Moving Day is finished! Play it!

Features include:

• infinite running… to the LEFT!
• pixel-perfect footsteps! (such a waste of time ^-^)
• gliding physics
• a token kitten
• You can win! (temporary ‘feature’)

This was my first Ludum Dare and I will probably be back for more! I really appreciate the motivation provided by the community and time limit.  I did record a timelapse, but I’m undecided if I will post it. I’m not sure if there would be much interest in watching a noob such as I.

Things I learned in the last 48hrs:

• How to animate a run sequence
• Flash + FlashDevelop + Flixel is a very pleasant and forgiving coding environment.
• premature gameplay tweaking is about as evil as premature optimization.

Hopefully someone will enjoy Moving Day, now I’m off to play some of the other entries!

Thus ends the first 22 hours of Ludum Dare 22 for me. It’s almost like I timed this! (no I didn’t)

Unfortunately, lacking any of the graphics, sounds, or narrative kind of reveals my game to have precious little game in it. Here’s hoping the rest adds something it’s missing right now, or I can think of a neat and quickly implemented little mechanic to spice things up a little.

You can get access to the prototype HERE!

So I’ve spent the first day setting up Flixel, searching for map editors (found DAME), making the hero run animation (Export from flash to png with Zoë). Compile all this into something playable-ish:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/848324/ld22/v01/index.html

Concept

So I’ve begun my entry. It’s called Zolcan. You are an astronomer traveling to a distant planet. Your buddies disappears and you are stranded, alone, on this alien jungle planet. Classic shmup story and game play.

Unfortunately, it’s on paper and I don’t have a scanner, but…

This game is looking to perhaps be my shortest most unambitious project yet, which gives it a damn good chance of reaching polish levels far more quickly. It’s probably going to take five minutes to play, but that was true of Throwbots and it was still at least an entertaining five minutes (or so I heard, anyway).

It all dwells on being trapped in a facility and depending on a very, very finite resource with an unlimited amount of things that drain this resource.

Unfortunately, this resource is basically the player character’s lifeforce. And once it’s gone, that’s it. Game over.

It might work, it might not. Onto prototyping the mechanics!

Well, by some miracle I haven’t slept way past my alarm and into the early hours of the afternoon. As I feared, I am not 100% in terms of health. Fortunately, I am at least over 80% in terms of health so this thing can still happen! Just need some caffeine and I can start talking a walk to develop my ideas. I have a couple of ideas already, so we’ll see how they go!

Ok, I will finish this time. I’m 12 years old, so I have to have set a record somewhere.
And you adults are going down was removed at request of CaptainLepidus. I make no guarantee to the grammar of this post, nor spelling.

Tools:

• Flixel 2.55 + My Flixel Template(just layout + menu stuffs) + FlashDevelop 4 + Flixel Power Tools if need be.
• Chronolapse for timelapse
• Livestream
• Photoshop CS5 + Flash CS5 for embedding assets.
• Garageband or WolframTones. BFXR.

I’m entering for the first time, so I’m basicaly a LD virgin.
Anyway I don’t think it will hurt, but it will probably be a bit awkward…

Programming: AS3 ( FlashBuilder )
Library: Flixel
Graphics: Photoshop
Music: Nanoloop ( iPhone )

This is where I’m from:
http://g.co/maps/rqp65

And this is what I’ll drink:

I’m in for my third Ludum Dare. The last two have been incredibly fun, so I don’t want to miss this one! For LD 20 my entry was Diamond Hollow and for LD21 I made Glissaria. Each time I’ve made sure to create a timelapse, and this one will be no different. However, I also plan to stream my progress live this time right over here. Also, I’ll keep updates on Twitter, so feel free to follow me if that’s your thing. And finally, I have a circle of LD people on g+, so add me there so I can stick you in my ever growing circle!

I’m going to stick to my strengths with pixel art and flash. Going to try to brush up on music this time, so I can at least have something listenable. I might try to find a music generation program simpler than Fruity Loops due to me being musically challenged. More formally, the tools I will be using are:

Programming: AS3 (Flash) via FlashBuilder (Eclipse)
Library: Modified Flixel (extra plugins such as a flixel bitmap font library, etc)
Graphics: Photoshop
Music: FruityLoops (unless I find something better)
Sounds: As3sfxr + Audacity
Other: Fast food, sleep, cats, alcohol

Last time I was overambitious, writing 3 games in 1, most of which I had no experience with. This time I’m going to play the safe route and make a platformer. It’s something I have experience with, is easier to make art for, and will hopefully mean I can create a full game in the alotted time. Let’s just hope the theme lends itself to a platformer. Also, if kittens wins I will cry because I can’t draw a cat to save my life.

One Of Two Partners In Crime

Good luck all. =]

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.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll state up front that the main reason for this post is because someone told me I couldn’t get trophies if I hadn’t written a blog post. I have no idea if we’re too late for any awarding, but what the hell.

I haven’t really felt the need to talk about my game, EscapeOut, because it wasn’t a particularly interesting process. Relying on a 20-min show-off video by Photon Storm about how to make a brick breaker in 20mins, I stumbled my way through Flixel and came up with something that put a little spin on the core concept. The theme of LD21 was Escape, so how else does one apply that to a brick breaker? Easy: something on the screen has got to try to get the hell out of dodge. From there it was a simple leap in logic to the eventual core mechanic. I won’t say what that is because I don’t like to spoil the game. In fact, I really liked setting friends down in front of EscapeOut with no instructions to see if they can figure it out. The game has no instructions for a very intentional reason.

Judging by the comments on EscapeOut, forcing players to discover the game’s mechanic paid off. I’ve been a very bad LD participant: haven’t blogged, haven’t played many of the entries, haven’t used the IRC channel except for a couple technical questions. Mostly this has been due to time; I only managed to spend half of the 48 hour timeframe coding, due to oversleeping and family obligations. So, I was quite surprised to log on today and see the comments and ratings left for EscapeOut. A few people really seemed to like it, more than I ever could have imagined. Even more shocking, the game was rated #54 in humour. Seriously, a game with no instructions, no words other than “YOU HAVE DIED” and “YOU ESCAPED”, no characters, no narrative, and even no sound effects or music, ranked within the top 10% of humourous games in the entire Ludum Dare 21!

I guess this really goes to show that an intriguing mechanic can turn a relatively bland experience into an interesting one, even if only for a few minutes.

I guess it’s time for me to do a postmortem of sorts (Tho I’m still working on the game at this point, but I should be able to wrap it up this weekend, you can check the compo and WIP post compo version at my entry page)

First of all, I would like to say that this has been a great experience, and I want to thank everyone for making it possible. So thanks everyone that participated, to the organizers that somehow managed to keep this afloat during the server situation, Adam Atomic for his awesome awesome Flixel Framework, and special thanks to Dogbomb for his terrific “65 Indie Games in 10(ish) Minutes” review, and to Oujevipo for his series of Ludum Dare game reviews.

So without further delays, a screenshot and then The Bad, The Good and a Desition:

Intro Screen

 The Bad:

Actually nothing went bad at all, I wish I had more time during the compo, but I had to attend a meeting on saturday that ate half of the day (I coded through half of it anyway, while nodding hehe), and the compo theme is announced right around the time I’m falling asleep (I’ve learnt that it’s better if I read it, then scribble down some notes and go to bed, instead of working through the night like I attempted last time).

The Good:

There’s just too many good stuff so i’ll break it up.

The theme:
I loved the theme the moment I read it. I had been thinking about non-combat, non-pewpewpew games for a couple of weeks before the compo, and what better theme than Escape to approach indirect conflict? I felt it was perfect.

The tools:
Flash Develop and Flixel are rock solid, I can’t explain how comfortable I feel with this combination.

GXSCC, usually frowned upon by the chiptune community, allowed me to achieve the sound I wanted without needing to learn the many layers of complexity found in a Mod tracker, so I only needed to borrow a friend’s Oxygen midi keyboard and I was set for music.

SFXR and Audacity for sound effects did the trick (plus some coding that make my game sound like it had lots of different samples, yet it only has 5 samples per kind of sound, that are layered and played at different intervals when triggered).

ASESPRITE, for graphics. While not great, it certainly delivered (except the newspaper cover that got made in GIMP because I had no time to dither the gradient by hand).

Pixel Bender Toolkit, my only gamble as I had never used it before, was really simple to develop and implement, really happy with it, gonna look into number crunching with it for my next game.

The planning:
1- Brainstorm, watch references.
2- Write down the concept.
3- Scope.
4- Write a Schedule.
5- Map input.
6- Create a Screenflow Chart.

This took about 4 hours. Screw Excel, Project, Qubity, Wikis, etc… Notebooks, Post Its, napkins and my cellphone alarm clock work just as good, or way better. For this part I took the keynote as some sort of divine commandment and followed the pro style advice to the letter.

After that, I jumped into developing the screen flow, slide presentation style, then jumped into the game logic, and the rest is history.

A Desition:

I really love making games, I really do. Ludum Dare helped me confirm my gut feeling. I love every aspect of it: The designing, the planning, the coding, the art and sound creation, the polishing, EVERYTHING.

I’m already on the path to make this my livelihood, I’m on the process of getting a game design diploma since earlier this year, and because of that I was thinking about throwing my CV around different companies once I got my portfolio finished (I’m a pretty competent 3d modeler). But the thing is that I don’t want to be another over specialized cog in the machine, pushing vertices or voxels around from 9 to 7, realizing other people’s vision.

I’ve attempted to collaborate with other people on game projects, and I’ve failed every single time, vision and consensus do not mix. I got tired of people telling me “no we can’t do that because it’s too hard”, I got tired of people telling me “that’s not the current market trend”, I got tired of ideas dilluting into homeopathic levels to please everyone, and maybe the problem IS ME, but who cares, if I can’t work in groups, what’s wrong with that?

 
I just got to try and do it on my own. So starting tomorrow I’m gonna go fulltime Indie, and I’m flying Solo!

Looks like people are still writing post-mortems a week later, so here’s mine!

Development:

I woke up last Saturday and checked the theme on twitter. I didn’t really expect the theme to be ‘escape’, but I had a think over breakfast and got a cool story idea, sort of inspired by an episode of an old TV show called Porridge. I started off with a dull blue wall tileset and made a prison cell in DAME.

Drawing tilesets in Graphics Gale.

Once the character graphics were done, I threw together a system which scans the DAME project file for game entities then places them on the map, since I didn’t have time to get to grips with the complex export system in DAME. Eventually I had little Rick running and jumping around in his cell, and I spent the rest of the day composing in SunVox and using Tweener to arrange the introduction text and events.

I didn’t actually start on the gameplay or levels until Sunday, when I decided to construct a small jungle full of spiders and spikes. It took most of the daytime to create the enemies, tiles, and music which left me with the evening to work out how to bring everything to a close. I stayed up right until the deadline designing the last area and finishing the game off, but I managed to squeeze in another tune, bringing me to a total of four songs!

Making the soundtrack in SunVox.

What Went Right:

• Considering this was my first time using DAME, creating the levels and making them work in Flixel was surprisingly painless.
• I’ve practised a lot with SunVox, so I can churn out decent music fast!
• I had a nice storyline idea and managed to keep it short without ruining it.
• I’ve been practising with Flixel and FlashDevelop for quite a long time. Even though I hadn’t released any Flixel games before this one, I was very comfortable with my choice of language and library.

• I missed a few details, for example there is no wall on the left side of the jungle, so you can fall off the screen and be stuck forever.
• Quite a lot of people heard strange hiccups in the music playback. I have no idea what’s causing this and I can’t hear them myself, but I added a standalone download which should hopefully fix any audio problems.
• I made a couple of bad design decisions, there are quite a lot of blind drops into enemies. I thought the levels were short enough not to need checkpoints, but it looks like I was wrong.

I’m really pleased with the amount I managed to get done in two days! If you’re interested, check out the entry itself here.

Oh, and if, like me, you don’t want to hand pick entries to vote on, I made a small bookmarklet for you:

javascript:var a=jQuery('table tbody tr td a');window.location=a[Math.round(Math.random()*a.length)].href;

Add this link to your bookmarks bar, then go to the view all entries page and run it, you will be taken to a random entry page. :] Happy rating!

So, unfortunately, due to the numerous issues with the site over the weekend I fell out of the habit of posting anything to my log over the course of Sunday. Given that this was certainly not the case for last LD, I am going to try and make up with a huge post instead, with sprinklings of hastily drawn drawings of things.

[ Play Aphelion Incident Here! ]

What Went Well

Planning

Oh boy did I ever improve on planning from last time. In LD20 I planned basically nothing and made it up all as I went along, reasoning that I’d find better use for the time actually making things. This was a mistake.

The time I spent on planning was 2 hours total (not a solid block), and for every minute I spent planning I saved two having to come up with things later on. I can’t emphasise enough the advantages of planning, but it’s one of those things where it’s obvious if you already do it and seems a waste of time if you don’t.

I did spend a lot more time on planning things I eventually had to cut, but without those plans in place I would have never known what I could have cut. I had to excise things like multiple species of guards and individual chatter lines simply because I didn’t have the time, but as stated, if I had never planned to add them in the first place, I could have never decided to omit them knowing I had more important things to work on first.

As my scanned-in plans are far too big to post here, you can find them here if you’re interested.

Prioritising

Code first. Code first is the most important rule you can adhere to for a competition this intense. It felt disheartening seeing a bunch of other entries being so much further along in terms of graphics when I was stuck with boxes with arrows on them, but with perseverance I ended up with a game that was more complex below the surface than Throwbots was. However, Throwbots had a few easier gimmicky things, which spiced it up a little. This game was a little lacking in gimmicky things, but it ended up spiced a little by something else.

Making the Guards Relatable

This I managed to hit spot on. I went into this with the idea of making the guards you’d otherwise treat as faceless enemies in a video game less faceless. I added a profile of stuff for each of the 20 guards in the game (which ate more time than I could ever have predicted) but knew there was one thing more I could do.

Give them friends.

In retrospect, “is fond of” was a bad phrase to use when the friend of a guard was meant to be any sort of positive camaraderie with another guard, and it made it look like the entire station was filled with courting couples or something similar. What was more interesting was I added individual messages to each guard if they saw their friend possessed or killed, but due to the frequency of random chatter it almost never showed up. It all helped to make people a little more hesitant to start gunning the guards down.

In initial playtests before submission, people were asking if I could make it so that guards could move into other rooms so they could unite the pairs of guards. I figured I’d won at making the guards relatable at that point.

What Could Have Gone Better

Guard AI & Controls

The guards don’t really HAVE an AI. Considering the initials of the game are “AI”, this feels a little more of a lacking feature than it should be.

Having never tried any sort of decent AI implementation in a game before, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. The state machine was simple enough, as was setting up an array of reactions based on certain stimuli.

But the main problem was a lack of good platforming AI. Having detection of pits and walls to turn away from was pretty simple – just check the tilemap to see if there’s a pit or a wall the guard is about to step into, and if that’s the case make them turn around. But then came a problem of the guards climbing jumpable parts of the map. I limited the jump height to such an extent that they couldn’t overshoot the block they were jumping to. For some reason, I decided to make that the jump height for the player too.

The kicker is that I later added code for the case where a guard falls too far away from their patrol point and made them pick a new patrol point based on where they were, so there was no reason to be so defensive about keeping them near where they started. That was an honest mistake on my behalf.

The transitions don’t always make sense either, and guards have no persistence of memory. If they see the player and the player ducks behind a corner, that’s it. The player has ceased to exist for them. If I had pathfinding code in there, I’d probably have made them chase the player while they were within a sensible range, but I sure as hell was not writing my first platform pathfinding AI during a Ludum Dare.

All in all, a host of niggling issues that I would definitely like to resolve.

Guard Interactions

I’ve heard people coming back to me saying they memorised all the guard details in case they had to use them. With more time, there would have been social interaction puzzles, because while it’s fun to take over people’s actions why not also meddle in their affairs while you’re at it? Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of a streamlined way to do this, nor a way to get the relevant reactions and such done within 48 hours. A future version, perhaps!

The UI and Tutorials

Quite simply, there was no tutorial. I ran out of time to add one, and so tried to make up for it by sticking the controls in my entry text. Not only that, but I ran out of time for custom keybinding. For everyone not using a US/UK English keyboard, I am so, so sorry to force Z/X/C on you guys like so many other inconsiderate devs, but when it came to getting the game finished or implementing custom keybinding, I knew I had to focus on the former.

As for the UI, well, I didn’t get any of the graphical elements done so most of them ended up hidden. It’s a confusing mess at the moment, but believe me when I say it’d be more of a confusing mess with a bunch of squares that don’t do anything on it. Once I get the first post-compo release finished, you’ll hopefully see what it should have been.

Critical Bugs At Release

The first version of the compo release had a critical game-freezing bug if you managed to get shot while controlling a guard (a case I never encountered during my own all too brief testing), as well as a duplicated terminal and a missing terminal. The first was due to another instance of a variable being null when I didn’t expect it to be (easy to fix).

The second, though, was the worst damaging typo of the compo. Each terminal had a numerical ID. Terminal #16 ended up getting 10, so there were two terminal #10s and one terminal #16. Now, this might sound meaningless, except the doors are locked according to terminal IDs and whether they’ve been used or not. Terminal #10? That’s the terminal that unlocks the door to the teleporter room. If you were confused by the earlier comments on my entry about finishing far earlier than they expected, that’s why. Whoops. My bad. It’s fixed now, though.

What To Focus On Next Time

Sounds and Music

I managed to miss this out this time as well, much to my disappointment. I had such neat ideas, too. Oh well. Best to have an okay working game that looks passable instead of a broken game that looks terrible with annoying screechy sound effects, right?

Core Mechanics

Although the extraneous bits this time around may have elevated my entry from mediocre platformer to something with a bit more depth, I still think the control mechanics could have benefitted from a little more love.

Timelapse

I skipped it this time around due to lack of preparation. In future I am going to do my research to find out what programs to use and more importantly how to make my reams of coding look a little more interesting.

In Conclusion

I had an amazing though hectic weekend working on this thing and there is no doubt in my mind that I’ll be entering LD22. This time, I intend to work on a post-compo version of my game and perhaps even carry it into the October Challenge if it’s on this year. Regardless, I’ll see you guys at LD22. Keep being amazing.

(Let’s see if we can break 1k entries next time!)

So LD21 was my first ever Dare and some things went okay and some didn’t. I definitely learnt a lot from it, and I’m keen to keep making games and work on my entry. I thought I’d do a brief little writeup.

Blatant self-promotion link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=5119

The game

The Daring Do! title screen

I’m pretty pleased with the game I produced: “Daring Do!”. It’s a sidescrolling running platformer where you play an intrepid archeologist. Each level is short and follows the same formula: grab the glowing golden idol and get the heck out of the temple before the whole thing caves in or you get crushed by the giant boulder coming after you. Avoid pits and arrows along the way. I wanted to keep levels short so it kept you wanting to play; that just one more level feeling. I’d like to add an ‘infinite mode’ in a future update, though. I’m also planning to add many, many more of the normal-style levels, as well as a lot more trap types: crumbly blocks, falling debris that you have to dodge, spike traps,and perhaps even some bad guys and collectables. I would’ve liked to get more of these in during the compo, but just ran out of time. Also, more work is needed on sound and sprites.

Daring Do! gameplay - pick up the glowy idol and prepare to run!

The Bad

The main thing that went wrong was that I didn’t spend enough time on day one thinking up a concrete idea. I got a rough topic in my head of a Breakout bat escaping from a game of Breakout, and rushed off and started making it. I built a simple little Breakout clone really quickly, and then spent a fair amount of the rest of the day trying to script together some kind of in-game cut scene explaining your escape. At this point, I realised I’d spent far too long on an ‘intro’ without having any idea at all about what the core gameplay would be after your escape. I became somewhat disillusioned with the idea and stopped working.

My first game idea, a breakout clone where you actually break out.

I woke up late on the Sunday with the intention of giving up, but I felt that I’d be very disappointed in myself if I did so. I chatted with a friend about what to do (thanks @triard!), and a new idea was born, that which turned into Daring Do! This one I felt I could run with: a simple gameplay mechanic that can be easily extended by the addition of more traps, levels, etc.

Daring Do! gameplay - outrun the boulder, avoid the arrows, jump the pits!

The Good

I’ve only recently gotten into Flash development, but I absolutely love working with FlashDevelop. I use a Mac as my main machine, so I had to run FD in a Windows virtual machine which was pretty slow – this infuriated me on numerous occasions as I sat there wanting to code but having to wait for my computer to catch up with me. For future LDs, I’ll have to run Windows natively somewhere, as the VM was almost unworkable. I wish there was a Mac version of FlashDevelop.

Flixel is also brilliant, although I was kind of learning as I went along so got a bit hung up on things that should’ve been easy but I didn’t know how to do yet. I’d like to spend some time with FlashPunk, too, to see how they compare. Writing my game in Flash made it super easy to test, to send to friends for comments, and to upload for other LD48ers to play.

As for my other tools, I used DAME for map editing, which worked pretty well, bfxr (fantastic tool!) for sound effects (although I somehow forgot to give my main character footsteps!) and had a brief attempt at creating some terrible music with FamiTracker.

Next time

I’d certainly be up for taking part on Ludum Dare again – the feeling of satisfaction having built something in such a short space of time is brilliant, and I love the community feel of the event. I’m so glad I didn’t give up after day 1! Next time, I’d spend longer ensuring I had a great gameplay idea before starting. Gameplay, gameplay, gameplay, that’s what it’s all about. In fact, I’d probably recommend trying to spend some time during the final round of voting thinking up some ideas for each of the top-voted themes from previous rounds, just in case they come up. Having a solid idea from the start would allow me a full two days to make my game – next time, I’d plan for day 1 on the engine and gameplay, and day 2 on content and tweaks. As I had to cram all of that into one day this time round, the content was a little light.

At the moment, I’m really enjoying looking through everybody else’s entries. There are some truly, truly brilliant games in there – not are they fun to play, but it’s nice to be able to find out how things were implemented. It’s a great way to learn.

I’d really appreciate it if you’d take the time to check out my game and rate it and / or leave a comment.

Check (and rate) the game here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=1947

Making a game in 48 hours is never easy, but thankfully it was less hard this time. Mainly because I decided to use tools I was more familiar with, instead of using the weekend to learn a new tool or framework.

I started the weekend with the idea of making a super-hero canabalt. Something that lends a bit of variety to the one-button run genre. A constant threat from the rear, a path that makes it difficult to stay out in front and some kind of upgrade system.

I structured my development a lot more than usual, with index cards and a vague agile methodology (and the entire living floor). I tried to sleep well during the weekend, getting 6 hours on Friday night, and 9(!) on Saturday. I also ate well, cooking rather than the usual takeaways, and only drinking one energy drink the whole weekend. (I did manage to polish off 5 pots of coffee though, which was around 25+ cups.)

What Went Right™

Organisation – I didn’t feel stressed much at all during the weekend. I managed time for music and even some graphics polishing at the end (not much mind, I’m not an artist and it’s hard to make faeces shine). All in all, I always felt like I knew what I was doing, what I had done, and what I would have to do.

Tools – I normally take a sackcloth-and-ashes approach to development: “If it can’t be done on the command line, then… you’re lying, because everything can be done on the command line. Fiend!” – But this weekend, I used FlashDevelop and worked on windows most of the time. FlashDevelop really is unparalleled when it comes to Actionscript coding.

K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid) – I nailed down the initial mechanics early. Platformer with tilemaps, jumping, double jumping. I did it all with multi-coloured squares too, sprites were an afterthought. I didn’t try to invent a new genre, and I didn’t try to rewrite the entirety of FlashPunk’s BitmapData handling (see: LD #19). I took a simple idea, and made it.

Asset Pipeline – I learned the workings of D.A.M.E. very early on in the weekend. Got familiar with its output format, its awkward, awkward tools, and it’s habit of refusing to write to CSV on occasion because it believes MXMLC is still holding on to the files (although this is more likely Adobe’s fault). I got much better at using Graphics Gale for initial pixel pushing and animating, and then using Photoshop to touch up and bake in some vague lighting.

Emitters! – Who doesn’t love little objects that fire random things in random directions? More Emitters, I say. More. I wish I could have Emitters every day of the week. My next game might be made entirely out of Emitters.

Guinness – Thanks to my first point, Organisation, I afforded myself an hour on Sunday for a few relaxing pints of Black. Boom.

(more…)

So I finished my game last night! I really struggled with the theme at first – one of those that can be used for a game in so many ways it was hard to pin something original and interesting down. While I’m not convinced I truly achieved that in my concept, this has been by far my best execution on a Ludum Dare to date. I actually had a little time to polish! But no DISCO

Click to go to the game page

So, pretty happy. I also took a timelapse with Chronolapse that I stuck up on YouTube if anyone’s interested:

Timelapse

My game ‘Vault’ went into the submission morass about 45 minutes ago. CLICK HERE!

This is a game about a security system, a series of barriers you gotta hack your way through in grayscale rectangle land.

As is my wont, I spent more time doodling around with superficials (and lazing about) than working on the game proper, so the experience is rough and feels sort of cloudy. It’s consists of an odd game mechanic where optimization is the most interesting thing, yet the only push to optimization that I put in was points and leaderboards for finishing in X moves. Maybe ought to have added a fuel gauge limiting how many moves you can take. The game could use a lot more experimentation, level design and otherwise.

With leaderboards and that unique hamburger something or other, I hope this Flash game will mean something to someone.

About time I made a note of what I’m up to! I’ve gone for an isometric-running around trying to escape a mysterious building while being hounded by hordes of sinister enemies sort of thing. Are they human? Maybe they were… once. Who knows! Also, due to the appearance of the tiles I’ve laid for the floor, I am finding it really, really difficult not to add an element of DISCO to this. Anyhow, that’s it for now; plenty yet to do.

LD 21 has been going far too fast so far. After an attempt at using Flixel, and failing due to too little knowledge I’ve slid back to GM8. I hope to use Flixel for the next LD after I’ve had a proper look at it.

Like a few others on here I’ve opted for a Tower Defence, I didn’t stretch the boat like I usually do with my interpretation of the theme, but it was 3am and I was tired.

The base game is there with placeholders, just gotta flesh it out, do my graphics and make more gameplay, so should be finished as usual 10 minutes before submission!

Until then, Sackboy is helping me eat some awesome Garden of Eatin’ Sesame Blues, yum!