Hi guys, I’m thinking of doing a “SuperCollier for Game Jams” tutorial, which would be an introduction to the open source SuperCollider programming language focused on the creation of sounds for games. It’s a very powerful system and well suited for game jams, as you can create a lot of sound effects very quickly. SuperCollider is open source and available for Mac, Linux and Windows.

For some examples of SuperCollider, the music for my LD24 game Wormelution was done with SuperCollider (Video) and you might also enjoy this chip tunesy live coding improvisation I did a while ago.

Leave a comment if you’re interested!

This post is just a collection of snippets copied from the “Rules and Guidelines”-Section of Ludum Dare ( http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/rules/ ) which all of the participants should have read:

4. All publicly available libraries and middleware are allowed.

6. Source code must be included.

…
This does not mean open source, just included source.  You retain all rights to it.  If you do not wish to provide source, consider entering the Jam instead.

…

Base code and personal code libraries are allowed, but should be declared and shared with the community prior to beginning your entry. To do this, make a blog post.

HA! Collision issues fixed…I think…

The theme:
My idea was that a big ugly spider is a classical villain in games (Limbo, Minecraft and many more) and the cute fireflies were the source of lights in a dark cave (finally not so dark, but that was the plan). A bloody eating animation was also supposed to highlight that, but not enough time.

The engine:
I took a risky bet to improvise some basic physics engine with per-pixel collision and it turned OK. I initially planned to use a library again, but LD is also to quickly experiment new things. However, I constantly modified the gameplay around it. The jumping mechanic exists mainly because walking was a bit clunky. Similarly, the rolling and sticking behavior solved the same stability problem. My first idea was to use some ninja rope possibility, but jumping was already fun enough. The second reason to use per-pixel collision was to quickly create levels simply with an image editor, thus skipping the need to code some custom map editor. This also allowed to easily add many graphical details.

The levels:
Making the first level was really fun (almost too much fun). I wanted to make more of them but drawing take more time that I expected (the price to pay for its flexibility I guess). I also added water a bit late, and it’s probably a bit too hard. Plus, a last minute typo made it even harder. I had more gameplay situations possible with the current terrain types, but again, levels were done too late. I also coded some compression tricks to handle these big megapixels bitmaps but it was probably not needed because the final game is only 180kb.

The controls:
I think the look and feel is good. Tried a lot of control variants and lost some time on the sprite and animation, but it really helped to make it more natural. Simple things like the spider orienting its legs towards the wall, or the difference between the rotating open/closed states made a big impact on the resulting impression.

The result:
Pretty happy about the final game. I really like the mechanic and wish to explore it more. Also, less ashamed than usual by my sprite skills. I really need to improve my level creation timing, though. But in the end and as always, I greatly enjoyed the Ludum Dare challenge

My brother sort-of did a post mortem, but I don’t think it fully covered this Ludum Dare and our game Double DeConstruction.

Going into this Ludum Dare, this was my team’s fourth time attempting the Ludum Dare, after failing to create a full game 3 other times. Our spirits were high, although understandably weakened. We came up with, 9-days before the Ludum Dare, a pre-Ludum Dare mini game idea where you’d play some sort of construction vehicle, like a bulldozer, and would run over things as the screen moved, much like the game Robot Unicorn Attack. I decided to not do it to try and save energy for the Ludum Dare. A day or two before the Ludum Dare came, I thought that people might choose End of the World. So we started pondering at the mini game idea, saying that the reason for this vehicle running over things would be because the world is ending and the person operating it doesn’t care what they do anymore.

Come the day of the Ludum Dare, “You are the Villian” is announced. Funny enough, this still fit into the game scenario in a sense. The thing is, I didn’t want to make a Robot Unicorn Attack type game, so I opted in for a top-down shooter. We discussed how to set it up, and while one member was reluctant to do this idea, because they didn’t like the genre, we still did it.

The Ludum Dare jam for us starts at 6PM on Friday and ends at 6PM Monday.

On Friday, we managed to get test objects up and running along with setting up the game states.
On Saturday, we had the player and enemy shooting wrenches out. The battlegroud image was completed and the official sprites were prepared.
On Sunday, we put in the title, character selection, and good/bad ending game states. The AI was also made during this day.
On Monday, in the very early morning I put in the sounds and music, as well as the amount of points you get for the kill to pop up (aka polish).

What went right?

• Organized steady development in a timely manner
• We had the game up and running just hours after the announcement
• Accomplished the retro look we were aiming for
• Multiple, separate, battle songs for each player and just overall awesomeness handling the music
• Both characters were fairly balanced during gameplay
• Got to polish things, like adding points flying in the air when you kill something

What went wrong?

• Body and arms were supposed to be separate, but due to miscommunication ended up as one piece.
• The good ending text did not look how I thought it did when I was tired. Being very awake made that very apparent.
• Didn’t get to improve the character selection screen, which was meant to have stuff moving behind the characters and marque the selected character name.
• Shipped it out with a game breaking bug that I just fixed a few hours ago. It was that hard to find.
• Noises were too loud and obnoxious if too many were being sent out. This definitely wasn’t intentional.

In conclusion, we are very happy. I wouldn’t say just happy, it felt more like a sigh of relief that we finally were able to complete the Ludum Dare. I want to do it again, but I honestly don’t know if my team wants to do it again. I think they want to stop doing the Ludum Dare on a good note. Who knows, maybe I might compete in the compo by myself and not the jam with my team next time around. Back on topic, all-in-all, it was a great experience and really taught me some things, namely how good it feels to complete a project. So, until next time…

Tags: jam, ld25, post morem, post-mortem, postmortem

Evil Chopper is a 3D shoot’em up made with three.js/webgl.

What went right

• Knew my libraries and tools pretty well (three.js, soundmanager2, tiled). Three.js was a bit tricky to use during LD #24 since the abstraction leaks when you want to use dynamic scenes and especially lights.
• Productivity. I am getting used to this kind of challenge now since this is my fourth LD. The brain knows what to expect by now
• My music generator delivered. It was not the greates pieces of music in the world but when I was to tired to compose anything manually, it was a saver.

What went wrong

• Time management. I spent a lot of time on tweaking graphics settings when I should have focused more on level construction and gameplay. Also, the adaption to the theme(s) was a failure mainly due to this error.
• Sleep. I should have spent more time sleeping

Overall, I think that this LD was the most fun one so far
Also, I joined the Jam because of schedule collisions. I worked alone and almost behaved like it was the 48 hour compo, but I admit that I stole some code from my previous projects to accelerate 😉

Play and rate the game here!

It’s been about a week now, and the dust has settled a bit to reflect over Grim’s Christmas List.

This was the first game we’ve done together, the first time I’ve done any serious JavaScript, the first time Octopi has done any game art like this, and the first time I’ve done any coding whatsoever since having to leave my job in August due to ill health. And, I think we did pretty well!

A lot of things went right.
We both clicked with the theme right away, and Octopi started sketching out characters and an idea. I gave some input into it as well, and we ended up with a hybrid mix of Bomb Jack, Rainbow Islands and Bubble Bobble. Sadly, the Bomb Jack elements got dropped due to time constraints, but we love the concept enough that we’ll likely continue with Grim and make it to the original idea.
The workload was split pretty evenly – with Octopi on sprite work and general design, and myself on coding, audio, and piecing together the sprite sheets. And being a Jam game, we got an extra day to work on it, so I wasn’t too stressed out my noggin.
Impact was a joy to use.. although I very likely made some bugger ups here and there as a few people have pointed out the slightly weird collision detection at times, but overall I had no problems with it – short of not really learning much about it beforehand.
Our game actually worked out pretty well, and is probably the best entry I’ve done so far.

A few things went a bit pear-shaped, however.
Most of Saturday was taken up with us travelling down to see my family to do the great Christmas gift exchange of the year… but we worked out some of the game on notepads during the journey.
We didn’t get the third aspect of the game in – collecting presents/reaping enemies in order for bonuses – from Bomb Jack, so you just get one measly point per present.
The level changes are a bit abrupt – we need to add some transitions, or at least a READY? GO! style thing.
No music ( bar the couple of seconds on the title screen ) as I couldn’t think of anything to do, and sound was workable at best ( though the boss/mini boss explosion sound works really well, with the presents flying everywhere! )
The end is a bit anticlimactic… probably could’ve done something a bit better than a black screen with text on it!

All in all, we think it went well, and we enjoyed ourselves
We’ll definitely be thinking of expanding upon it later on.

If you haven’t seen it yet, you can find it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=267

Now for us to start rating some games!

Tags: arcade badgers, Grim's Christmas List, octopi, post-mortem, stuckie

Here’s a video of me playing & talking about my entry:

Also, if there’s no comment on your entry from me yet, it means I haven’t come across it. I’m rating like mad, so if you want me to drop some wisdom/pain on you feel free to link me your entry & I’ll git right on that.

Tags: commentary, playthrough, walkthrough

My first Android game in my live! Thanks Ludume Dare for this!

You can download game on game page HERE

Thanks!

Tags: android, apk, first, ld25, ld48

So for example, my game’s rating numbers, right now…

D = 47 =

R = 22

–

C = 24.

Except not quite that simple.  I mean, I guess not.  22-24 = -2, not 47.  What do these number mean?  R = Ratings, C = Coolness, what is “Default”?

I take this to mean that I’ve been rated 22 times, and I have rated 24 games.  But I don’t get what the “default” number 47 is, or how a slightly more complicated subtraction of R – C somehow equals 47.

The last Ludum Dare gave me the occasion to jump to 10 years back in my life.

I started making “games” at the age of 14 and since then I hardly finished one, or at least a decent one. I was young and unexperienced with programming. As I started studying computer engineering I didn’t have much time to spend on game-making but the desire still remained in me, waiting to be fulfilled.

The small time given in this competition forced me to focus on the game and give 100% to make the best I could, starting from scratch. I coded until 4 A.M. (the deadline in Italy’s timezone) and even if my game is not great as I expected (ok, it’s not great from many points of view :P) I was completely satisfied. I could have made tons of games till now, maybe now I found the perfect balance between free-time and motivation to go on and do some more.

Ok, that was a little boring.

The best part of this post is the announce that I updated the version of my competition entry “A Pigeon’s Life” fixing some bugs that made the game crash:

I also added sounds and music that unfortunately I wasn’t able to add before the deadline

You can also download the Bundle: Game + Sounds together. Remember that the sounds and music are NOT to be judged for the Ludum Dare compo.

Here’s the link to my entry and DOWNLOAD page -> http://buff.ly/TqADDD <-

That said, enjoy!

So here it is, i wanted to have a few reviews before writing anything.
link to the game : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=16143

( Warning : the two next lines contain spoiler about Braid )

The guideline
First of all, i did not like this theme, that i thought was probably too basic. I just sticked to the concept of the villain’s feeling about the outer world and putted it into a survival game i had the idea a week before. I choosed to focus on the loneliness of the villain and his destructive response, and made it in a survival game where you shoot heroes trying to get your princesses, like an action game based on Braid’s storyline.

\/  No more Braid spoiler down there  \/

How it happenned
I have nothing really exiting to say about the way i made the game except I remember waking up the next day after a 2h night completely demoralized about the game, i thought it was a boring, bugged (if there’s no collision with the borders, it’s not, at the start, an intention, but an inability to fix it because of the collisions programming), and ugly.
I just took a long pause, adding funny things like a music, and drawing some more art i could implement if i had the courage. The around 6pm, i tried playing the game and i realize i could try add some really really minor thing. I first made as much feedbacks as I could, then i added the explosive and healing princesses that restarted my interest playing the game. The last part, around 10pm was about tweaking, a lot of tweaking trying to balance all the characters. It was probably the coolest part of this Jam, and the one I learned the most from. At the deadline, i was still not convinced by my game but it still looks better than the morning. Now the reviews are absolutely great and it makes me want to restart this game with a nice and polished gameplay, more characters and feedbacks.

What went wrong
– Stoopid collisions coding blocked me for so much time now fucking hate it
– Time & sleep management was awful, like the last one, i got awfully tired the second day and finished really too early
– My game was maybe a bit overambitious for a “second game ever”, i wasn’t able to add as much content as i wanted

What went right
– making art : as usual i’m really comfortable with making little funny assets and animating them- coding with GM is friggin great !
– tweaking got great too
– fight demotivation

What to do next
– Continue with GM I suppose
– more tweaking
– beeing stupidely overambitious is awesome if you have a simple game with tons of content to add

So this is probably the first time I’ve gotten something fun in a few years. 😛 I usually end up with playable prototypes, but slowly stop working on the project for one reason or another.

Theme

This theme was probably the worst one there could be. I don’t like playing as the bad guy. 😛 I did think of a cheesy workaround, but I never put it in the game, as the “” implies.

This is also a problem for voting… A lot of the games seem to involve killing people, and also seem to have blood. I don’t exactly like those a lot. 😛

What went right

• Graphics. When I was playing around with my prototype Friday night, I just started with a circle. Until I added the trail, it was hard to see what direction the player was going in. so, I changed the point count of the “circle” to 5 to make a pentagon. After adding a small pentagon in the front, I had a little “car” to move around. (See progress/0.png)
• Gameplay. Although I was planning on adding a few more things to the gameplay, the game itself was pretty much finished on Saturday. I also had been polishing things as I went along. Both of these were important considering the last point of “What went wrong“.
• No organization. Seriously, if you look at that code, your eyes might fall out. I specifically tried NOT organizing my code (and not using good practices… :P) to see if I would make more progress, and it seemed to work. Eventually I need to organize this though…
• Difficulty + “AI”. Implementing difficulty levels was really simple. I have some base values for Easy, and then some multipliers used for harder difficulties. The “AI” is really just some random numbers for distances the cars should follow you, when they should speed up or slow down, etc.

What went wrong

I pretty much was just low on time. I was only able to work on this a few hours on Friday, and then most of Saturday. Sunday… not so much. 😛

What’s new

• Sounds. Already done.
• Better levels. The levels that generate are stillterrible, but I’ve tweaked it some to make it slightly better.
• Finished the intro screen. Already done.
• Highscore screen. Already implemented.

The entry is here, with downloads for both the compo and post-compo version.

This is the second time I have finished a game for Ludum Dare, and I think I’ve learned lessons from my previous entry. I didn’t have most of Saturday or Sunday available, but I made a big push on Monday to get something playable out.

What went right:

• Polish. My previous entry lacked a lot of polish, and it showed in a lot of places. This time, participating in the jam, I had plenty of time to add little bits to my game to make it more presentable.
• Testing. My previous game had many bugs remaining, as I rushed it out for the 48 hour competition. This game is relatively bug free (besides a hi-score saving bug in the original upload, which was swiftly fixed).
• Aiming for jam release instead of compo. I was rather busy with work commitments during LD weekend, so I didn’t want to push myself too hard, especially after being pushed hard at work.

What went wrong:

• Work commitments. I’m usually very busy with work during the festive season, and LD weekend was no exception.
• Tiredness. Because I’ve been working all day Saturday and most of Sunday, this has left me physically tired, and with little motive to code.
• Coming up with a game idea. I really liked the idea of the theme, but I just couldn’t decide what I could actually make from it. It took me about 12 hours to come up with a simple pickpocketing game.
• A little too easy. Especially running from the police. The reason behind this is that I reduced the time limit from 5 minutes down to 3  towards the end of development. I didn’t adjust the sprinting speed (which slows down based on the amount of pockets you picked) to compensate.

What was cut:

• Music. I tried algorithmic music generators, but nothing I could find could produce a suitable 8-bit style sound.
• Road / Police car. I was originally going to put a road at the bottom of the screen, where police cars could drive past, and catch you in the act of pickpocketing, but I dropped that feature, as I was running short of time.

Well, it’s been a fun Ludum Dare. I’m looking forward to playing a load of entries (I’m aiming for gold coolness this time). In the meantime, you can play my game HERE

INTRO
My game, PsyGoat, is a platformer about an evil Goat who can control weapons with his mind.  As the Goat, you must escape from a maximum security prison and use your evil superpowers to generally cause chaos.  Overall I’m really happy with it, I think shooting a giant laser out of your eyes and controlling machine guns with your mind is fairly fun, but there were definitely some problems that meant the challenge level and variety really suffered.  If you like to vapourise guards with a giant laser beam, play the game here: PsyGoat Game

WHAT WENT WRONG

Time / Priorities
So imagine you decide to make a platform game, you get the collisions and gravity working and you have to make a decision regarding your game design, do you:
a) Stick to pure platforming; just running, jumping and maybe bouncing.
b) Add a single combat or manipulation mechanic to complement the platforming.
c) Add 5 complicated superpowers that involve slowing time, creating objects, projectiles, controlling defences and changing gravity.

So the correct answer is “run as far away from option c) as possible.  Guess what I did.
This bizarre decision was supposed to lead down the route of having a multitude of awesome powers that would complement each other perfectly.  Then the levels would offer interesting ways to use these powers.  An ambitious goal, but it was mind-blowingly obvious that it wasn’t going to work in 48hrs.  So I got all the powers done, which I’m really happy about, but they were all either over-powered or totally useless.  There was no requirement to even use them at all.  This leads to the 2nd problem:

Level Design
In summary, I spent 46.5 hours getting the game working, getting the powers working, writing & recording some music, setting up pause menus, writing tutorials, creating title screens and generally making sure everything would function together as a game.  Great, I was very happy with this; it was my plan all along.  Now to duplicate my empty level 20 times and set about design a series of challenging and interesting levels… just get a coffee first… BLARG THERE IS 1 HOUR LEFT!  Yes people this actually happened.  It also happened in an identical way during LD24.  Level design is very important, you can’t do it in an hour.  The levels just weren’t engaging, and I have received some entirely justified criticism in this regard.  So next time I’ll go for slightly simpler mechanics and allow more time for level design.  Well I’ll try.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

Music!
This was a main goal of mine, I play and write a little bit of music in my spare time, so I felt this was an area I should try to perform well in.  I set about writing & recording a simple synth soundtrack on GarageBand, and I succeeded.  No auto-play or samples, just me play virtual synths with my actual fingers.  I’m really pleased about this, if you want to check out the soundtrack it is online here: Soundtrack

Super-Stuff
As much as most of the powers weren’t that inspiring, I felt that the main power of telekinetic guns was solid, and fairly fun to control.  Even more so with the laser; I like games that do bug stupid stuff you can’t do in real life, and I’d like to think that giant laser made a few people say “whoa!”

Sprites
I’m not an artist and really struggle in this regard, but I am professional developer of Excel reports & systems…  so I found using Excel to create auto-shapes as body parts really helped me!  It meant animating was easier and more consistent, and I was able to re-created some scribbled character drawings quickly.  I think I got the scale wrong, everything looks a little lost in amongst the platforms, but overall I think this went well considering my lack of artistic flair.

CONCLUSION
Ultimately I finished a platform game and created some music I’m happy with, so all my goals were achieved.  I call that a win!  I also learned more during the 48hrs of this LD than I have in the whole 3 months since the last one.  It is an amazing way to learn what you are good at, and how to prioritise the important stuff.  This time I also spent a lot more time reading the community blogs, so I had 40 interesting games bookmarked already when the voting started.  Overall, a great experience.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2012 at 6:29 pm and is filed under LD #25. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Let me sum up how this Ludum Dare went for us this time. We wanted to work together, so we did jam this time — Makdaam did music, sounds and level design, and I made the simple engine and graphics. The things that I’m mostly happy about and think that we got right:

• I used love2d, having only about two weeks of learning it (and of learning lua). This seems like a sure way to fail, but it was actually fine.
• The AdvTiledLoader library saved me a lot of time, and Tiled let us design levels relatively painlessly.
• Using music as a part of the level design seems like a viable strategy.
• The workflow for my graphics is the same that I used in previous Ludum Dares, and it seems to work well, except for tiles, about that later.
• Making the distributions for all the platforms was very easy with love2d.
• I had an emergency plan of adding shooting to the game and turning it into a shooter if anything went wrong, but that didn’t happen.

What went wrong:

• If you are setting out to make an adventure game, make sure you at least have some outline of the plot. We left the plot for last, and it was a huge mistake — we only did very basic and rudimentary things so it can barely be called a game (you can’t even win). Another person taking care of the characters, plot and levels would be fantastic.
• The freehand style doesn’t work too well with tiles. It was hard to make them tile and still retain their rough looks. I also didn’t make all the necessary tiles, so you can see some gaps and inconsistencies if you look carefully.
• Collisions are hard, but fortunately getting them perfectly right is not necessary for the game to be playable.
• Sound support of different libraries varies greatly between different platforms, even with a multi-platform framework like love2d. The game crashed on Windows just because we pre-loaded the sound files into memory.
• An overlay layer is not enough to make top-down levels look right in respect to obscuring sprites.
• Defining the dialogues and quests directly in the map files is a mistake — makes it too hard to see everything at a glance and make improvements. I think that I should have only defined named locations, and have all the plot and text in a separate file that refers to them.
• We didn’t have the free time and any energy left to work on it for the third day of the jam. We could have come up with a real plot and polished it all much more, but we were so completely tired, that we haven’t.

You can play it here.

Some input from Makdaam:

• There’s not enough time
• Learning milky tracker proved to be more difficult than expected
• Sounds and music are not implemented right anywhere
• 1 out of 50 melody ideas can be rendered almost instantly in a tracker without any training
• 1 out of 10 melodies are usable
• sfxer FTW
• Audacity is enough to make your own synth samples with distortions
• none of those samples will be used in the final LD product, so don’t waste your time in Audacity
• prepare for your neighbor getting a new hifi during LD

Tags: postmortem

At first I wasn’t very inspired by the theme. I had voted it down. At first just because I wasn’t inspired by it, but with the recent school shooting, anything where you would play a villain with guns was unthinkable. Not that I’m afraid of a controversial subject. In my opinion, games as a cultural expression has every right to bring up sensitive subjects, just like books and movies can. But this time we had gathered over 10 people at our office for a Ludum Dare gathering. It wouldn’t be appropriate to cry by the computer, I thought.

My first ideas not involving crazy people with handguns were pretty boring: just reversing classic game ideas like Pacman or Donkey Kong. The funniest idea I had was one where you would play one of the aliens in Space Invaders. (“Keep the formation, soldier!”) But that’s more fun as an idea than when executed.

In the end I came up with a concept  that was controversial, but perhaps a bit more subtle. It seems nobody that has played the game hasn’t even noticed. Was I too subtle, or have we gotten so numb that we don’t even react when men, women, children and goats are slaughtered in a way similar to what’s been happening recently in the real world?

Play My First Ping Pong Massacre

I had a blast with this Ludum Dare, mainly because my tools were in such good shape.  All the work I had done on my libraries beforehand let me focus on content creation for the most part.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=5649

What went right:

Helper classes – I made a bunch of helpers before the compo to automagically handle sounds and particles and static objects in the map.  Saved tons of time.

Update entities – Really saved the day.  Allows you to change entity objects in the map without rebuilding.

Acoustic guitar for music.  I couldn’t remember how to play, but just tried random stuff and fixed it all in audacity

What went wrong:

On map building I only had one major mistake, and that was losing an hour or two to leaks and map errors on the third level attempting to create a windy branchy maze by duplicating and rotating.  Brush maps tend to break when you do that.

I also had a bug where a switchable light set to on wouldn’t be on if you built the map with update entities.  I chased that one for awhile.

Sleeping in small chunks.  Didn’t really work that well.  I usually set the alarm for 4 hours, but only once was actually awakened by it.  Usually I just woke up on my own and got back to work.  I’d always awaken feeling refreshed, but I’d be tired again after just a few hours.

My “full build” button doesn’t actually save the final product.  You have to “Save Zone” after.  Several times I forgot, and couldn’t figure out what was wrong.

My alpha sorting broke!  I was so mad.  I spent a lot of time on that and even tested it in my warmup!

Story – I might have left too much unexplained.  Is the apprentice the lover?  Is the prisoner a man or a woman?  What happens at the end?  Also if the power is out, how did the first door and the elevator work?  Also if you don’t hit the triggers in the right order it can tell you stuff you already figured out, or reference stuff you might not have seen if you missed picking something up or hitting a journal trigger.

Stuff I want for next time:

I’m planning on making a game specific entity class creation tool.  This would allow you to specify what fields and default values an entity would have in a gui, then at the press of a button it would automagically edit quark’s entity file, and maybe even generate some C# code as well.

Pathfinding – I have some basic A* code but it isn’t integrated with anything.

Terrain integration, working on this in another project.  BModel style mini bsps for landscape objects like rocks or ruin chunks, or full buildings with portals that look out and in.

Doom3 style gui screen surfaces.  These would be great for making interesting puzzles.

Tags: ld25, postmortem, xna

You can download the 48-hour edition here or the post compo version here [exe] [zip] [rar].

 ——————————————————

What went well?

This was my first Ludum Dare and my first finished game. I’m pretty happy with the game and very pleased with how things went.

 ——————————————————

I Finished!

The deadline kept me right on track and by hour 48  my game was finished, I didn’t manage to get everything in I wanted and the code was a little sloppy but there’s plenty of room for me to build on if I wanted to work on the game in the future.

The Art

I’m not a very good artist so I decided to go for as simple a style as possible. I ended up trying to go for a style similar to the game Realm of the Mad God. which worked out pretty well. I focused on trying to create  a lot of variation in the backgrounds to try to break the grid which meant I spent a lot more time on art than I’d have liked.

Keep it Simple

The game needed to be simple to pick up for players so they wouldn’t lose interest and simple for me to design so I’d be able to finish it before the deadline. Thankfully sticking to this idea meant that the majority of people managed to finish the game but it also lead to the game being a little too easy.

 ——————————————————

What went wrong?

I’m generally very happy with how everything turned out but there were a few major problems largely caused by lack of planning. I’ve got a lot of them fixed now, but there’s still one or two I’m working on.

 ——————————————————

Lots of Bugs

Annoyingly there were some major gameplay and graphics bugs still present when I released the game. Some of them I’d spotted but simply didn’t have time to fix, others such as the tile scaling bug I didn’t spot til after I’d uploaded.

I’ve fixed the majority of them in the post-compo version.

Music!

It may be partly because I’ve listened to the tracks in the game for hours during testing but I felt the music was probably it’s weakest point. Before the compo I didn’t plan on how I was going to create my music which led to a frantic search at hour 46 for a way to quickly generate it. I eventually settled on Otomata thanks to the post by caranha on music generators. The music it generates is pretty good, I then ran it through GXSCC to give it a nice 8-bit feel.

For the post-compo release I’m planning on redoing most, if not all of the music using Famitracker.

Over-scoped, under-delivered

When I originally sat down to start sketching out game ideas the first thing I thought was “Think Small” and despite this I still managed to over-scope.  I’d planned to have around 6 puzzles but ultimately ended up with 3 at most. This was mainly due to lack of time and poor planning. Thankfully the brevity of the game seems to be something a lot people liked so I plan to keep the game short but add a lot more depth.

Post-compo Version

I’ve fixed up all the bugs and improved the graphics a litle for the post-compo version, you can download it here [exe] [zip] [rar]. If you find any bugs please post them below and I’ll try to get them fixed asap.

Thanks for reading

Tags: antihero, post-compo, post-mortem, unsave the princess

It’s time for a postmortem of The Hunt. It wasn’t the usual, great LD experience for me, as I had to enter the Jam just to finish my entry, but I’m happy I did manage to finish something… Well, let’s start…

The Good

• I did finish a game. I think last time I was so happy that I managed to do this was during my first LD.
• I like the graphical effect I managed to achieve with backgrounds. This is definitely something to explore further in different projects.
• I left polishing the code for later/never: no component object models, no fancy object-oriented techniques, just plain simple entities. And I DIDN’T CARE.
• I used the additional time to test my levels, and now I think that the difficulty curve is quite fine. The game can be beaten, but does get a little harder with each level. Even my mom can play it!

The Bad

• I hated the theme. I couldn’t think of anything that I would really like, which resulted in me starting to work around 13 hours after the compo started.
• The original idea to use Twine over AS3 was better, especially considering my time constraints (RL stuff).
• I was late for the compo and had to enter jam instead, and didn’t really gain that much out of it (I managed to add only 4 more levels)…
• I didn’t have time for anything. I didn’t implement anything interesting, and my weekend consisted of switching between LD and other things. I didn’t even add Kongregate API.
• Waited with creating assets too long: in the end I had to look for some pictures on the web and use combination of rotoscopy, palette reduction, recoloring and similar techniques just to have something. It turned out fine, but I wish I had a better plan.

The Result

• I think it’s probably the most non-innovative game I’ve ever created, but I also think that it was a worthwhile experience. Maybe it’s even not that horribly bad in terms of gameplay (it’s simple & casual), but kinda mindless, not very innovative and lacking theme-wise.
• I feel it’s kinda time to change the technology I work with (AS3), just to see something new. Haxe, HTML5, maybe even try something 3D… I must think about it some more, but it’s the right thing to try for me.

Either way, I’m looking forward to the next LD.

Tags: hunt, postmortem