Hello! I am static_boy123 and I just wanted to share my experience in my first LD, and first game, with others:

I found out about this competition last year when Notch(The maker of Minecraft) entered Prelude of the Chambered, I immediately said to myself,  ”I will do this next year.” So now I did it, I entered in my first, but not last, Ludum Dare.

I was watching tv one night when something popped into my mind, the Ludum Dare. I checked the website to see when it was, two hours. I ran to my computer and started memorizing my basic -5 file- library inside and out, after an hour I was able to repeat most of it from memory and the rest, thankfully, wasn’t needed. So I waited the longest hour of my life hoping the theme would be kittens.

Once the competition finally started I cursed everyone who voted anti-kitten, opened up handy dandy Visual Studio, and got to work. I typed out what I remembered of my library only two classes, but I was able to make a bunch of edits to one to make a new class. I had lots of trouble starting and coming up with ideas for what to do, but I did the basic things, like changing the screen size and creating the controls for moving.

After an hour of sitting and thinking I had an idea, a game that is more based on story than game play, but still has game play. I sat down and started, I added in textures, added a way to shoot, and realized just how inexperienced I am when it comes to game making.

Coding was crazy, I had tons of road blocks; bugs, bugs, and more bugs. I had to go into untraveled land to create the game, and I also spent plenty of time in well worn territory. Overall my game was very fun and frustrating to make, but it was well worth it.

Now a list of what was good and what wasn’t:

Good Things:

• It was fun
• I learned a lot
• I coded in XNA which I am very comfortable in
• Everybody was very supportive of my first game
• I am happy with my work
• My coding works
• Others enjoyed my game
• The ultra great graphics game “Real Life” didn’t distract me that much

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…

Play It | Rate It

Origin

When I heard Alone was chosen as the theme, a set of bizarre ideas immediately appeared in my mind. I really wanted to explore about the feeling of being alone, about the psychological effect of it. Also, I had read The Knock recently so I wanted to explore more about that subject.

Development

The tools I used included:

• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Lightroom
• Adobe Flash
• Flashdevelop / ActionScript 3
• as3sfxr »
• Aviary »
• A standard Digital Camera
• Some burned papers
• A friend (lol)

The art is rather simple, I took some photos of my house and I asked a friend to model for me. We did some shots of him walking, but because I lack equipment (tripod, marks, etc) the result looks a little bad. I did my best to correct the photos in Photoshop. The room is a part of my house, that isn’t even a room, but I couldn’t take a picture of a real room because the camera angle was too short. I applied Exposure and Posterize to all the images.

The programming was done entirely in ActionScript 3, using some features of my own library, but the vast majority was to be made from scratch. I used Flashdevelop because I’m really fast with it… Just press Ctrl+Shift+1 and it’s like magic!

What now?

I think I’ll work more time on this game. I’ll add more puzzles, make an easy mode, add language support, and maybe more rooms to explore, or explore more about the story. For example, what happened upstairs?

This was my second time on Ludum Dare, and I think it was a really good experience. I don’t think there’s something that went wrong, maybe next time I’ll add more features to my framework, like effects, sound support and embedding support; but at the end I managed to do what I intended to do.

What went right.

• I finished. That simply made all the effort worth it.
• I’m happy enough with the graphics overall.
• I had fun making and playing it.
• I had healthy food, that made me have good mood.

What went wrong.

• I allocated too little time for level design, and it shows.
• I had to cut some features planed.
• I overslept.
• I procrastinated to much.

Conclusions.

The experience has been great and I’m somewhat proud of the result.

Timelapse

Ok so I crashed for some sleep after submitting my compo entry and I figure now is the best time to do  a postmortem.

In traditional game projects people usually go off on vacation or put off post mortems long enough to forget about the details

The ‘Game’

Forever Alone Kitten

Play / Rate it here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=3624

 Made with: Unity3d / Photoshop / BFXR / Maya

Points of frustration

1. Indecision about Dialogue/Story, after the theme was announced I was at a loss for what to do. So I went through the motions of creating the game engine shell while being nagged by this. I originally wanted to make a shmup, but tried to do something moody to fit with the ‘Alone’ theme and sort of flailed around for several hours trying to define it.
2. I’m still new at learning unity and wanted my entry to be made with it, so consulting the documentation repeatedly or trying to figure out proper script code to control material properties or other things slowed me down bit.
3. No time for visual polish/build a proper environment. At the end I lied to myself and said its supposed to look bleak and empty anyways.
4. No game restart. I realized early that worrying about adding/testing restart functionality would have slowed me down considerably, so I abandoned it even though there is some fragments of it in the game.
5. Based on the player input, its possible to not see all the game narration paths, so if someone plays it only once, there is stuff I put time into that they may not see and the length or mood impact can vary. The lack of #4 (restart), or communicating that there is ‘another path’ in the game content is also problematic. This is why I don’t like permanent branching games as a game player, and prefer ‘networked world’/sandbox games because all content is explorable at anytime or multiple times. I’m not convinced story heavy games really hold up to replayability since they all seem to suck at this issue (you played this before, but this menu option here will show you something different, a hint like that would be kind of spoilerish or break immersion).

Things I was happy with

1. I learned a lot. I’m a ‘learn by doing’ type of person, so forcing myself to deliver something in 48hrs made from scratch in the time limit = learn + do fast. I used version control even for this short-term project so i could document its construction in the commit messages and  would stop worrying about ‘accidents’ where i would lose work or mangle things so badly and could rollback.
2. Some people commented on liking the mood in the game, which is what I decided to focus most on. Someone despaired that when they played there seemed to be no “happy ending”. My goal of toying with the player’s emotion = ‘mission accomplished!’
3. I came up with a neat little forcefield behavior around character that affects the things that swarm and come for you, the enemies still face+approach you, but when the shield is up it holds them back and they get pushed around fairly smoothly when you forcibly move into them. I’ll have to re-use that for another project….
4. Although the code is absolute spaghetti, there is alot of it with some lengthy comments sprinkled in it so I could remember what I was doing along the way, so its not a complete throw-away game shell for something in the future. For the curious: Link to source/assets/unity project are here:  http://db.tt/eJOJT6Dx

In reference to point #4 above, I call my rapid code prototyping style ‘Freestyle Spaghetti / Chaos Coding’. People that care about ‘coding style’ or ‘designing clean systems’ will be outright offended by what they see here haha

The basic rules of ‘Freestyle Spaghetti / Chaos Coding for rapid prototypes+game jams:

1. Extra Comments, you need them. You need more comments than you think you do. I write comments as a way of ‘talking out loud’ about what i’m doing. It makes things more clear, and when I come back to the code later, I can more easily remember where I left off.
2. Extra Verbose variable/object names. you want every variable name to make it painly obvious as to what its scope and contents are. Between #1 + # 2, I rarely ever need to step through code using a debugger because I can work out what is going on following these 2  rules.
3. New ideas may often come to you while writing code for other things, jumping to act on that new idea is okay, as long as everything still runs you’re cool. Unfinished things = comment verbosely what is going on. Before you jump to the new thing, always write a note in code about what you were just doing+need to do next there, then jump to the new thing while the idea is fresh to you.
4. Everything can look to a base (GameBase.cs) to figure out what is going on (access a global value state) to gate/ungate a script that doesnt work or isnt complete.
5. Take the path of least resistance in implementation. Data driven? Code Driven? Do I need a tool? Do I need a file format? Could you just hack it in code and be done with it?
6. The person playing your game doesn’t see your code when they play it. Stop worrying about what your code looks like and focus on the results that people will play. You can pretty up your code and ‘refactor it’ later if you need to build on it.

Things that took more time than I expected:

1. Audio – I spent a lot of time with bfxr trying to get sounds out of it that matched the mood I wanted (trying to get a sad kitten+spooky type sounds out of a synth). There’s a lot of extra sounds in the source that I didnt use which fit the mood target but i didn’t get to implement due to the time limit+needing more supporting graphics+code to go with them.
2. Art/Tweaks – I went crazy with the particles. I liked the square/fine grain look of the particles so i kept the particles untextured to save time. I fussed with the colors of everything several times to keep it the right ‘mood’ as well as all the other particle effect sliders. I lost time modeling a few other things that didnt make it into the game and realized that there wasn’t going to be enough time to texture+rig+animate them so I trashed that given the time pressure.
3. Dialogue/Narration – changed multiple times after playtesting through it over and over and over…. Having a premade system to handle complex dialogue/interaction would have been much better. hacking something from scratch+testing it with time pressure was painful.
4. Setting up+modifying my game in unity. To save time I did some things in the unity editor instead of explicit code, which i’m still getting the hang of. The editor workflow method has little quirks like nuking connections or values on scripts if you change the variable name in the class to something new ended up biting me several times, breaking the game. Trying to find a balance of initializing/setting script values hardcoded or in the editor view on an instance of something with a given script slowed me down and I should have more clearly defined this.

Things to do next time:

1. Setup and do a timelapse next time. In retrospect i’m even more sad I didnt do this. Ideally I would do record this for 3 screens since I work across 2 screens on my mac (playtest+code+ photoshop on cintiq), + geo modeling pc.
2. Do something that doesn’t waste so much time with unique dialogue flow with one-off internal triggers/unlocks that the player might not ever trigger.
3. Continue to write code fast+freely for the sake of progress, and don’t be so worried about what people think of your code that you hacked together over the weekend. (I write much better code for normal games I swear! )
4. Build out a more of traditional game to play?
5. Worry less about story/playtesting dialogue flow. Focusing the first half of the compo time on this was good/bad since it ate up a ton of time – it was uncharted territory for me in terms of content+code implementation.
6. Better schedule my time and set time limits on doing a feature/asset.
7. Start visual polish phase and test deployment earlier so there is less of a frantic rush at the end.

I have successfully finished my very first LD game, The Last Man on Earth.

You play as the last survivor of an alien invasion, your goal is to avenge your species by clearing out an alien spaceship.
It is a pretty hard game, but please don’t get mad at me – I had no time to balance the gameplay.
The game has two endings… and a kitten.

It has been great fun, I would love to participate in the future, too.

Screenshots:

Tools:

• Visual Studio 2010
• XNA Game Studio 4.0
• Paint.NET
• Inkscape
• Bfxr

Download: http://attilahorvath.me/TheLastManOnEarth.zip
Source: http://attilahorvath.me/TheLastManOnEarth-source.zip
Game Page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8403

I have finished it ON TIME!

WOW! I did it!

Here is my entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=7418

These are the changes since the last report:

• Player graphics and sounds
• Fix Floor borders.
• Arrow graphics and sounds.
• Arrow shooter graphics and sounds.
• Barrel sounds.
• Save point sounds and graphics.
• Exit point sounds and graphics.
• Burning Effect.
• Title screen.
• Ending screen.

Pasta today, the cupboards are empty, all that I could find was milk, spaghetti, flour and cheese, oh well.

I also have a lack of ideas, that sucks too. I’ve finished all the mechanics and music scares me.

I think i have finished with almost all the gameplay elements. Now I’m planning the rest of the graphics and starting with the sounds.  So now the status is:

• Player –  Gameplay done – Graphics pending - Sounds pending.
• Columns - done!
• Floor - pending. (fix border tiles)
• Barrel – done! - Sounds pending.
• Spikes Hole – done!
• Spikes Hole filling with Barrels – done! – Effect pending. 
• Lava Hole – done!
• Arrow Shooters – Gameplay done! - Graphics pending. Sounds pending.
• Arrows – Gameplay done! - Graphics pending. 
• Boulder Dropper – Canceled.
• Boulder – Canceled.
• Save Points – done! - Graphics pending. Sounds pending.
• Exit Point – done! – Graphics pending. Sounds pending.
• Menu - pending.
• Intro screen – pending.
• Game Over screen – pending.
• Ending Screen – pending.

I have put the Alpha1 for testing purposes here:

Timelapse for day 1. Time for sleep now. A day of music and polish tomorrow. It’s nearly done!

I guess the first bad impresion about the theme was unfounded. After some thinking I found a feasible idea. I think the coding is going smoothly, even after some struggles with the typical problems of coding in C. The art is coming in nicely as well. Here is the first screenshot.

My first LD is LD #22

Just to really get started on how confusing this is to begin even before a competition I’d have to say geesh. Now that that is out of the way there are about 5 hours left before the theme is announced. I’m really hoping for “dreams”, but can deal with quite a few of the themes especially “falling”, “random generation”, “underground”, “teleport”. The one that I think is just plain no fun is kittens. Sorry just hate that as a theme. Looking forward to making one an easter egg. I am also hoping to keep the style very rougelike sans ASCII +1 graphical. We’ll see.

So I am thinking flash AS3 as the development platform and black and white silhouette as the atmosphere.

5 hours till theme announcement and beginning of code writting

Hey!

I submitted my warm-up game “Bouncy Bouncy“. And it looks like I’m ready to go.

Also mi updated setup is that:

Compiler: GCC and mingw (for cross-compiling)

Library: SDL and my framework (GameLib)

Graphics: GIMP

Sound: Audacity and Sfxr/Bfxr

Timelapse: Glapse

Hardware: Gigabyte M912

And well; the required ”desk” shot:

I supose that makes me a couch-gamedev

This is my first participation in LD

looking forward to this!

Target platform: Unity 3D Webplayer

Code: C#

Art:

• Photoshop/ProMotion/Maya

Sound:

• BFXR / CFXR
  

Hoping for a Kitten theme, but i’ll roll with whatever it is :3

I’m in, checklist:

Take saturday off work: [ CHECK ]
Warmup with theme SURGURY: [ MOVED ] //have planned for this week
Foods & drinks: [ CHECK ]
Motivation: [ CHECK ]
Health status: current: [ OK ] | predicted: [ UNCLEAR ]

Weapons:
Java, Gimp, Audacity & Microphone

This is my second LD, but I hope to finish it this time (last time I failed because of bad planning and code breaking )

Hi!
This is my first LD48, I will try to have fun. This is my setup:

Programing: GCC + SciTE
Graphics: GIMP
Sound: Audacity + sfxr

So, Cosmic Heist was my entry for the recent Ludum Dare compo. It was a major success by my reckoning, as it was completed in time. That aside, however, I would like to write a little about how things went.

What went right

I spent some time coming up with a couple of interesting(ish) ideas, but ended up throwing them out before settling on what became Cosmic Heist. When I designed the game that actually ended up being made, I actually cut out tons of things, and cut even more as I developed it. This is one area that I really want to improve (I, like many others, am horrible at the “cutting things until it’s right” part), and I feel I made some good progress during this compo. I was able to reject tons of ideas, some good, some bad, but all non-essential.

I had a decent personal code base to start from, and already knew all about the language, libraries, and tools I used beforehand, so I was able to jump right in.

I left some time for play-testing and bug fixing/tweaking near the end, but ended up not needing very much of it. The game was small and simple enough that it wasn’t too buggy by the end, and my wife and I tested it some as I worked on it anyway. However, I would definitely leave this buffer time again anyway, because it really kept things stress-free.

The menus ended up looking/working/sounding great, and I added a cool animated menu background near the end that I really liked. I’ll probably use some of the work that went into that stuff off into the future in other projects.

The music turned out to not suck as much as I thought it would. That was actually my highest-scoring area in the competition, and I am still somewhat unsure what to make of that. This was my first time really making any music, and I don’t really have experience playing/reading/etc. music either. But it doesn’t sound too bad, so I am counting that as a nice success.

The controls are really fluid, and are my favorite part of the whole thing by far. The way you control the ship is great, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. I actually didn’t spend much time tweaking that, and by implementing everything I needed for it, I had a whole system for various enemy ship movements, too.

What went wrong

The player’s ship is a bit oddly shaped. This makes it hard to see where you are going. I didn’t realize this at all (duh! isn’t it obvious! the ship points in the direction I drew it to point!) until people began commenting on it. Certainly something that would need to be fixed.

Some people kept looking for the shoot button. I didn’t make it very obvious (at all) that there is no shooting in the game. You just pilot your ship, and enemy ships try to plow into you.

There were a couple of features I wanted to get in, but had to cut due to time constraints. I wanted enemy ships to shoot at you, and every level was supposed to start at a shipyard, from which you had just stolen a ship.

There might be a problem with the Linux build of the game, as one person mentioned they couldn’t get it to run. Unfortunately, it runs fine for me, but I only have two machines to test it on, and they are both almost identical in both hardware and software. If anyone has or can test the game on Linux and tell me if it a) explodes, b)doesn’t run at all, or c) runs fine, I would greatly appreciate it.

Conclusion

All in all, as I said, I was very pleased with the outcome, and I even got some people to play my game, so that was really exciting. I hadn’t ever participated or followed LD until now, so I didn’t have any idea what to expect. I honestly didn’t think anyone would even see my game! Thanks to everyone who rated mine. One thing that I regret is that I didn’t have time to rate any games myself. I did play a few, and they were all great. Next time, I want to set aside some time to rate a good number of games.

Links

Ludum Dare entry

Cosmic Heist on Cheese and Bacon (my website)

Cosmic Heist on Google Project Hosting (MIT License)

Seeing as this is my first blog post I’ll include a preface about my first LD48 experience!:

I’ve been waiting to do a Ludum Dare event until I had 1) Spare time, and 2) Recent experience with a game programming language/library. The second point is important because I do programming entirely as a side hobby. I haven’t had much experience with the art in the past 4 years. I’ve taken swings at SDL, LWJGL, and Allegro before… but this time I had been learning to use Flixel.

Cut to the night of the competition–I was checking my email in bed on my netbook and decided to check on the LD website and HOLY LUDUM they’re having a competition right now! Man, this is cool stuff… what would I do for the “escape” theme if I were participating? Actually, what can I do? Well basing it on Flixel what if I made the main character an extension of the FlxTileMap class instead of the FlxSprite class? Hey this is an exciting idea… let’s actually do it! So I opened up FlashDevelop and started typing away in bed. I ended up coding the whole thing on a netbook. The graphics I did on my old old desktop simply because I wanted higher resolution and I already had Paint.net installed on it. It was crashing on me but… I frantically got my desktop stable again and pressed on. In the end I learned a lot more about Flixel and even came up with something good enough to submit! My only regret was not having enough time to squash bugs.

My game Globular Prisonbreak

So on with the blog entry thing. Results!

Here we go in reverse order:

Humor: No ratings at all? I must be super un-funny. I wasn’t really going for funny but the game itself is a bit corny. I expected a low rating for humor but got none at all. *shrug*

Community: I could probably benefit from posting once in awhile. I didn’t post before the competition because I didn’t register until a few hours into it. Plus there was no planning whatsoever. I didn’t make a post during the competition because I couldn’t figure out how to even navigate the LD website (and it was down mostly). I’d like to put a lot more effort into community stuff next time…

Fun: Well this was sort of expected. But I am surprised it got this low relative to my other scores. I knew it would be low because my game is confusing and buggy, and those make games very un-fun. On the other hand it’s fun in a innovative/schmup/puzzler sort of way. I guess my gameplay is also quite nitch and suffers from being something I want to make and not what others want to play. But I don’t think that’s not a bad thing.

Overall: Okay. Not much to say. Overall is sort of each individual’s weighted average. johnfn pointed out that Overall is closely linked to fun, so this score makes sense.

Audio: It’s nice to get a score in audio since the last time I touched game audio at all was with Modplug back around 2001. I only included a Level Complete Jingle for my game. I tried to have various pitch sound effects for when blobs hit you but my attempts didn’t sound right and I was wasting time. I’ll take a swing at sfxr now that I know it exists (thanks community!). I’d like to try including music when I’m comfortable believing that I can make something that actually sounds like music.

Theme: I was hoping to do a liiitle better here. Simply because my game was about escaping a prison, and each level involved you escaping off the top of the screen. I even included the line “Escaped!” as a possible level-win message. Plus I used the word “Prisonbreak” (not a “real word”, this is intentional) in the title, which I thought was a little more creative than games that simply used “Escape” in their titles. But I’m not complaining here so much as nit picking.

Graphics: A pleasant surprise to score this high on graphics. I did throw out my first colorful floor tiles in preference of a simple brick pattern after my roommate complained that they looked like shit. I guess it paid off.

Coolness: Ah yeah! My game is so cool! Oh right, this is about how many games I played. I made a point to avoid the overly-popular games during the voting. I played a mix of what looked interesting and those straight from the rate games page. My favorites were:

Dystopian Future Underground City – j_peeba
Bunnies, Back Into Your Cage! – ratking
Planetary Mission – NMcCoy
Towering Inferno – tenpn
Snake Plissken: Surfin’ U.S.A. – vandriver

I pity the fool who can’t beat Dystopian Future Underground City and Snake Plissken: Surfin’ U.S.A.

Innovation: I’ve been disappointed at myself that I couldn’t polish my game more or weed out bugs before submitting it. I was thinking, “well, at least I might score okay in ‘innovation’”. Turns out I did pretty darn well, and I’m really happy about it! I think most of us wouldn’t work on a game at all if we didn’t think it was innovative in some way. Why make something if it already exists? This i’s especially important to me because I spend a lot more time thinking about game ideas than actually making them (I don’t program for a living). Plus this is the first time I’ve made something public. So I couldn’t be happier with this result. I even made the Top 25 Categories page!

Future Plans

While I think my game does have potential, I don’t have plans to develop it much further. I think it would have to be reworked from the ground up. I would up the tile size to 16×16 and try to make gameplay smoother. My original plan didn’t have movement locked into a grid, and I’d still like to try it without the grid (which would need other changes for balance). Balancing could already use some work to improve the strategy aspect… things like reducing the color count to 4 in the earlier levels or changing the floor tile algorithm for better color clumping. (Without clumping there is no point to the bullet-adopts-the-color-of-the-floor-tile mechanic.) Ultimately I think my time is better spent on a randomly-generated platformer I’ve been tinkering with for some time already. I might start another separate short-term project or just wait until the next LD48. But until my “fun” rating becomes decent, I think I have to focus my time on real life concerns.

Just a little postmortem on my LD #21 entry, Anthony’s Psyche: Escape.  (This is mostly a cross-post from my blog.)

This was my third Ludum Dare.  In each one, I’ve challenged myself to come up with a different interpretation of the theme than I thought would be typically done.  For the Escape theme, I decided to go with the idea of psychological escape mechanisms, or avoiding painful thoughts and memories.  This turned out to be a rather artsy, narrative-driven playable story of sorts.  This is very different than anything I’ve developed before.

I spent about 27 hours on this entry.  Friday night when the theme was announced, I spent three hours in the typical initial panic of trying to come up with an original interpretation of the theme.  I settled on the psychological escape mechanisms concept, and that it would have something to do with words on the screen representing thought fragments.  I was still unclear about the specifics beyond that.

On Saturday, I spent a couple more hours playing with ideas in my head, and settled on a design.  I then spent about ten hours writing code and debugging.  It took me much longer than I anticipated to get text with variable alpha per character working in Flashpunk. Probably five hours on that alone.  I also spent a few minutes making the “art” for the game (the one stick figure) for a total of 12 hours on Saturday.  By this point I had most of the basic functionality of the game working (moving a box of text around the screen and having the words fill in when over the character).

On Sunday, I spent about an hour getting Reason and my keyboard set up, and coming up with the short music loop and “thought complete” riff.  I then spent several hours trying to come up with a decent story.  I discovered that telling a story through first-person thought fragments is very difficult.  When I started entering the text for the thoughts, it just wasn’t coming together.  I also discovered some bugs in the way Flash renders text, so I spent a couple hours debugging and working around that.  I finally gave up on the story I’d come up with, and about two hours before the deadline, I came up with a very different story that came together pretty quickly.  I also wrote some more code for the title screens, ending screen, etc.  That made a total of about 12 hours for Sunday.

The end result isn’t exactly a “game”, but I’m satisfied with what I came up with because it’s very different for me, and pushed me in a different direction.  I like the overall feeling of the play.  I’m thinking of developing something like this a little further.

Like my previous two LD entries, I created things as stand-in content (the stick figure guy, and especially the very short, repetitive music loop) so I had things to write the code around, but they ended up being the final content because I didn’t have time to do “real” art or music.  The difference this time was that by now I’ve learned that when I create them, that’ll probably be the case.  Ludum Dare is always a great exercise in game development (and a lot of fun) because it forces you to be ruthless in cutting features and calling things “good enough”.

A door as envisioned by a post-modern programmer/artist

Ok, here is what happened since my last post.

[OPTIONAL SAD STORY]

I was supposed to start working on the project yesterday after lunch but didn’t find the inspiration and was tired as hell so before writing a single line of code I took a short nap that somehow became a ~3hrs long sleep. I woke up around 6 PM and after coming back to my senses (around 6:30PM) I sat in front of the computer so I could start working on the game. I settled with Monkey as the programming language and made some progress with the code… but as the night fell I started running into some problems. I was not satisfied with the overall implementation of a few things and although I tried a few alternative ways I was not getting the results I wanted. My goal was to finish the game that night so I could spend the few hours I would have available on Sunday to make music/sound and better graphics.  Around 3 AM I discovered (by checking facebook) that DST  was to be resumed that night… so it was 1 hour later than what my clock was telling me. Having my time cut by my “little” nap and the damn DST, and frustrated because I was unable to achieve the results I wanted for the game, I decided to give up on the project.

I woke up this Sunday a bit before lunch, a bit depressed for having abandoned the project.

My sister entered my room and asked me about the competition and I told her I gave up on it last night. I remained on bed a few more minutes and then started thinking on my plans for the day.

I discovered I had nothing better to do, so after a few minutes, I decided to give it another shot at the project. I rescued the files from the recycle bin and started working on it again. Don’t ask me why I did that… I didn’t have a single reason to resume the project… in fact, it was quite unrealistic to even think it was possible to finish the game in the remaining time having already lost like 50% of the estimated time I had. But I was not in a hurry for finishing now… I was .. just curious to see how far I could go with it…

[/OPTIONAL SAD STORY]

I actually got trolled by the clock. I checked the LD page and made my schedule according the remaining time it displayed. I should have grown suspicious that it was still telling me that the compo would end around 10:00 PM despite the DST, but I wasn’t thinking on the DST in that moment.

I managed to finish the game code around 8 PM, so I had like 2 hours to make some music. After trying a few programs from the LD tools page and realizing I didn’t have time to learn any of those I settled with composing the music with my DS (and the DS-10 Synthesizer) and record it on the PC with a stereo cable. It worked fine. I made the special FX with SFXR on my computer.

I wrote the sound manager module and then rebuilt the project. It worked fine except for one thing… background music was not looping. I tried a few things but given the time constraint I ended up giving up on it, leaving only the special fxs.

With like 40 minutes remaining until the end of the submission deadline I uploaded everything to my website and tried it on the browser.  It worked fine except for a minor thing… I was loading resources in the moment you need them, so the first time you face an open door, or any of the game screens, the game freezes for a second or so in order to load the image/sound. BAD.

I coded a quick and dirty image manager class that I could use to keep a cache of previously loaded images. Then replaced all loading calls for cache calls and added a few calls at the beginning of the code to cache the most heavy images (so they were already loaded from the start) and then uploaded the game again. Now it was working fine. As I didn’t write a cache for sounds you may miss a few sounds if they are too slow to load, but that shouldn’t affect the experience.

With only 18 minutes remaining until the end of the competition I finished uploading the game and submitting it into the compo. I was done.

I felt so relaxed that I kicked back and checked the IRC…. only to find that it was still 1 hour and 18 minutes until the end. Damn YOU DST!! LOL.

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TL;DR? Managed to make the game. Don’t ask for the graphics as I had like half the time I was supposed to have (which was already around 1 day total). Had some problems but fixed them (although some compromises were done). Total time was around 8 hours including “art”, “sound”, and “music” (which was not included for technical reasons). Also, I’m bipolar.

HERE IS THE GAME!

P.S: You need to correctly avoid/enter 50 doors to win the game. Good luck with THAT!