Here’s the postmortum I promised last week.  I haven’t read the comments on my entry yet and I wanted to get my thoughts down before I did.

THis LD48 was my third, if you don’t count the two that I intended to enter and never did.  My number one goal was to finish, and the number two goal was to do something fun.  I’m happy that I completed goal number one, but failed on goal number two.

Technically, I didn’t really even submit a game.  There is no real end condition or repeatable system that goes until you fail.  I never got a chance to actually implement the “monster at the gates” scenario, as I fought with a stupid bug at the end brought on by stupid changes on my stupid part.

What did I do wrong in the LD12?  I didn’t spend enough time on it.  I should have squeezed three or four more quality hours in.  My mother-in-law was visiting, and that led to the normal distractions as she visited with us and our newborn.  I probably could have completed something that resembled a game with a little more time, and I know that the time existed.  I just didn’t use it well.

I didn’t get any real animation done with the monsters or the dude.  It would have been nice, but time didn’t allow it.  I also used some sound, and while it wasn’t nearly to the level that I wanted it, I thought it was neat to hear the monsters gargle when they died and the arrow whisp away from the dude on the tower. 

I think my usage of the angle/power aiming mechanism was a bad idea.  I think I should have gone with the “point-and-click” method, which would have been easier for the user and fits better with the action oriented design.  The arrow was made up of separate graphics rotated to the closest 15 degree mark.  I could have implemented a rotation transformation, but that would have taken longer and probably been more CPU intensive.   

So what did I do right?

I met the theme of the Tower by simply having a tower in which the dude fired from.  I didn’t stop there, and created a middle floor from him to fire from and also made the doors at the bottom open and close.  The tower isn’t just a pretty graphic.  It’s functional and strategic.

The part I liked the most about my entry was the graphics.  Most of them were sketches from my initial game idea sheet.  I scanned it into the computer and photoshopped color into it and cut it into separate parts and images.  I think it gave my entry a unique style that I’d like to use again in a future competition.  I’m not a great artist, but I think if I don’t try to make everything perfect, it comes off better.  Reminds me a little of the original South Park or other ‘construction paper’ style.

Another thing that I really think I did well was keeping the coding distractions to a minimum.  By this, I mean that I didn’t get sidetracked coding something that wasn’t important ‘right now.’  In the past, I will start to code something that may come in handy later, but doesn’t really help me too much in completing more important foundation pieces.

So all in all, I think I did ok.  I can see that I learned some things from the last time around and I really look forward to taking the things I learned here for LD13 in December.  Same goals, but I will try to think through the game for a little while before coding to make sure that it is actually a game and hopefully fun. 

I would call my game Incoming Fodder both a minor success and a minor failure.

My goal for this competition was to create sound and music in the game, and of course it must be playable. So I made a lot of sound effect, some good some bad, mostly bad when things get crowded there are so many sfx playing it’s annoying. The music, or what you might call it (You can kill the music) was a complete failure. There was a MOD player lib for flash that I though would be awesome to use, took about an hour to get it to work.

Then I needed to create music. I suck at composing, I know it, doesn’t matter what tools I use, it’s just awful. I might have a tune in my head, trying to get the music to sound like that never ever happens. So I scribble down something trying to make it sound like music, copy paste. Crap, I better sing the tune next time.

I chose flash 9 as platform, that was good. Learned a few valuable things, like it’s not easy to pause things running with event listeners without preparing for that before you build your system. I had to skip pause, lost some time there.

Game play wasn’t as developed as I wanted. I really don’t know why I didn’t have time to improve here, I picked the idea of the game so I could spend more time on polish, but I guess I wasn’t interested enough in the idea to really devote to it. I need to be quicker in this area. I need to focus on that in the next LD.

Coding OOP is lovely, I had one moment of awesomeness this time. I’ve built a tower that can shoot arrows, then I built a castle to protect, after a while I realized that the castle also should shoot arrows, so I made castle inherit tower and voilà it shoots arrows! I did have to make it own 3 more towers to make it have 4 arrow shooters.

Graphics was the least of my priorities and it turned out ok, the defeat screen it the best of the whole game.

So this is ‘Tower’ since I didn’t bother to come up with a better name.  (I did all my naming duty with Fiona’s Purple Reign.)

The object, of course, is to defend your tower from the onslaught of baddies.  Unfortunately, there is only one type of monster, but each wave has it’s own speed and interval.  Use the arrows to move the guy up and down the tower, or left and right across the top.  A/D change the angle and W/S changes the power of your arrows.

I’ll probably write a post-mortum later, but you can download Tower.

Defend the castle!
Click with the mouse to build a tower. Ctrl-Click to build a casino.

Download CrossPlatform 2.6Mb

Need Flash 9 installed

Edit: To all of you who think my game is too hard, I have beaten it twice! =P And the laser collision is just box-based, so if you shoot it diagonally you have tons of whitespace to possibly hit the things with. Also, a bug escaped the final version so the non-evil clouds sometimes get stuck indefinitely. It’s fixed locally but not in the zip; oh well.

Here’s the link, includes source (python + pygame) and windows executable (not guaranteed to work, though I have been told it works):

http://shared.nincheats.net/zips/ld12-femme-tower.zip

(If it doesn’t work try: http://67.212.186.26/~jach/shared/zips/ld12-femme-tower.zip )

Will add post-compo thoughts here later. NOW!

It’s about 20 minutes after now. So, what I did horribly wrong this time around:

I slept in too late twice, got distracted by all sorts of things, felt horrible demotivation and considered dropping out for most of the compo. I also didn’t pace myself well (submitted about 2 minutes prior to the end) so the art and sound could have been slightly better.

This game seemed pretty hard to me and to my EXE tester, but I assure you it is beatable. =P

Big disappointment with getting sound to work in Processing (some Java Weirdness), but I’m generally pretty happy with the game as it stands.

Final version

Finally, I finished… It took me about 18 hours or so of work to get this up and running… and I had to do a plane travel from Lisbon to Dublin in the meantime and all…

This was by far the smoothest compo I was ever in, probably because the game isn’t as ambitious as my previous attempts… I don’t know whatever I should be happy for finishing a product (complete in terms of menus, music, sfx, even a pause key!) or unhappy because it’s so unambitious… I’m getting old, methinks…

Anyway:

You can download it here (Game)

Source (C++/DX9) can be downloaded here (Source)

You can also download a more complete journal here (Log)

Timelapse can be downloaded here (*.wmv)

And I think that’s it, looking forward to judging you all (eheheh, sounds funny said like that)…

Covenant, signing out…

It’s a block that jumps on blocks. Soon it will be a ninja in a tower.

Ok. So I’m done! Thanks to timezone, I’m early too.

This has been my first competition, and it’s been a lot of fun.

Download it: http://www.ingeniumdigital.com/ldimg/TowerOfDoom.zip

Readme it: http://www.ingeniumdigital.com/ldimg/readme.txt

With all hope (due to its lack of being tested) it’ll actually work. It’s written in C++ with SFML. I’ve licensed the source under the MIT license. If this is a problem, yell.

Stay tuned for a postmortem and perhaps a less broken build after I sleep.

I felt like I picked up some speed, here is something remotely playable: http://enedahl.com/ld12/incomingfodder01.html

Going to bed now. Oh, the music is just a placeholder, a demo .mod file.

So, my idea was to create a game around an air-traffic control tower in a troubled country.

Players have to manage their air space and land all the planes successfully.  Planes refuel and stock up on aid supplies to deliver to the people.  Take off too early, and you don’t move any supplies.  Land too late, and you crash.

Can YOU keep all your birds in the air?

Hum, well, here’s my breakfast. Wasn’t easy to build The Tower, even though I cheated and it’s leaning against the glass. Now about coding a game.. or even finding an idea for one.. that will come next.

Im going for a Tower Defence with resource and upgrade trees.

Title screen working, and filling the screen with towers works also.

A sneak peak into Galcon for InstantAction reveals this tower of Brawndo Cans!!!