So far I have come up with the beginnings of a game idea, and this fish curry:

So far, so good…

I didn’t forget, just procrastinated. I want to consider myself a veteran at Ludum Dare, as this will be my 5th entry.

Hooray for Number Five!

Let’s just say I’ve graduated from complete newb to novice, and now am just above novice. I don’t make games professionally (yet), more of a hobbyist developer. It’s something I completely love to do, create little fantasies in code and allow people to see them and interact with them.

Ludum Dare is my way of looking back at previous projects, gauging how my skills have improved, enjoying the ride, and letting the community know that I exist. So anyway, there are tools I have used before, and I’m gonna list them:

• language: C++ in MSVC 2008 Express
• library: SFML 1.6
• audio: SFXR, Audacity, PXTone
• ear candy: musicforprogramming.net
• health: good food, smoothies, coffee, some light exercise, and a decent amount of sleep (but seriously not too much)

Everyone, have a blast, and best wishes for your projects.

• 2x 200g TESCO chips (onion & paprika flavor)
• 2x 90g TESCO chips (cheese flavor)
• 2x 70g Mexicorn (chili flavor)
• 3x 100g popcorn (have some special spice for it)
• a Snickers SUPER
• 2l Márka Cola
• 10x 0,5l beer (Arany Ászok)

and there are some unfinished things on the table because of the LD…

Now on to setting up the environment and for some extra fans for my PC. It’s 44 °C here…

At the end of LD22, I was quite proud of myself. I had made a game, for the first time, and exceeded all my expectations. I had to deal with a library that I learned about just a couple of days before, almost no preparation, and lots of weird problems packaging the software. So it came naturally to me that this time out I would take all the lessons of LD22, build on top of them, and make an awesome game. Oh, how wrong I was!

Damn this game.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I went into great lengths to prepare myself for this LD. I participated in the warm up, and build myself a neat little shooter for the 10 hours that I allowed myself to spend in the warm up. Then I bought all kinds of food that I could or could not need, since food was another thing that I felt was lacking in my first LD. Since the theme would be revealed 10AM my time, I slept early, and planned to go to a restaurant near my home to think about the theme away from the computer.

At least food was not a problem this time!

All was working well so far. “Tiny World” was not my favorite in the list of themes, but I did not dislike it. The inspiration came when, at the restaurant, the expresso machine broke. I immediately remembered all those children stories about small gnomes fixing househood items, hidden from the adults. Specially, I was thinking about the recent Ghibli movie, Arrietty, which I liked a lot. So the idea started to form on my head. A family of tiny creatures, trying to live unnoticed in a human’s house.

I spent about 20 minutes thinking about a princess-maker style management game, where you managed a family of “borrowers”, sent them on missions to explore, or expand, or other things, and tried to keep your profile low. But then I thought that a management game was not a good call for LD — management games are not everyone’s couple of tea, and they can be quite hard to balance. I decided to change the focus a bit, in order to make something more likeable, and I came with the idea of controlling a single of these creatures, in an action/stealth game.

Maybe that was my mistake, maybe I should have gone with the management game I wanted to make… anyways.

The idea for the game was this — a creature living underground, had to forage the above world for items, food, treasures. All while avoiding the humans and other hazards in the big world above, and using the spoils to improve their own tiny world. It was still a good idea on paper. But when I started laying out the plan for the game engine, I panicked. I realized that I needed creatures of widely different sizes, on a complex world, and I had no idea of how to handle collision. In my previous game, collision was a non-issue, and I was getting scared that I would spend a LOT of time trying to learn how to make a quad tree or something like that. It did not make any sense, I was just panicking, and in panicking I lost a lot of time.

Eventually I decided to re-implement a tile based engine just like in my previous game, with three different sizes of sprites: 1, 9 and 25 tiled units. I implemented a simple and dirty routine for square collision detection on those sizes. Then I started to work on some early lose conditions, on the idea that I needed to have a prototype with a win/lose condition as soon as possible. So I implemented foraging for food, dying of starvation, and the cat predator.

But by then, it had already been over 30 hours, and I had very little time to do much else.

In the end, my game idea about living among humans and exploring, fixing their stuff, and building your base while remaining undetected became a silly game about stealing food from cats to give to your fat queen . The game didn’t even have any humans.

So much planning, so little to show for it...

Other than the end result, not all was lost, though. The preparation certainly paid off: I did not have any problems regarding my programming environment (no mysterious bugs) or the living environment. Submitting, publishing, time-lapsing all worked without a hitch. I got a lot of practice with the Gimp, and learned to use some tools in different ways. I also learned how to create and add music to the game without requiring a lot of composition knowledge. Autotracker is a wonderful little tool that I learned about too late into the compo, but will certainly be a center piece for future dares. In fact, I might go as far as create a bunch of random tunes to just listen to them while playing DF or something like that. Also, I managed to insert a lot of little neat widgets into the game that made me a bit proud of myself, such as a generic handler for mobs using inheritance, a text message listener that shapes the message to an arbitrary window, dealing with real time, a pause screen, etc. Too bad that these neat tricks can’t replace an actual game :-/

Well, there is always next time! I still feel pumped for programming, so maybe I can get some more game making experience before LD24.

TL;DR:

I finished my game, but it fell way short of my expectations, couldn’t implement critical features.

The Good
* My preparation was top notch: I wanted for nothing, biological or technical
* I managed to solve many technical problems I had in my LD22 game, such as music and message box formatting.
The Bad
* I panicked early in the dare because of lack of familiarity with game programming, lost a lot of time.
* I misjudged the time I needed, critical features and playtesting were missing from the game.
Lessons Learned
* If I like a niche theme or a game style, I should just go for it. With 1000 participants, LD is not a popularity contest.
* Working with multiple small levels uses the time better than working with one complex level.
* Autotracker rocks.

Also the obligatory links:
* Game Page
* Time Lapse

Dinner Time:

MyFood for LD23

Progress:

2012.04.21_1925 - WIP01

Dismissed Idea:

Dissmissed Idea - Kleine Planeten

I hope, I am doing this the right way with the screenshots ??

Only twelve more hours for the start of the dare! Before coming home, I went to the supermarket, and bought the necessary supplies. Last time I kinda got burned because I didn’t have enough proper food, so maybe this time I overcompensated:

I have also prepared my game music playlist, and cleaned up my place a bit. Just a bit of winding down, then I’m gonna sleep, wake up for the theme announcement, and go think about it while having breakfast outside (and away from the computer).

Good luck everyone!

Ok final version uploaded, libraries updated with the bugs found during the weekend, some donuts eaten … time to rest for the week to come !!

don’t forget to play the final version here : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=825

cheers !!

Good nutrition for good morning!

I just woke up. I was getting a little stuck last night when figuring out my concept (which is what always happens to me).But, I got some sleep, am about to get more coffee and will probably eat something soon.

Hmm, I just decided that I would scan some of my note/sketches. I’m putting it through the automatic document feeder to not waste time, so it might look a little washed out. — GAH, nevermind, the auto doc feeder is a POS. It always fucks up.

Good morning! Having a breakfast sandwich for breakfast along with another Rockstar (one was from last night). I’m sure I’ll be in the kitchen a few more times today though. ;] Things are coming along nicely:

The game is sort of a Minecraft/Dwarf Fortress-like where the player must dig their way to the ladder and escape from [undetermined number] of randomly generated levels. Currently the only obstacle is lava which floods player mines. Stones will be used to create bricks to block lava flow and also water when it is added. I’m also planning on adding cave-in events which cause dirt walls to be destroyed and non-mine-able rubble blocks to be created. So far I’m really happy with how the game is going! =]

it’s noon here so i decided to whip up some breakfast.

I baked bacon and eggs with cheese on top to make these adorable breakfast puffs. We also have the most professional plates. Okay? Okay.

And breakfast for Machiavelli too!

Hope everyone is doing okay! I have some backgrounds to color.

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!

I’m almost done. Once again way too little content, but that’s what usually seems to happen when making anything content-based in a very short amount of time, logically.

Before posting final + screenshots, here’s a second foodphoto. It’s a late dinner consisting of duck ragu and nettle pasta.

Way to start the compo … is to eat and post a foodphoto. My wife whipped up some excellent ingredients for this Tex Mex moment.

In fact I’ve been working on an entry for maybe 2-3 hours now, but I don’t have anything sensible to post about it yet.

here is my task list :

1. build models :
1.1. mailman
1.2. zombie
1.3. kitten
1.4. building
1.5. sidewalk
1.6. street
1.7. shotgun
1.8. street light

2. prepare sound effects
2.1. define sound track
2.2. record zombie sound
2.3. record kitten sound
2.4. record shotgun reload sound from nerf
2.5. find shotgun shooting open sound
2.6. find steps sound
2.7. create sound track

3. create user interaction
3.1. arrange in the scene the first city with some streets (copy real neighbour ?)
3.2. add camera to the character
3.3. move the character
3.4. define positions to generate zombies
3.5. define kitten positions

4. prepare actions
4.1. get weapon from kitten
4.2. display and count lifes
4.3. game over scene
4.4. shoot and kill zombies
4.5. count zombies killed
4.6. deliver letter

5. add main screen menu
6. add final score screen

lets do it !!

Oh man I am at a loss… So far my ideas are:

Tumiki Arena – Tumiki fighters except in an arena. It would fulfill the theme because every time an enemy died, they would give you a gun or whatever for you to handle further enemies. This could either work in robotron style, or in astroids style. With the second one it would be a bit like captain forever. I don’t think that is a bad thing though.

TowerTron – Similar to above, but you can pick up and drop turrets. Maybe this is more like herzog zwei crossed with tower defense. I don’t know if I can figure out A* this time though, or really any pathfinding.

Castle Defense - Missile Defense, except you can occasionally add stuff to you towns and cities, and they all shoot automatically at the missiles. “this is a dangerous place to have a town, here take this”.

Ok gonna just roll with one of them. I clearly need to light a fire under myself, I just spent 20 minutes messing around with my timelapse script. HOLY CRAPPU, GOTTA ROLL.

Also, here is my desk, and my lunch and dinner (I just cooked 2 meals at once):

What I’m eating while writing this post:

Here’s my sketch / ideas / incomplete todo list :

I sucks at drawing but I have to write ideas even if I’m the only one to understand what it means.

The compo started at 4:00 am in my local time, and it’s now 12 pm. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what kind of game I could possibly make in 48 hours and in accordance with the theme. I was close to give up. But I’ve decided that even if the game will be bad, deja vu, not original I will just enjoy making it and have fun. So here it is

The first screenshot with our little yet unamed buddy.

It will be a metroidvania. Probably. With a little twist in the story. If I have enough time to do all that I planned.

Breakfast? CHECK

Supplies? CHECK

Concept? CHECK

My concept I’m going to start fleshing out now is to do a tribute to Gauntlet where the player that plays alone gets a special item to help with the difficult levels that are designed for 2 players (tying in to the theme). This is probably more than my poor art and sound skills can manage, but its the best idea I can come up with that actually seems like fun to me – so here goes nothing!

Starting design work and timelapse capture now…

Quick food photo, nothing fancy. A few adorable left over Easter eggs, some Kielbasa and assorted things.

Poor adorable eggs. You're going to a better place.

And the result:

I guess technically, not the final result.

Totally set food wise, good into the early morning. Was busting my butt trying to get a trailer done (check it out it’s spiffy), and game up for XNA peer review for the past 24 hours. Starting to wish I would have gotten at least a little pre-compo sleep. Hopefully the over abundance of food keeps me going.

After playing a bit of Dad N’ Me and thinking about other similar Behemoth games, I just can’t bring myself to fire up Flashpunk. Looks like I’ll be going the normal Flash route for this compo. It’s such a shame too, because I’d love to come up with a simpler concept just to get some Flashpunk experience, but I’m drawing a blank for this theme.