Timelapse video of my entry Dimensional.

Introduction

Spitoon was my first ever Ludum Dare submission. As I mentioned in my previous post, I had watched Notch’s live feed of his entry for LD 22 and was inspired to participate in the next one. Here is how I think it went.

What went right

• I managed to make a mostly-playable game with (AFAIK) a somewhat unique mechanic.
• My graphics, though simple, got the job done. I was pleased with how they turned out, mostly.
• I learned that I can perform under a very tight deadline and for very long periods of time.
• I made my first Timelapse as well as my first ever upload to YouTube!
• I had a lot of fun!

What went wrong

This is always the more interesting part, I imagine:

• Many bugs made it into the posted version. Among them are the spitballs appearing at full size for a split-second before being resized (this one bothers me a lot, as it messes with the visual style and happens repeatedly), and spitballs sometimes stopping dead in their tracks when they aren’t supposed to.
• The game uses up way more memory than it should, particularly by the later levels. This was a problem I had spent a good portion of time trying to fix, but, alas, I just don’t know enough yet about proper and efficient garbage collection. This is where my relative lack of experience with ActionScript, Flixel, and programming in general really shows through. It is something I’m slowly working on, however.
• No sound! I had even practiced a bit with generating sounds with SFXR before the competition, but in the end, I spent too much time fixing bugs and designing levels (both of which took up more time than I had originally planned on) to get to this stage of development at all. A game like this really deserves some nice spitting sound effects to round it out, but I had to prioritize, and sound I deemed was less important than the other stuff.
• Too short! I realize that the bar isn’t necessarily very high as far as length of gameplay with this sort of competition, but I really wanted to shoot for a minimum of 10 well-thought-out levels at minimum (20 if I could help it). That said, I had to settle for 7 levels, with 2 of them being pretty bare in terms of “puzzleyness.” I also wanted to have an actual menu and a way to restart the current level, but I just didn’t get to implementing it.
• I misspelled the name of my game! :O I don’t know whether to chalk this up to being tired or what, but yes, it’s spelled ‘Spittoon,’ not ‘Spitoon.’ I didn’t name my game til right toward the end, and although I’m usually a pretty decent speller most of the time, this time I got it wrong. A 5-second Google check could have shown me I had it wrong, but it just didn’t occur to me until the next day to do so. At this point, I can either fix the spelling for the post-compo version, or leave it as is and just call it my own. Does anyone have any preference on this? Should I leave it “Spitoon” or should I fix it and call it “Spittoon” from now on?

For the Future

Shortfalls aside, I really did have a blast participating, and I absolutely plan on being in future competitions for Ludum Dare. Feedback has been wonderful and it’s so encouraging to hear people’s thoughts about the game. I’m also planning on releasing a “post-competition” version of the game with all the bug fixes, sound effects, and additional levels I wanted to include in the original version. Hopefully, work schedule and family life permitting, I’ll be able to put that out sometime in the next 2 or 3 weeks. Thank you for reading and thanks to everyone for making this a great experience! I’ve already played quite a few of the other entries, and I’m terribly impressed; I can’t wait to play even more!

I uploaded the timelapse ( Part1, Part2) for my game OK…Now this is akward, and I thought it was time to make a public post-mortem.

This is how I’ve made a game I’m not very happy with :

What went right/What helped

Ritual Hot Chocolate

This was my third Ludum Dare, and as usual, just after I discoverd the theme, I went to my favorite café and ordered a hot chocolate. That’s how I got my ideas on LD21 and LD22, and that how I got it on LD23. Honestly, there is nothing better than drinking a hot chocolate under the sun in the morning, far away from your computer, with a sheet of paper and a pen, to find the inspiration.

Warming up

Three weeks before the Ludum Dare, I decided to warm up and to start working on a new game. My objective was to finish it before the LD, and I failed, but I don’t care because I’ve tried my tools, discoverd new way to code, improved my drawing, did some researches for audio tool…to put it in a nutshell : I was ready !

Various inspiration sources

It’s pretty impossible to create something totally new. I know that. So I always look for things that I like to be inspired by. This time, the game was inspired by a Garfunkel and Oates’ song, I Don’t Know Who You Are, in which a girl is embarassed because she doesn’t know who is the guy speaking to her, and a scene from Human Traffic  in which two characters meet in the bar, have nothing to say to each other, and imagine what this scene would be if they were both honest to each other.
The girl who doesn’t recognize a guy + the bar + the difference between thoughts and acts + the akwardness…I got my game !

Watching/listening these inspiration from time to time during the making of the game was helpful to remind me what I was trying to do.

IRC french chanel

We were around 20 french jamers on a irc chanel during the whole LD, and it was great to share our ideas, our problems, our prototypes. I didn’t ask for much help (except trivial details like : which color should I choose for her shoes?) but it is always great to feel you’re not alone.

Tools

I’m starting to be very familiar with Adventure Game Studio and GraphicsGale. I exactly know what I can and what I can’t do. Useful knowledge of course because then, it was easy to know what game could be made.

Partying

On saturday night, I was invited to a party and was planing to decline to work on my game. But then I thought : Fuck it ! It’s saturday night ! I think I had the best meal of the whole Ludum Dare ( bruschettas, five cheeses tortelini, salmon spaghettis and tiramisu, with some pastis and wine of course…Thanks Jehanne) and I got the occasion to tell some non-gamers people what I was doing this week end. « -Wow ! Is it possible to make a game in 48h ? » « -Fuck yeah it’s possible ! And I’m gonna prove it ! ». I found A LOT of motivation there.

Live beta-testing

I got lucky because sunday, a friend came by to my appartement (to give me a crappy Cathleen Montana DVD…do you remember Cathleen Montana ? That show was awesome ^^!). So I asked her to beta test what I have made so far, and of course, it’s very helpful to actually SEE someone playing your game. You can see the smiles, the laughters, the boring moments…JUST GREAT ! (Thank you Gwen)

WHOA ! So many things went right ! How could it be I don’t like my game then ?! Let’s see…

(more…)

This is my port-mortem for Biodome, my 4th LD entry, first Jam.

The Good

» Working as a team was a lot more fun than expected. I was on a team of 5 people, talking over on skype. We’ve known each other for quite some time, and decided to get together to make games, and this was our first game, kind of a experiment, to find out how each other work and how to coordinate our efforts.

» Defining right at the start what each one would be doing. We are pretty much all pixel artists, but I’m the only one who can program, so that was decided beforehand (our composer also can, but we couldn’t sacrifice our only composer). Each of the other three were assigned to sprite work, scenery work and general artwork.

» Using Construct 2 to make the game. It’s easy to use, has a ton of cool features, and is completely stable (contrary to construct classic). But recent updates were kinda buggy, like using “or” statements with key press not working. Also, thanks to Construct’s HTML5 exporter, we could get a lot more people playing.

The Bad

» Our idea got too big. Starting with the concept of a puzzle platformer with 3 characters at the same time. First of all, a puzzle for LD is not a good idea, cuz it’s hard coming up with good puzzles in such short time. Second of all, platformers are not my strong point, so the movement was kinda weird at times. And finally, having to program 3 characters with different abilities and properties took a lot of time, and making the puzzles was hard because of their different characteristics.

» God-damn buttons and doors.

» The guy in charge of making the tilesets didn’t know anything about making tilesets. This resulted in it not being correctly aligned to the grid, tiles missing, tiles not tiling correctly… a big nuisance.

The Result

» People seemed to enjoy the game, despite a couple of flaws. They said the puzzles were good and they loved the music and the art, so I guess the whole team did a great job.

» We will be working on new projects now ^^ We formed a gamedev group, at Dead Pixel Games (temporary website), or @indiedeadpixel

My timelapse:

I wasn’t really expecting to do a postmortem, but due to all the feedback i ‘ve been getting i just said “Meh, why not?”.

First things first, here’s the timelapse and the game in question.

• What went right:

-The concept: Like i always do with most things, once i heard what the theme was  i started thinking ‘outside the box‘, something that no one would think about doing with the current theme….

Luckly for me, i got a great concept 30 minutes in, a heavilly-text story oriented game, something i never even attempted to make before, but i managed to stick with it till the end and the final result was pretty good.

-Coding: Due to my experience with the (not always so great) Game Maker, i was able to program the engine from scratch in only a few hours. Sure its not the greatest engine ever, but it gets all the work done which gave me plenty of time to concentrate on my cons. Speaking of cons…

-Graphics:  Usually, i would put this on what went wrong,  i’m just terrible at drawing but, for some reason, i really like how some of the art came out. Sure, its nothing spectacular compared with most of the games around here, it might even be on the ‘1|2 star type‘,  but I was really proud of what i did.

• What went wrong:

-Sounds/Music: I always have trouble with this part, i tried to make the sound effects myself (using the mic, etc), but i just couldn’t make them properly so, after wasting about 30 minutes, i went for the overused sfxr which can get the job done but the sounds get too similar to most of the games around the comp, but what really upset me the most was the lack of music. Music would be great for a heavilly-text oriented game but, after using OpenMPT for about 1 hour and getting near the deadline, i decided to scrap the music idea which really hurt the game in my opinion.

-’Lack‘ of content: For a 48h game, its quite a lenghty game, with several diferent paths and decisions to choose from, 7 diferent people and 4 ‘zones’. Unfortunately, i planned to have +10 people and 6 zones and 2 more paths but, around the end of the first day, i saw that i wouldn’t be able to do that, which made me rewrite most of the dialogs for the NPC’s, sometimes making them say and give the same quests on diferent paths. And, while its possible to have 2 ‘diferent endings’, they were rushed out on the last minute, something i REALLY didn’t want to for this kind of game…

Aside from all that:

-I was able to finish the game in 48 hours =D.

-About 40% of the time was spent writing dialog for the NPC’s.

-I learned alot on how to handle ‘dialogs’ and ‘scripted events’.

-Music making is not for me…

That’s about it i think.  I might plan to complete the game later on since i’m getting a lot of great feedback, something i wasn’t expecting from this kind of game .

Finally finished putting together the timelapse from my Ludum Dare weekend. So check it out!

*Edit* Changed the video to the correct timelapse – how embarrassment…

I also look forward to hearing more feedback on my game, so if you feel like playing a 3D survival horror/puzzle game, then the page for my Ludum Dare entry is here – [link]

Now its time to get voting. Ill probably do one more post, a summary of my favourite games from this LD (I plan to vote on at least a couple per page of entries, that way Ill get to at least see all of the games, and play a good deal of them too) Ive seen some pretty awesome ones so far!

Below is the timelapse for my game: Montezuma’s tomb. If you havent seen it you can go here to play/rate it. If you have already seen it, or just want to play it, then I recommend the post-compo version 0.3 as I have fixed some jumping and inventory issues.  Although still difficult, it plays much better.

Hello! Well, there’s a lot of games this time huh! And one of them is my 5th entry, a game I called “Jack”.

This time I went wild and made… a pixel-arted platformer! So cliché, I know, but it’s actually the first game of this kind I’ve personally put out there. The theme “Tiny World” once again didn’t fill me with delight, but here’s what I came up with: giants are threatening the Tiny Kingdom beneath them and you, as Jack, must defeat them! Obviously this is deriving from Jack the Giant Killer/Jack and the Beanstalk etc. It has a silly sense of humour, no less than 3 pieces of music I somehow found time to compose and can be finished in less than a minute.

You can play and rate it here

And here’s that timelapse!

Play the game here.

I originally wanted to make a platformer where you run around a tiny planet (like in the final game), but after a bit of coding I realized I had no idea how to actually make my idea work, and making levels would be really difficult to make. I decided to change it to a shooter. I got a little influence from the Sim portion Actraiser, I think.

Another idea I has while working on this was a puzzle/platformer involving Atlas carring the world around, throwing it around would cause changes in the world you’re in depending what you do with it. I couldn’t really think of a good way to use this idea, so I just continued with what I as making.

The game name is just a little pun I thought up, it’s a combination of Cosmic and Micro. I’m a little surprised no one else used the name, considering the theme.

What went right:

• Despite not having much experience using as3 or flashpunk, everything went pretty smoothly in the programming aspect.
• Graphics ended up alright
• Sound and music were ok, although I think the music it a bit bad in some places.

What went wrong:

• I tend to dislike games which have you doing the same thing repeatedly to get a high score and have no real goal, but that’s how my game ended up. I’m not too happy about that. Time constraints made me leave out features such as multiple stages and enemies.
• Apparently the difficulty was to high. If I added stages like I wanted I would’ve had it easy in the beginning and ramp up the difficulty later.

I’m planning on working on the game a little more to add stuff I left out.

Day 1 Time Lapse:

Day 2 Time Lapse:

Check out this timelapse for Invasion Of The Trivials made in Unity!

I did it in the style of The Humble Indie Bundle’s Broadside Express Timelapse!

Play the game here!

Pocket Strife Entry

Session 1 [ Fri Apr 20 20:56:25 -> Sat Apr 21 02:22:08 ] 5.5 hours

Two hours in:

Figure 1. iso-mine-craft shows it’s sexy side.

At this point I felt pretty proud of myself. I’m two hours in, and have something that #ludiumdare and #love actually like the look of. If there’s anything I learned from minecraft, is that a lot of low res crap makes one big hig-res-low-res thing that looks good. Of course, I’m totally bombing the framerate here.

Five hours in:

Figure 2. I’m starting to realize that this was a bad idea

For the next three hours, I spend the night trying to figure out how the hell to a) make the performance smooth (e.g. only draw the tiles on screen, don’t just test if they’re on the screen) and the math to make the mouse work. I’m getting at best 46 fps (where it should be closer to 1000 in this case). I’m getting discouraged, and decide to go to bed, as I have a friend from California coming in, and a band to try out for that night. I spend the night chilling, playing guitar and smoking shisha with my girlfriend. Obviously I’m not taking this too seriously, but I did plan on using Sunday to finish the LD and make a “game” out of what I have.

Session 2 [ Sun Apr 22 ~13:30:00 -> Sun Apr 22 20:24:06 ] 7 hours

Eight hours in (5.5 left):

Figure 3. Now we’re getting somewhere!

I came back and slept in until 1:30ish on sunday, and started at it again. I decided to use all the shortcut tricks I knew to get the framerate back up, and used some seriously dirty hacks to get the mouse to work (had to get the location during the draw phase, and then hide the mouse to avoid suspicion!). I’m not proud of them, but it beats spending hours trying to figure out the math myself (sorry internet, you weren’t very helpful). At this point I started bashing away at the game, and things moved very quickly. I had four building types, I integrated the health bar, and you couldn’t place buildings on tiles that were too blue or white. Later, because this wasn’t dynamic enough, I wasn’t able to include the cool maps and such, like lava planet and the moon.

Nine hours in (4.5 left):

Hard coding only four items really came back and bit me in the ass, but I knew what I wanted for game play, so it was not worth the effort making the system dynamic. At this point, I have added the territory flag, but I still haven’t gotten the AI in yet.

Twelve hours in (1.5 left):

Now the AI is in, and working at full stupid. Using a bit of math, and tweaking it until the computer made what I wanted it to make, life was born. The computer is faster than crap, and doesn’t really think much, but it’s there, it’s pretty, and it’s hard to beat. I like that. At this point I start integrating the lovemenu library that I have.

Let’s not forget the kitten challenge! I spend the remainder of the time testing the game, and fixing small bugs.

Thirteen hours in (0.5 left):

The game is done, and it’s time to start packaging for distribution. I take pretty screenshots, and shove them into my repo. I run my build scripts and upload the final product up to mediafire. I fill out the information on ludumdare and leave to have burritos at Moe’s. I was unimpressed by my framerate and graphics, sad that I had to include the mouse hack, but still rather proud of my product.

Total: 13.5 hours

Pocket Strife Entry

Continuing in the glorious tradition of timelapse recording my entries, this time with a much better framerate.

I did most of the development of my entry on a laptop while at a dance workshop weekend (as a tech/helper, I had a lot of free time), so sometimes I am off doing things and the timelapse freezes on one image for a few seconds.

But if you’re interested in seeing me draw my “art”, watch away!
(I accept no liability for any eye bleeding that may occur while watching my art skills)

Entry
Post-mortem

Hey !
I’m Eldaryze, the programmer and sound designer of the getRandomName() Jam Team.
Here is my 72h Timelapse of the game making.

Check our entry here !

While Zeik and I figure out our post-mortem thoughts and plans for future tweaks to our game, have a timelapse video courtesy of Cake! And since she’s the artist and designer of Pow! Pow! Pow!, be prepared for lots of colors and cute little aliens. (As well as not-so-cute bigger aliens.)

Play/Rate “Pow! Pow! Pow!” Here

Brief Summary
- Character and asset creation
- Environment design
- Inspiration from The Twilight Zone
- Designing a set of cohesive enemies
- Planning storyboard ideas
- Level design through XML on Dreamweaver and figuring out exact pixel positioning through InDesign
- Brainstorming harmonious typography combinations (Existence Light with Arvo)
- Brief poor attempts at sound editing and sound effects
- Random one-second blip of Michelangelo’s “Pieta”
- Lots of Twitter and IRC shots. Yikes.
- WEBCAM PHOTO TIME!!!
- Excluded: All the facebooking and AIM-ing that ensued

Well, we finished. Barely. With 5 minutes to go I was making a build and realized there was no game icon so I quickly let my artist know, she tossed one in the dropbox, and the build finished with two minutes before the deadline. Our finished game is called “Aqua Wars”.

CLICK HERE TO PLAY THE GAME!

WHAT WENT RIGHT?

The art. The artist for our group was Kiki Snell and I usually have her doing the art for me whenever I do game jams. She did a great job and threw together this awesome little timelapse video to show her progress…
http://youtu.be/vRduXqTZ3CA

WHAT WENT WRONG?

It took far to long for us to figure our our idea and gameplay. I had a few ideas for some of the themes but wasn’t expecting Tiny World to win. We kind of came up with a rough plan and fleshed it out as we went along. With past game jams I’ve had more time to focus but I was gone from my house until Sunday afternoon and was just able to do a little bit of coding with my laptop. Once I was home on Sunday we made a lot of progress but then I had work all day Monday and only a few hours to make any finishing touches. The next time I plan on taking off time from work and putting aside the entire weekend to completely devote it to making a better entry.

We started tossing ideas around as soon as the theme was announced and had an idea for making a city building sim type game but base around a microscopic Sea Monkey type creature. That idea didn’t really stick for long but we had already gotten a decent amount of art for an aquarium type setting so we kept going in that route. For the first 24 hours we didn’t really have much down as far as gameplay went. We thought maybe something like a Tamagotchi where you would just care for the fish, but that sounded more like an interactive screensaver and we wanted something a bit more fun. We ended up turning the assets we had into a sort of tower defense type game. You guide a small school of fish around, clicking other types of fish that appear to attack them, and buy more fish, feed your fish, and buy plants for the aquarium. I’m not sure I’d really call our game a success, even though we finished I think we could have done something better…

Here’s my time-lapse video of the making of Zephyr:

Play Zephyr

This was my first time participating in Ludum Dare, and it was an awesome and fun experience. I wasn’t aware of that I was able to get so much work done in that short amount of time!

Here’s the game:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=11939

And here’s the timelapse:
http://youtu.be/-72jelVP6T4?hd=1

Here’s a time lapse from last weekend’s coding/graphics/sfx/music binge, also known as Ludum Dare! The soundtrack in the video is the music I created for the game. You can check out the game here!

As an added bonus, here’s the original “design document” I carefully crafted before writing a single line of code.

I’ve never participated in LD before, and I wasn’t planning on it this time, either. Then suddenly, with only 10 hours until midnight, and with the knowledge that I wouldn’t have time to work on the game on Sunday, I decided, “What the heck? I’ll go for it!”

So I toiled away for about 11 hours (timelapse here) and made a game.

Then when I went to submit the game to LD48 I realized that my game didn’t qualify because I didn’t follow the rules. Oops! I didn’t realize I couldn’t use middleware and pre-made assets for the Dare. But it appeared that the Game Jam was more relaxed about things like that, so I decided I’d submit it as a Jam entry. Also, the extra 24 hours would give me some more time to work on it.

After about three and a half hours of sleep on Sunday night, I suddenly woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. It seemed like as good of a time as any to work on my entry some more. So I spent the next few hours (timelapse part 2 here) adding a main menu, some GUI screens, Playtomic statistic logging, and displaying some of those statistics to you when you lose the game.

I’m a noob to game jams and I feel like a noob to Unity. A lot of the things I did on Saturday are things I’d never attempted before in Unity. It was a great learning experience and I really enjoyed it.

I’m glad I could be a part of the historic 10 year anniversary Ludum Dare 23 in which over 1,000 new games were created. Congratulations to everyone who succeeded!

And with that, I present to you:

Be Tiny, World!