So this was my first Ludum Dare. I did the Global Game Jam back in February, so I had some idea of what to expect, although the GGJ was teams rather than solo. One thing I do regret is not interacting more with the community–IRC, Twitter, etc. I could have used more feedback than I got, instead of relying almost entirely on my husband’s comments.

Friday night I spent brainstorming ideas and thinking over mechanics. Saturday morning I started coding. By late afternoon / early evening, I had the major mechanics implemented, but it wasn’t fun. At that point the turrets were just yellow diamonds (and they were warp portals which your cyan circle teleported between), and the hint circle always disappeared before you could fire again.

Screenshot of older version of SEEK*TOR

The best thing that happened for the game occurred when I sent my Saturday prototype to a friend for feedback. He told me two very important things:

1. He had the most fun figuring out where the hint circles intersected
2. He wanted to know why you had to aim and fire to reveal the map instead of just placing light bulbs around the “platforms” (yellow diamonds)

So I made the hints persist but fade over time. That means you can see the hint circle intersections, but the screen doesn’t become overly-cluttered with old hint circles. It also means the aiming mechanic is important, since if you take too long, the previous hint will have faded away. I also changed the theming of the game so that the portals became turrets and you selected a turret to fire from, rather than teleporting between them.

Sunday was mostly a day of polish. The big feature changes were implementing multiple levels, scoring, and flare limits. I also added the start, game over, and between-level screens, made the graphics, (such as they are–hooray for GlowFilter!) composed a background track, and created the sound effects.

In the end, I was successful in terms of having a pretty-much finished game at the end. On the other hand, seeing some of the other entries, I kind of wish I’d done something a little more ambitious…

Things that worked out:

1. Using abstract glow-y vector graphics instead of trying to draw. (I spent about 20 minutes attempting to draw a single turret before deciding my time was better spent elsewhere.)
2. The game selects from 4 (hand-crafted) turret layouts and randomizes the enemy and player locations. That turned out to be enough randomization that I didn’t need to make a turret layout generator. In fact, I only just realized that I left the game in debug mode where it always chooses the same turret layout.

Things that didn’t work out:

1. When I started, I implemented everything in one file just to see if the core mechanic would work. I made such a mess of my code that I spent hours late Saturday night moving code around so I could add levels. Spending hours working on code without actually adding new functionality–even regressing at times–was very hard on my morale.
2. I spent too long trying to make my git history tidy. I’d keep forgetting to add a file to the commit or not commit for a while and wind up with a gigantic commit that involved 3 features and all the source files. Then I’d try to figure out how to break up or revise the commits. (And how to use vim, since that’s the default git editor…) Given that I never had to revert to a previous version, it was kind of silly of me.

Tools and Libraries Used:

1. FlashDevelop
2. TweenLite
3. git
4. ACID Music Studio
5. Free VSTi soft synths: Crystal, LazySnake, and ErsDrums
6. Audacity
7. sfxr

Sweet, I managed to complete my first Ludum Dare! I was thinking of learning Push Button Engine for it, but after going through a couple of tutorials I decided I’d go for straight-up Actionscript instead. PBE has some neat features, but I need more time to get my head around its component-based programming model.

Anyway, SEEK*TOR is a game where you’re trying to locate the enemy by firing search flares from turrets. You have limited flares, and turrets have a limited range, so you need to carefully choose where you aim. It’s in Flash.

SEEK*TOR Voting page

Incidentally, I’m annoyed with Audacity because it added an initial silence to all the mp3 files I encoded with it. So all the sounds come in late. Also, I just realized that I forgot to have the background music loop…

I uploaded my entry, even though it isn’t near complete.  I figured it’s worth getting feedback on what I have for future reference.

I’ll probably write a post-mortem in a day or so, but I know the number one thing that I did wrong was that I didn’t organize properly at the beginning.  I didn’t know where I was going to end up, exactly, so I didn’t know how to get there.

Here’s the screenshot.

The compass isn’t linked to anything in this version, since navigation wasn’t completely implemented. The arrow keys aren’t supposed to move the ship.  The plan was to let the user select a direction, and then sail that way for a few spaces.  How far they traveled would depend on which direction the wind was blowing, and whether or not any events happened, like finding land, meeting pirates or running into hazards. Unfortunately, I never got the planned movement implemented and so the compass sit

Head on over to the entry page to check it out.

Well I remembered that JayIsGames is running another casual game desing competition with theme Explore. It is only for browser-based platforms so it may not be of interest to everyone but to some it will.
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