{"author_name":"stefan","cat":"LD #28","comments":[],"epoch":1387228800,"likes":1,"metadata":{"p_key":"34507","p_author":"stefan","p_authorkey":"21963","p_urlkey":"70055","p_title":"Finished \u2013 Key by Key","p_cat":"LD #28","p_event":"LD28","p_time":"1387228800","p_likes":"1","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"21963","us_name":"stefan","us_username":"stefan","event_start":"1386892800","event_key":"20","event_name":"LD28"},"text":"<p>I finished my second game in my second participation in Ludum Dare <img src=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-includes\/images\/smilies\/simple-smile.png\" alt=\":)\" class=\"wp-smiley\" style=\"height: 1em; max-height: 1em;\" \/> I&#8217;m proud of the result, even though it could obviously be improved with some more time. I want to give you an overview of what went well and what didn&#8217;t and the tools I used. I hope you enjoy this collection.<\/p>\n <p>In the course of the weekend I used the following software packages for creating the game:<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>IDE: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eclipse.org\/orion\/\">Eclipse Orion<\/a>\u00a0&#8211; an development environment mainly for HTML5\/javascript running in the browser . The UI is familiar if you are used to eclipse, even though some things are different, in particular the main menu. It&#8217;s a nice tool to continue coding on a netbook or tablet if you want to go somewhere else \ud83d\ude09 There is also a nice GIT integration.<\/li>\n <li>Framework: <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/GoodBoyDigital\/pixi.js\">pixi.js<\/a> &#8211; an HTML5 rendering engine using wegGL or canvas elements. It&#8217;s a small but powerful library. I used it before for small projects for the <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/github\/game-off-2013\">github game off 2013<\/a> and the warmup weekend. It helps a lot in handling sprite sheets, animations and rendering. Give it a try!<\/li>\n <li>Map editor: <a href=\"https:\/\/sourceforge.net\/projects\/tiled\/\">Tiled<\/a> &#8211; a level editor which saved me a lot of time. Instead of coding the level data by hand I parsed the JSON files exported by Tiled and used them in the game &#8211; a great speed up in creating levels. The six levels took me a little more than 30 minutes.<\/li>\n <li>Graphics: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.codeandweb.com\/texturepacker\">TexturePacker<\/a> &#8211; a small yet powerful program for creating sprite sheets from many small pictures. It is not free but the features of the lite version are still fine.<\/li>\n <li>Graphics: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gimp.org\/\">Gimp<\/a> &#8211; an evergreen in image manipulation. I have always been using it and never regret it <img src=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-includes\/images\/smilies\/simple-smile.png\" alt=\":)\" class=\"wp-smiley\" style=\"height: 1em; max-height: 1em;\" \/><\/li>\n <li>Sound: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bfxr.net\/\">Bfxr<\/a> and <a href=\"www.inudge.net\">inudge<\/a> &#8211; websites for creating sounds and background music for games. inudge badly lacks an export feature but the both programs still helped me a lot.<\/li>\n <li>Sound: <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/wibblymat\/ld24\/blob\/master\/autotracker.py\">autotracker<\/a> &#8211; a genius tool for creating random songs in a matter of seconds. This is great for adding background music in the last minutes.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>I have probably skipped some software I used, but these were the ones I used most or used them for the first time this weekend. All of them worked out nicely. I do recommend them all.<\/p>\n <div style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-28\/?action=preview&amp;uid=21963\"><img alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/compo2\/308734\/21963-shot0.png\" width=\"600\" height=\"600\" \/><\/a><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Screenshot of my game<\/p><\/div>\n <p>What went well:<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>I used an IDE I&#8217;ve never used before. The same holds for the framework, the level editor and so on. Everything worked unexpectedly smooth in using these new tools <img src=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-includes\/images\/smilies\/simple-smile.png\" alt=\":)\" class=\"wp-smiley\" style=\"height: 1em; max-height: 1em;\" \/><\/li>\n <li>I&#8217;m very unexperienced in creating graphics assets. That&#8217;s why I decided to draw all images in a pixaleted way. This worked out nicely and I was surprised of the result which I think is quite good for me.<\/li>\n <li>Using a level editor was a good idea. I thought that it may be more work to read alien file formats than hard-coding the levels by hand. This is not the case: I recommend you to use level editors if possible, you will be much faster for game like the one I wrote.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>What didn&#8217;t went well:<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>Time management&#8230; I didn&#8217;t do much on saturday and sunday morning, but worked the whole sunday night. I should start to work hard earlier \ud83d\ude09<\/li>\n <li>The background music was made within minutes and I think you will hear that. Maybe its a good decision to mute the game &#8211; I added a button for doing so in the lower right corner \ud83d\ude09 Maybe I should focus on sounds in the next Ludum Dare.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>Obviously, this game is not finished yet. There is some basic gameplay but I have lots of ideas that are waiting to be added. I like what has been done so far and therefore think of extending it the next days. This is what could or should be done in the next days or weeks:<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li><del>done: Fix typos in the description (it was late&#8230;)<\/del><\/li>\n <li>add images for keys that are currently active<\/li>\n <li>add tiles that could only be passed from one direction<\/li>\n <li>create shoes, hats, &#8230; that influence gameplay<\/li>\n <li>add enemies<\/li>\n <li>add more levels<\/li>\n <li>create better background music<\/li>\n <li>move some reusable code to my template project<\/li>\n <li>implement all the things mention in your comments <img src=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-includes\/images\/smilies\/simple-smile.png\" alt=\":)\" class=\"wp-smiley\" style=\"height: 1em; max-height: 1em;\" \/><\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>All in all I really like my game, even though I think my last one for LD26 was a little better. But this depends on your personal taste. I learned a lot of new tools and had fun which is what I was aiming for. To that extend this weekend was a great success!<\/p>\n <p>I&#8217;m looking forward to reading your comments on this blog post, my game and about the experiences you made last weekend. Thanks for reading this post and now have fun playing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-28\/?action=preview&amp;uid=21963\">Key by Key<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n <p>Tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/post-mortem\/\" rel=\"tag\">post-mortem<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/postmortem\/\" rel=\"tag\">postmortem<\/a><\/p>","time":"December 16th, 2013 4:20 pm","title":"Finished \u2013 Key by Key"}