So now that everything has settled, I’d like to take some time to explain the process that went behind making Fromulus.

Firstly, I spent most of the time disconnected from the internet.  This wasn’t exactly on purpose, but I think it helped me focus a bit more.

The competition started at 9pm my time, and I devoted the first night to ideas and sleep.  I came up with a few decent ideas, which I blogged about earlier.  I settled on Fromulus as it seemed like the best option.  I woke up a bit later than I had really intended, but got to work fairly straight-away on art.  I did all of the art in one sitting, which was probably close to 8 hours.  Most of that was playing around with different styles for things.

Originally, the grass was a standard green, and the ground a purplish-brown.  I opened up the hue editor in Photoshop and played around with it until it became red.  For some reason, it just seemed a lot better.  You compare:

Red vs. Green: Fight!

After choosing this odd palette, I decided that I needed some equally weird plant life.  I decided to go with spirals, as they were very visually pleasing (to me, anyhow!).  They were a bit of a pain to do, but I think it was worth it.

A very large bulk of the time then came doing animations.  I drew the Slimer first, but ended up redrawing him later as his animation didn’t look great.  Next came the Chomper.  Each has two animations, and fits into a 16×16 block.  The ice cube and fire graphics are just drawn on top with code.  When I get more time, I will likely draw each type of creature on fire, to make the animations look better.  Here’s what the Chomper’s spritesheet looks like.  The first row are of him walking, and the second are of him getting thrown back.

Chomp chomp chomp

The largest animation is, of course, Fromulus himself.  He has five different animations, which all needed to be smooth, as you obviously see him the most.  His death animation is the longest, at 10 frames.  Here’s what his spritesheet looks like.  In order of rows, the animations are: walk, cast, jump, fall, die, and then the rest of die.

I am a wizard!

I had very clearly two images in my mind:

1. When he falls, his robes needed to fly up.  Although there isn’t really enough room to show some boxers with hearts on them, I did manage to show a little skin.  (How’s that for ‘humor?’)
2. When he dies, he should disappear and his hat should float down.  This is definitely my favorite animation.

On to the coding portion, things went relatively smoothly.  I used the wonderful flixel library, with which I am very comfortable, as I have been using it for quite some time.  I made a poor choice in map editor decisions and went with one that is a little flaky (Wasabi M) over Ogmo Editor, just as it was easier to use the maps straight away with out delay.  Ordinarily, Wasabi M is a great editor… however, this time around it had all sorts of problems, namely not letting me see the entire map and then, towards the end of the competition, eating the map that I had drawn out.  So, in the last minutes, I scrambled to make the map you see now–which is why it’s not very good at all.

I actually made some sound effects, but you don’t hear them in game.  Why is this, you might ask?  Well, sfxr only makes wavs, and I didn’t have any software to convert them to MP3.  I tried an online converter, but Flash wouldn’t take the files.   So, I will fix that in a later version (or just embed the sfxr player into flixel).  This really made me mad, but I didn’t really have any time to keep fussing with them.

Before the competition started, I played around with musagi to see how to make chiptunes.  The plan was that if I had any left over time, I’d write a track.  However, before the competition even started, I came to a grand realization: I really, really suck at making music.  So, I gave up on even thinking about trying it.

Anyways, that’s pretty much the tale of making Fromulus.  I enjoyed the experience thoroughly, and will definitely be competing in more Ludum Dares as I can.

Edit: removed responses to things on the voting page, as I see you can make comments there.

Now the part you’ve all been waiting for: here’s a shot of what I’ve done since the competition ended:

Look ma, I have the fire spell selected!