Play Here

Well, we are going to start from the beginning. I had high hopes about the theme would be Parallel Worlds so I started to do an idea about a game with this theme in my head.

The day 26 came and the final theme was Minimalism. The first thing I did was curse to the people who had voted that theme. The second thing was start to think how can I innovate and at the same time create a minimalism game, but the ideas weren’t coming to my, and magically I remembered my first idea for the Parallel Worlds theme. This idea consisted in a split-screen with two characters who would interact between they. You would have to get the objects in the ground and go changing of screen for kill enemies who only could be killed by one of the character (ok, this sounded better in my head).

So I made this concept more minimalist. The game would have split-screen and two character running forward, each screen would represent the black or the white and this would create a contrast between the characters and the background.

Then, when I had this in my project of Unity, I added blocks who kill you when you touch him. Although this look like a simple thing but this was one of my hardest challenges in the develop of this game, all because Unity not detected any collider. After two hours and almost come to despair I decided restart my computer, and YEAH! THIS SOLVED THE PROBLEM, FUCK U UNITY!, were my words.

Well, the colliders works good, the characters run forward and when they touch a block they die. And has not spent even one day, this is amazing!.

Is time to level design!

The level design was very frustrating, to each block that I put I needed complete the level until that point, and this isn’t easy, seriously, I wanted to hit something!. It took me a lot of hours.

Ok, the day had not finished and I still had time to do the menus. I made it and finally came the time to sleep after 22 hours of work without rest.

The game was complete and I still had one day more to polish it.

The second day was a relaxing day. I did the music and fix a lot of bugs. I still had more of half day more so I started thinking in what could I add to make the game experience more satisfactory, the first thing I saw was that the graphics were very very simples, I knowed that the theme was minimalism but… I love the pixels and my game had to have pixels!, so I set to worked. I did a wall of bricks and some windows and the game now looked like an ancient castle. The problem of it was that the game was now more hard. But fuck, I really loved how the game looked!, so I add a “button” for choose if you want play with textures or without them.

Finally I publish the game when still missing about five hour to finish the compo.

And this is basically how I did feel while I was develop this game for my first ludum dare.

PD: Sorry for my bad english, I’m not a native

Hi all,

I discovered LD48 9-12 months ago. I’ve always been interested in programming, and I now how some experience in it.

My current goal is to be proficient in Java (maybe fluent, if possible) by LD25, about hopefully make something which I can submit to it. I also want to improve on my pixel art.\

Anyway my next post will probably be between now and LD25. Maybe in September-October to report on my Java progress and then just before LD25 if all goes well.

Ludum Dare is a great place to know more tools for game development, so I’d like to share the tools I used to make Micro World.

Programming:

Flixel - Open source game-making library for ActionScript 3.

FlashDevelop - Open source code editor. Supports ActionScript (2 and 3) and haXe .

Graphics:

GraphicsGale - Animation graphic editor. Good for pixel art.

Music:

Guitar Pro. Tabulature editor software. I used it to write the song and export it to MIDI.

GXSCC - Automatically converts a MIDI to 8-bit chiptune. Just drag and drop your MIDI to this window, then click Authoring to export it.

Sound:

Bfxr - Generates manipulable sound effects with 8-bit style.

Free Audio Converter - I used it to convert WAV to MP3.

Fedor and I made this completely from scratch in three days (with little sleep):

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=13139
We’re proud of it and couldn’t wait to show this off to you guys! Please spread around, rate and comment

I will now attempt the daring feat of sharing what this experience felt for me, so we can all benefit from it as game designers/developers/artists.

Development notes:

It was exhausting and super fun. I particularly enjoyed composing the music, and how we came up with an interesting gameplay mechanic (teleportation).
Coming at it as equals and negotiating ideas did a world of good for our game. Our main inspiration was the Touhou series of games for Fedor (I’d only seen gameplay) and Ikaruga for me (finished the game several times).

I started doing graphics on Saturday morning. I worked on a mockup photoshop file full groups of layers, to which I returned throughout development. For example, when I needed a new enemy, I would fire up the mockup, draw the enemy next to all the other sprites and then paste it into another photoshop file and animate it separately. I would then export as individual .PNGs (Photoshop’s “Render Animation to Video” was very helpful).

Dropbox of course saved our lives, and we communicated through skype’s chat. In fact we haven’t even seen each others’ faces.
I used Photoshop CS5 for all animation and graphics, and Fruity Loops with free soundfonts to write and perform the music.
Fedor used Unity and I don’t know what else ^-^

Post mortem: We gave it our absolute best. A coding set-back made the scrolling clouds unusable, so Fedor had to wing it at the last moment, which left the background a little bleh in my opinion ( I had no time to make changes to the cloud graphics and scrolling). But even so, when at the last minute he managed to fix the clouds so we at least had some, it was very exciting. The level is very very well thought-out and very fun to play. It took Fedor, what, 6 hours? to come up with the patterns that complement the teleport mechanic.  The 3 hours before deadline were, for me, mostly about helping Fedor out with any requests, like changing sprites or giving him a list with all the visual elements he had yet to implement. I made a second enemy ship graphic in 15 minutes, since Fedor made enemies with two different numbers of hit points, and I felt we needed to be able to tell them apart. This was done 2 or 3 hours before deadline, when Fedor was struggling with the stupid clouds. He added the second enemy graphic in the game 1 hour before deadline.

I also wanted finite lives implemented (9 of them, as many as the tails of the Kumiho fox-spirit), shown only everytime you are resurrected from a death, in order to keep the interface as clean as Fedor wanted it. Scoring wouldn’t have hurt either. But we didn’t have time to even negotiate it, because the ideas came too late. Even if they had come early, we wouldn’t have had time. I stayed up Sunday 12am to Tuesday 6am, and it’s the longest I’ve ever been awake.

So, overall, I couldn’t have wished for anything better, I had the fastest and best coder at my disposal, we had a crazy schedule and working hours, and implemented almost everything we set out to implement, and still had time for a little polish.

Hey guys, just thought i’d toss this out here for anyone interested.  Finished a first “stable” release of my new sprite editor, It’s QT4 and written to be cross-platform but at the moment only downloads for linux are up, as I’ve yet to figure out how to use the mingw cross compiler with QT.  Tailored for my engine’s format but the toolset can also easily export to png spritesheets.

Short version of the features (full list on download page)

• Onion skinning to help with animating
• customizable palletes w/ full save/load/rip from image support
• more color picking tools than you’ll ever know what to do with
• fully integrated with system clipboard so you can freely select, copy,cut, paste, etc..with other image editors
• large undo/redo bufers, specific to each frame
• live animation preview
• fast control scheme (mouse + command keys, or hotkeys control every action, all hotkeys are listed in the edit menu)
• customizable UI, all toolbars can be reshaped, floated,  pushed behind tabs, hidden….etc

Still got a lot of bugs to work out, and missing features, but it’s at least stable and capable of image editing at this point. You can download it and try it here http://www.midnightfragfest.com/sprite-editor/

Edit: Windows download is now available, but somewhat untested, I would appreciate any feedback on how it runs.

Yesterday I got around to a bit of sfx/coding, today I started it off with some graphics!

One leg is lacking a frame (poor planning) but that’ll come as a later fix, for now it’s time to put him in the game! Segmenting the body will allow me to easily aim in 6 directions with the upper body while the lower body reacts to movement/jumping/falling. Looks a bit stiff in the end, but it’s a marine!

Screenshots to come once I get some tiles and stuff going!

I have this much finished. See if you can find the fan pack to jump higher!

http://megaswf.com/simple_serve/87754/

Theme Growth. I did get a review on this game, here it is:

Ingame screenshot