PLAY SPAWN

I didn’t keep very good notes while I was developing this weekend, so I’m going to try to just list out approximately what happened when before I forget too much. I’m referring to my time-lapse video to help me with the exact times.

Friday

4:00 pm – Took a short nap and then bought some groceries so I would be well rested and fed for the upcoming competition.

6:00 pm – Theme is announced! ‘Alone’.
Initially I am not too crazy about the theme. It seems a too broad. I imagine everyone just making standard platformers and dungeon crawlers and saying ‘the main character is alone’. I suppose that would happen with any theme.

6:00 – 6:45 pm – Brainstorming and sketching ideas.
Some idea fragments:

• the last leaf clinging to a tree at the start of winter
• the last chick left all alone in the nest
• a lone amoeba swimming through a vast ocean
• piloting a ship through empty space
• a dandelion spore

6:45 pm – Open Flash and TextMate and start prototyping the basic movement and gameplay

7:45 pm – Briefly consider using Flixel. Decide not to due to my unfamiliarity with it.

10:00 pm – With a rough prototype complete, I stop coding and write a quick blog post.
I spend about 30–45 minutes sketching character designs in my sketchbook.

11:00 pm Sleep!
Saturday

5:30 am – I woke up on Saturday feeling refreshed and was glad that my game concept and prototype still seemed viable after sleeping on it.

6:30 am After breakfast I immediately started working on the designs for my main amoeba character (in Illustrator).
After about an hour I had a basic design that worked so I brought it into Flash and started animating.

8:30 am – Design title screen

9:00 am – Change Nutrients from being Flash Sprites to bitmap objects that get blitted onto the background, hoping to improve performance.

10:00 am – Added the collected nutrients to the amoeba’s belly.
The game becomes pretty playable at this point. From here on I think I wasted a lot of time just playing my game.

10:30 am – Sound effects (sfxr & Sound Studio)

11:00 am – Added spawning animation.

1:30 pm – Added ‘New Species’ label

2:30 pm – Added some placeholder new creature graphics

3:00 pm – Added the menu for showing all the creatures you’ve spawned.

7:00 pm – Added background bubble graphics

8:00 pm – Remade title screen as multiple graphics instead of just one.

I was starting to feel really burned out at this point, so I wrote a quick blog post and thought I would go to bed. Instead, I spent another hour or so working on some background music (GarageBand).

 

Sunday

6:30 am – On Sunday I woke up feeling terrible. I was tired and my whole body was aching. I was not looking forward to spending another day in front of the computer, but I knew I only had a few more (big) things to finish.

7:00 am – The major thing remaining was to draw the graphics for all of my spawn creatures, so I got started on that first thing.
It took most of the morning.

10:45 am – Added different probabilities for which nutrients show up based on where you are in the ocean.
I took a few big missteps before I got this right.

12:00 pm – Fearing poor performance on older computers, I decided to change the game’s framerate from 60 to 30. Most of the movement in the game is framerate independent, but my amoeba animation had to be adjusted.

1:00 pm – Posted my finished game with 5 hours to spare! Woo hoo!