Ludum Dare » gave up

Throwing in the Towel

Frimkron — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 19:19:04 +0000

Well, I’m going to have to give up, I’m afraid. Here’s a screenshot of the latest version:

I’m not going to submit it because there’s nothing even resembling a game in there.

When I got up on Saturday I had a really good idea for a game, and I still think the idea is a good one, but unfortunately over the last day-and-a-bit I’ve just not been able to keep up the pace required to see it take shape.

The game was going to be a worms-style turn-based aim-and-shoot type game, but with the idea of strategically capturing islands thrown in there too – by launching soldiers onto unclaimed islands, building more cannons there, and increasing the chances of hitting and damaging your opponent’s fortress.

I’m going to blame this one on the fact that I’ve not slept very well over the last few days and this weekend I was severly lacking in energy and enthusiasm.

I’m a little disappointed with myself to say the least, because I’d been looking forward to this LD for weeks and I thought the theme was pretty flexible and inspiring.

I will endevour to finish this game at a later date, because I feel I really need to do justice to my original idea and in particular I would love to see it as a network game.

And next time, I’m going to do the following:

Prepare – I should have got my timelapse software ready, as well as any libraries I would need and so on. I should also have familiarised myself with a good 3d modeler for Linux.
Sleep – More sleep before the competition and I probably would have had a decent game by now.
Keep it very simple – I’ve decided that if the core gameplay can’t realistically be finished in the first day, then the idea is too complicated. I tend to be far too ambitious when it comes to picking a game idea, either by incorporating some experimental code idea or by underestimating the work required for a seemingly simple feature because of a lack of experience with it.
Stick to what I know – I wasted a lot of time trying to paint sprites in Gimp, then finding that they were anti-aliased onto the wrong colour background and fixing the outlines them to work with colour-keyed alpha. In the end I gave up and switched back to pixelling sprites in Graphics Gale (though none of these have made it into my screenshot)

Non-Advancing Wall of Failure!

Frimkron — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 23:50:56 +0000

Well it looks like the only advancing wall of doom in my case was the deadline which, unfortunately, has caught up with me. I’ve not managed to finish anything even resembling a complete game this time

Final screenshot:

My idea this time round was definately too ambitious for the timescale. I was trying to make a simulator game, which because of the nature of the thing, just isn’t playable until all the components of the game are in place.

What I was trying to do was create a rolling-wall-of-death-fortress simulator with an ecosystem of employees to keep happy in order to drive the fortress forward and crush larger and larger settlements under its treads as the game goes on. What I’ve actually ended up with is a system where you can place rooms and people and watch the people die very quickly due to the lack of food. You must place tracks to support additional rooms.

Here’s the zip with source, screenshot and windows executable:

ld14awod_frimkron.zip

Note: python 2.6 and pygame are required to compile the source.

I’d really like to go back to the game and finish it some time – I felt that I managed to keep on top of the code quite well, in terms of keeping it managable and not like a big ball of mud. I guess clean code doesn’t get the job done on time Hopefully I’ll be able to find the time to work on this some more at a later date.

That is, after I’ve finished playing all the awesome-looking entries that have caught my eye over the last 2 days

I Give Up

Frimkron — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 19:16:19 +0000

I’m giving up, I’m afraid. My game just wasn’t going anywhere. I’ll be writing a full post-mortem at some point in the near future, but it boils down to the fact that I bit off more than I could chew with the decision to try and create a city procedurally.

This is a shot of it in its final state:

Very much as it was this morning – just a car in a field full of random road segments and paving flags.

And here’s a download link in case anyone’s interested. Source included of course.

ld13_roads_by_frimkron.zip

Oh well – I’ll keep it simple next time