Post mortem time: ( As you will see English is not my native language, I can add that I’m French, there is probably a lot of syntax error in this )

Theme reaction:

I always try to anticipate the theme before knowing it, it’s stronger than me. From the themes proposed in round 5 I knew I wanted to do something “rpg”.

Bim! Tiny world!

First thing came to my mind, I have strong memories of Zelda -The Wind Waker- Especially how the island looked so small when you were far from them and then when you were on it there was ton of things to do! I don’t do 3d, so I went for an old school rpg aiming to have a small island with a ton of things to do, so the idea was at this moment to have a rich life and diversity on the smallest island possible.

First steps, graphics:

I started to draw 10x10px tiles and went into this:

I found that was cute but I I thought that a lot of people, since the theme is “tiny world”, will do small resolution worlds so I wanted something a little different.

I opened my island inside inkscape, set the grid to 1px and start to redraw everything adding some angles and went into this:

I loved the render, I knew that Processing open svg files, big plus I can scale them easily and make the island slowly scale down, that give me some ideas for a story

I realised at this time that half a day was spent on gfx, redrawing them under inkscape cost me a lot of time ! I knew that I will not have the time to do characters animation for example so I started to draw waves for the water and makes them moves thru sine movement to turn the visual more “alive”. Then I draw all the character I wanted for my game hoping to have finished the gfx and start coding for real I used the same process to draw them, then I added a small shadow to make them more visible on the map since I used the same 10 colors for drawing them.

hero, mother, princess, king, wise, bad tiny pirate knows magic

Coding:

Then I started coding, everything went well quickly but I was a little bit worried of all the other works I had to do this weekend that I wasn’t doing because I decided at the last time to do LD#23. To avoid stress and keep focusing I worked with this patern all saturday afternoon:

1h00 of coding – 0h30 of making music-sound effect – 0h30 on graphic polishing – 1h00 of codi….

Spend the time before sleeping thinking about a stupid story, I went into something big I will not detail here since I didn’t had the time to implement in the final game.

Sunday afternoon, I knew that I saw to big had to make a choice, I knew the game I will upload will not be finished. Had to make choices, I don’t like uploading something that looks unfinished, so I programmed a quick combat system and wrote an anticipated end.

Now I’d like to thanks all people who commented my game, it really warm my heart and makes me want to continue this project!

Play it here if you didn’t :http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=4651

I absolutly have to work on other things before tomorow.

that’s the end for the competition for me, play “THE TINY PIRATE KNOWS MAGIC” here (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=4651) tiny sailors!

it’s short, unfinished, but made with love

first video, I”m moving slowly but surely

My video capture software is laggy, everything is running smoothly as a wave on a pirate boat.

Guess what magic power he has ?

Time to go to bed left to do for tomorow= storywriting / fighting system / incorporating audio

When I do the title gfx before coding gameplay, it’s usually a bad sign

Ingame render this time, it’s coded in processing, gfx are vecto.

I’m aiming something rpg, there will be a princess to save eventually

On my tiny world there’s is something like 0.5 people per tile square

To much work to do for this week end but nevermind, I choose LD48

tinyworld for my LD48, gfx done at 50%, music done at 80%, now start coding