I’ll have to pause several times, hope I still can finish the game).

Here’s a small screen after a bit less than an hour :