I moved house recently and had a pile of things to do, so spending 48 hours making a game for Ludum Dare would have been really irresponsible.

Anyway. Here’s the game I made for Ludum Dare:

 

“A big adventure for a tiny hero – you are, literally, a single pixel. It’s the only way a game this big will fit on a single screen! “

I’m in the UK, so the theme was announced at 2am, which is a mixed blessing.  Took a while to get up and running, but I could stay up on the Sunday to get things finished. Well, as finished as they could be. I foolishly left the actual level design to last, so the map itself is a little rushed – positioning is all good, but I’d have liked to spend more time polishing the graphics.

It was quite a while before I settled on a game idea. I’d wanted to make something more quirky and out-there than a platform exploration adventure, but I got hooked on playing as a single pixel for the theme – instead of making a game that was small, make a big game shrunk down.

Most of the gameplay was planned before I started but the fog-of-war was a last minute addition which I think it adds a lot to the feel of exploration in the game. And they say feature creep is a bad thing! That said, I coded pushable rocks that I was planning puzzles for but didn’t get time to fully include on the map. They still provide barriers and the like, but none of the Boulderdash-style tunneling I’ve envisioned. I have a page or two of scribbled notes for things like proximity mines, different enemy behaviours, and various other plans and schemes that fell by the wayside.

 I plan to work on this game some more in the next week or two and make a full version with more bells and whistles, probably picking up some of the above ideas. If anyone has other suggestions for improvement in a ‘full’ version I’d love the hear.

This was built from scratch using Flash, Audacity, MS Paint and a few too many cans of Red Bull. I use C# in my day job, so it was nice to delve into ActionScript 3 again, even if it does mean I keep hitting the wrong shortcuts in the office. I didn’t use any existing libraries or old code bases or anything, as I wanted to do it all from a blank page onwards. I used Gimp a little for some graphics, but mainly Paint as it just really like the zoomed in view with a grid and thumbnail for drawing pixelly things.

I probably spent too long trying out silly voices for the game when I should have been coding, but I wanted to give some character to the little glittery hero and, to be honest, I was having fun and that’s what games are all about! I used Audacity was for recording my voice and adjusting the pitch – I’ve been told Glitter Pixel is cute, so I’ll be working on notching my voice up a few octaves in real life to see if it works for me too.

Now I’m playing through other people’s games and some great things have been made this weekend, whether highly polished or rough around the edges but imaginative and quirky.  It’s all good and I’m glad I was part of it and will definitely be doing this again.

Finally, in hindsight, trying the learn the Ukulele so I could play some backing music may not have been the best idea of time management…

Anyway: Play / Rate Glitter Pixel here