{"assets":[{"original":"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/hanoka.jpg","local":"\/data\/posts\/2014\/08\/8a8a38c8debbe6dcc95f7967b88e7b44.jpg"}],"author_link":"author\/spotco\/","author_name":"spotco","cat":"LD #30","categories":["LD #30"],"comments":[],"epoch":1409363280,"event":"LD30","likes":4,"metadata":{"p_key":"81931","p_author":"spotco","p_authorkey":"0","p_urlkey":"292663","p_title":"Dreaming Knight: Postmortem","p_cat":"LD #30","p_event":"LD30","p_time":"1409363280","p_likes":"4","p_comments":"0","p_status":"WAYBACK","us_key":null,"us_name":null,"us_username":null,"event_start":"1408665600","event_key":"24","event_name":"LD30"},"source_url":"2014\/08\/30\/dreaming-knight-postmortem\/","text":"

Finished my second LD a week ago and just managed to get some time to add some post-jam fixes.\nAdded some enemy-ai bugfixes, all the random art that I didn\u2019t get to in the 72 hours, and FULLSCREEN MODE<\/strong> (that last one\u2019s a big one since you\u2019re swinging the mouse everywhere in this game!).<\/p>\n

If you haven\u2019t yet tried my game, give it a shot! (It\u2019s a lot of fun I promise :))\nhttp:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-30\/?action=preview&uid=35477<\/a><\/p>\n

\"35477-shot2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

For the less video-game-playing inclined, I\u2019d describe it as a top-down brawler with RPG (upgrade tree!) and Bullet-Hell (see picture) elements.\nIt\u2019s got two parallel styles of play (sword or crossbow), 3 bosses, some semblance of story and LEL FUNNEH MEMES<\/em><\/strong> for all the humor points. (I\u2019d say they\u2019re relatively tasteful and fitting though\u2026)<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll also take this as an opportunity to write a short post-mortem (since I do love reading others on the front page).<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Real Life Stuff:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I met up with my old friend Josh<\/a> for the Apportable<\/a> meetup in San Francisco, we were planning on doing this event for a while (and he drove all the way from LA to get here \u2013 true sacrifice!).\nThe meetup itself was pretty dissapointing (I think we only say maybe 1-2 other serious teams there), but can\u2019t complain about free food.\nWe did, however, meet up with our 3rd teammate there, Josephine.<\/p>\n

I wish I took some photos of the meetup, but I\u2019ll just have to settle with the dinner-after photo:<\/p>\n

\"10548052_688194937916099_4136138774195406890_o\"<\/a><\/p>\n

(bottom-right 3 of the photo).<\/p>\n

We spent the rest of the weekend working at Intel HQ in San Jose (Thanks Josephine!).\nI also remember being woken up at 2am by the earthquake that made national news<\/a> while sleeping in a cubicle. Wasn\u2019t too bad in the south bay.\nGame Design:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I went in really wanting to do something involving RPG elements.\nThe main influence I had was a game I played during the last LD called Hanoka:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.newgrounds.com\/portal\/view\/638425<\/a><\/p>\n

\"hanoka\"<\/a>\n(If you haven\u2019t, you should totally play this game. It\u2019s fucking glorious)<\/p>\n

And this talk by\u00a0Jan Willem Nijman of Vlambeer:<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U<\/a><\/p>\n

(You should also watch this if you haven\u2019t, I\u2019d almost consider it required for anyone making any sort of action game).<\/p>\n

We settled on the idea of a dream world pretty quick.\nHere\u2019s the general progression:\n\u201cTraveling between dream worlds\u201d -> \u201cStories from multiple people dreaming\u201d -> \u201cKid in school dreaming about different historical worlds\u201d -> \u201cminigame-based game with different dreams (dead end)\u201d -> \u201ckid sleeping in class dreaming he\u2019s a superhero\u201d -> \u201ckid sleeping in class dreaming he\u2019s a zelda-style knight\u201d -> \u201cthe bosses are the other kids in the class\u201d -> \u201chis teacher is the princess\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Progress:<\/strong><\/p>\n

The original idea was 4 directions in the same vein as the 2d Zeldas.\nDidn\u2019t take too many in-progress caps, but check out this ridiculously fun looking prototype:<\/p>\n

\"Capture<\/a><\/p>\n

Sometime around midnight friday, one of us said \u201cWouldn\u2019t it be a lot more fun if we just kept out the sword out the whole time?\u201d\nAfter that, it naturally progressed to a sword-follow-mouse and then a swing-mouse-to-swing-sword style of mechanic.\nI usually like to have a fun prototype by the first night, so we were making decent progress. Sure, the game was just \u201cgreen ball swinging grey stick at blue boxes\u201d, but we could tell the \u201cswing sword\u201d mechanic would probably feel pretty great with some knockback, explosions, freeze frame and screen shake (watch the vlambeer video to know why!).<\/p>\n

I do also remember spending a LOT of time working against the flixel hitboxes (specifically Flixel Powertools). I remember just being pretty annoyed the pixel-perfect collision not working properly (basically, any time you have an rotation, scale or offset).<\/p>\n

The next day we met up at Intel HQ and worked on getting the game feel right, and I think we implemented one enemy (the small spider I think).\nWe were able to use just about everything the two artists made with little iteration, so kept on a good pace.<\/p>\n

\"Capture<\/a><\/p>\n

The day after (Sunday), I was feeling pretty behind so I made a goal of finishing all the enemies (small spider, big spider, jelly, boar) and 3 bosses (snake, spider and fireball). This was basically a day straight of coding\/art.\nGot all of those done around 2am monday, but was feeling pretty stressed out about the status of the game by then.\nStayed up and implemented most of the UI for the shop.<\/p>\n

Woke up Monday 11-am (took the day off work!) ish feeling REALLY stressed. The game at that stage was just 3 untuned bosses, 4 enemies, and a couple of ideas on how to connect everything together.\nLuckily, was saved by Josh. Since the art was mostly finished, I had him go on level design (enemy patterns, stats tuning) for the rest of the day. This involved some coding for Josh (first time ever I think?) but mainly a lot of playtesting and number-tuning. He did a really great job (you can tell just by the enemy placement and the balance with powerups!).<\/p>\n

\"Capture<\/a>\n(Level code written by our artist!).<\/p>\n

I managed to finish up the scene transitions, shop upgrades, bugfixes and everything else in the last 6 hours (that was the REAL crunch time!)\nDid everything sound effect\/music related in the last hour before submission. Luckily, I had a ton of general-purpose sound effects from my soon-to-be-released iOS game SpeedyPups<\/a>, and some great chiptune music from Joshua Kaplan<\/a> (from a previous game jam) that all fit really well.<\/p>\n

With 10 minutes, added the last sound effects and submitted to the site. Was an intense and stressful 72 hours, but the final product is always worth it afterwards.<\/p>\n

\"35477-shot0\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Looking back:<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was really happy with the final product, managed to get in those RPG mechanics that I wanted to play with (with quite a few elements more-than-inspired by Hanoka\u2026).\nI only had a couple of regrets:<\/p>\n

-Swing mouse to swing sword felt like a little too wonky\/unpredictable mechanic to base a game off of\n-Story wasn\u2019t really too clear (and ending could have been a little more clever)<\/p>\n

and unrelated:<\/p>\n

-Didn\u2019t get too much time to talk to an Apportable Engineer (since I actually am using+have a problem with their SDK!)<\/p>\n

Will probably try and get this game on FGL once all the Ludum Dare excitement dies down.<\/p>\n

Thanks for reading, and see you next LD!<\/p>","time":"August 30th, 2014 1:48 am","title":"Dreaming Knight: Postmortem","title_was_empty":false}