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This was the first time ever for me to successfully complete a Ludum Dare. I have tried 4 times before, but never was able to finish. The reasons varied from other real-life distractions and no good ideas to simple exhaustion. And also this time it felt the whole time like I will not be able to finish it or submit something really bad not even close to the theme. But with a week now to look back, I have to say that I am pretty happy with the result. The story and the feel to the game is more then I could have expected to develop in about 35 hours (including breaks but not the sleep).

Already a few days before the LD I decided to go with a ray-casting-based 3D game in a Wolfenstein-like fashion if I would somehow get the game to match the theme in some way. So, I briefly read an article on ray-casting to get the idea and the math straight …at least in theory. Also, I wanted to do 3D but the problem is that you can easily get caught in the art-trap: doing highly polished graphics that take up a lot of time. That’s why I love pixel-art: It has a great visual style but (depending on the resolution) requires not so much effort. Well, that sounds wrong; great pixel art takes a lot of time but you know what I mean: You can have a visually pleasant game with rather simple and fast pixel art. Would I have used OpenGL, you often get lost in detail because you can display a lot of detail (one of the previous failed attempts made me realize this).

Result of day one: basics renderer including texturing are working.

Come the announcement of the theme, I was sure that I made the wrong bet because I could not immediatly think of a good gameplay idea. I decided to proceed with implementing the raycasting-based renderer and postpone this problem to a later point in time. This lead to me spending basically 1.5 days of the time on implementing  the renderer; i.e. rendering perspectively correct walls and sprites, getting the math straight and implementing all edge-cases. I was sure that I would not be able to finish this time. Espacially because thinking straight and doing the math got hard after one day and I struggled a long time to get the textureing and sprite-rendering right. And I also discovered a bugs that got my rendering spiral out of control once I went out of the defined bounds of the world. But I learned a lot from these two things:

Result of day 1.5: Everything is almost finished (main-menu, story, weapon animation, level, sound) except the sprite-rendering

1. Having to tackle a “hard” problem (it was hard for me at that point) actually made me get frustrated and push the problem aside a lot of times. I did not get the sprite rendering done before 4-5 hours in to the end of the compo. This lead to the situation that I was doing everything game-related that I usually have the least fun with: doing menus, sound, story, optimizing the mechanics, nice graphical gimmicks. In the end: improving the overall atmosphere of the game. I did all of this in quiet fast succession. In between I always tried to tackle the hard problem but failed or was not motivated to do it. So, 4 hours to the deadline I have a “polished” game that was only missing one core element: the enemies; because I had trouble getting the sprite rendering right. Then I got back to the problem and was so motivated to get this finally done because it was the only thing left for me to release an actually pleasant game for a 48h compo. And I finally cracked it.
2. I realized that you sometimes get blinded by problems that are no actual problems you need to care about. As said, the rendering went haywire once I exited the bounds of the game world. Some trigonometry where I though there is a symmetry or math itself takes care of it but actually wasn’t. After struggling with it for an hour I came to the realization that the player will never be exiting the game world. Why would he? Per definition he keeps in the game world. So, I just implemented the checking that the player cannot run past the bounds of the world and everything was fine. This is not the solution that makes the math-addict in me happy because I know there is some wrong thinking in my calculations but for all practical purposes it does not matter.

Game development is almost over; the sprites animations of the blobs are finally rendered correctly.

So, actually everything went good in the end. Also the story was ok and somewhat in line with the theme. I guess you can always push a shooter in  the direction of a theme if you want but I was not happy at first with going this easy road. But as I did not have any good gameplay ideas, I got pragmatic and am quiet happy now that I did. Otherwise, it would have been another failed LD with the excuse of having no good ideas.

Once the sprite-rendering was working, the low-resolution art style again came to my rescue: the blob with it’s two animation frames was done in zero time and I could focus on improving the feel of the gameplay. What sounds are played when the blob get’s hit? How many times do I have to hit the blob? When is it getting to hard/easy? How many blobs and where are they located in the level?

I actually did not spend too much time on this questions because there was still one final thing that I never did before (due to always dropping out)  but actually turned out easy: Actually releasing the game. A quick question in the IRC revealed that most people use dropbox to host the download, so I went with that too. Especially because you can also host a static website (which I did not know). So, packaging the game as a Java applet to run in the browser should be an easy task in theory… Also in practice: I never before developed a Java Applet (maybe once in a Java course at university) but was hoping that it would be easy as my game was based on AWT as the window system.  And I was not going to be disappointed: Embedding the game-frame within a JApplet and done. It was so easy, I was impressed. While doing this I actually lost track of time and noticed while writing my final progress post that I was minutes away from the deadline. I guess it was because I really wanted to package the game as a web-version to make it as easy as possible for everyone to try it. No download and bad feeling to start some random executable on your local system. (Side note: I still don’t understand why not more people make this a higher priority in the choice of their dev tools/language. The exposure of the game gets so much better.)

Looking back, I am happy to have finished the compo with a game I feel is not too bad for 48 hours and me knowing that I can do this; there is no excuse anymore to drop out of future LDs.

If you are interested, I also made a timelapse:

I am feeling exhausted and happy all at once. My first successfull LD entry. I finally managed to solve my sprite bug and was able to submit a small game that is using the raycasting-based software renderer that I have been spending most of the time on. I am not happy with the gameplay of the game; it is just a small and shooter without any special mechanics. What I am very happy with, is the art still. I really like low-res games.

That’s it for me and good luck to anybody still spending the last minutes to polish the game. Post Mortem and timelapse will come somewhere next week I guess once I had some time to reflect.

Progress has not been like expected. I guess I did not have enough sleep; because I always have to push the sprite-rendering; just can’t focus. At least I have some artwork, sounds, the menu and even some minimal dynamic lighting for the the weapon-fire ready. Only the enemies are still missing…

I’m at the brink of dropping out. Let’s see what a break will do for me…

Oh; please note the moon: After hearing the sad news of Neil Armstrong’s passing, there was no other option then paying proper respects.

Day 1 with 19 hours of coding (including some breaks in between) is coming to an end. As usual, I did not progress as far as I would have liked, but it is definitely better than in previous LDs; at least technology-wise. Even though I did not prepare anything, I was able to build a full raycasting-based software renderer on this day. I wanted to replicated the feel and art-style of a Wolfenstein 3D-like game. The idea was/is that this will allow even fairly limited pixel-art to look nice and retro. So, more time coding, less time spent in Paint.NET. And I like the idea of pushing each pixel on the screen myself and having full control. I have already discovered some nice visual effects by accident.

The software renderer was actually the main thing I was working on today and I had some occasion of thinking to drop out. The simple case of rendering one quadrant of the the map correctly was done after a few hours. The funny part started with the edge cases and making the code work for all four quadrants of the players facing direction.
I actually had looked up a tutorial about raycasting before the LD, but did not use it extensively. I wanted to judge my understanding of the problem and I am quiet happy with how it turned out. Especially, I am surprise how fast the implementation is running (>1200 frames per seconds) considering that I did not do any optimization and bit-shifting tricks. It is all floating-point operations which is slower in general, but helps the understanding of the code.

Even though the attached screenshot looks fine, I still have some glitch in the texture-mapping for the walls. This will be the first thing to get fixed tomorrow morning. As it is quiet late already I rather spent the time on some art and the bitmap font. I noticed hours ago that bug-free coding is not happening anymore today…

What else? I did not spent much time to think about the actual game mechanics and story, yet. I hope something will pop up over night; if not, it will become a standard shoot-em up.

What’s on the agenda for tomorrow? A lot:
- Soundtrack and game sounds
- Artwork: textures, sprites
- Speaking about sprites: The renderer still needs support for the character sprites. But it should be “easily” possible to reuse the wall-code for that purpose.
- Enemies and Game mechanics: Still not sure about the actual goal of the game, so not sure what the enemies/characters will do. A theme like “Evolution” actually dictates to build something heavily AI-focus. But, I haven’t been doing AI since university and I don’t want to open up another can of worms in the last hours I have left.
- Menu system and Highscore board; I like Highscore boards
- If i have lots and lots of time, I would like to extend the renderer to also support textured floors. Up to now, it just a color-filled rectangle at the bottom half of the screen, simulating the floor.

Oh yeah: As I was spending the last hours on art-work, the logo for the game is done. You see it on the screenshot. I don’t have time to waste on redoing the logo, so
“Shit! It’s Evolving” it is. No idea yet “what” is evolving, though…

Good night!

Some random walls and a textured block. Doesn’t look that fancy for 19 hours of work…

Main tools will be Java, Eclipse, Paint.NET and Bfxr.
Have fun everybody.