Well I never made it to submission, but I’m really glad I entered as it’s possibly opened up a major door for me…

It’s very close to what I had in mind for my first chapter of Amnesia Stories, the ‘prequels’ to Amnesia (see my blog), a game I may never get round to making. In fact, the boy looks like a young Yuuki, the main character, and so this may well become the first chapter of said prequels. I think I’ve got something a little special, atmosphere-wise, and it’s a great template for the guaging exactly how long it would take to put a scenario together for AS.

So if you’re interested in 2D survival horror, keep an eye on my blog in the coming months, as there may be goodness contained therein.

Thanks for having me, Ludum Dare!

The dust has barely settled, but I’m throwing up a post mortem anyway…

Moons of Subterrane was interesting in that for the most part, nothing went wrong.
I had been feeling a bit ill and stuff, so didn’t do the full 48hr run, I perhaps did 24hrs instead…
So in keeping with my previous post-mortems, the good, bad and ugly –

The Good:
As said, nothing really went wrong during the work I did.
Adding things was really easy due to the way I had set it up – albeit slightly convoluted in that maps and enemies/stations are in different files.
The system kinda worked like a database to that effect… where each room was designed in a text editor and given a room number, and the map just referenced the room numbers. All data was loaded in on level load ( which can cause a pause or two )
Enemy spawners and flight paths were relatively easy to add as well.
Seeing as I did miniLD11 with Little Quirks ( which I’ve still been working on ) I was a lot more confident with the engine and how things worked, or should work, which was probably how I managed so well this time

The Bad:
Again, I didn’t really factor much time in for sounds.. and a ZX Spectrum could beat the sounds I did!
Testing was quite tricky as well, as the levels can be quite involving.
Also, no animations… so everything’s a static sprite – doesn’t look quite so good as it could’ve been but then, I’m no artist!

The Ugly:
The submission phase… heh… I buggered this up spectacularly and only just realised after I got a comment stating it was far too fast.
The game was coded primarily on a Linux box, and I had a Windows laptop setup to do win32 builds on. I tested and built the correct binary, but somehow transferred an older binary to my Linux box when packing things up. Same thing happened with the Dingoo and Wiz builds ( they should work but just not have input, instead they crash due to other factors which I fixed this morning. )
Now, I have updated my entry with a fixed exe to download.. but this is tricky though as my original submission does have a broken exe – HOWEVER, and here’s the fun bit.. I included full source in that package and if you were to compile an exe from that source, you’d get the correct working version!
Also, I did put up various versions on my site, as I had some other people who were testing my game throughout the duration on Windows for me.
You can find them all here:
http://www.stuckiegamez.co.uk/gamez/ludumdare/ld15/

(The submitted package is: MoonsOfSubterrane-LD15.7z and the Win32 fix is: SGZ2D.exe)
You’ll see that the exe in hour 44 does infact work at the correct pace ( without sound.. though the sound is so dire and you’ll be probably turning it off anyway ), and you can check the source in the submitted package: specifically line 132 onwards (the updateInterfaces function) in Source/code/engine/CInterpret.cpp – there lies the nasty hacky SDL specific framelimit code – which obviously isn’t active in the submitted exe.

Also… KATE on Linux seems to do stuff to the files it edits, as on Windows they seem to have extra blank lines between every normal line.. hmm..

So yea, although nothing technically went wrong during the competition, and I was surprised at that, I managed to bugger up the submission in spectacular style, instead! Woo!

Hey guys,

I had a few people leave comments about my entry noting that it wasn’t quite working for some people. I sent it around to a bunch of friends to playtest and it seemed to go okay for them…sooo, if you’ve run into problems with my entry or would like to see if it works, please download it! If you do run into any issues, please give me some details – the program generates a log file in the Release directory which should spit out any fatal errors. (also if you’re running it through wine or something, that would be good to know!)

It’s not the best piece of gaming in the world – I just want other people to be able to legitimately criticize it.

http://www.cs.stevens.edu/~pmainwar/ld15.zip

Thanks!

I realized the instructions for my entry were a little sparse.

There are two levels with a boss eat the end of each. The game is completable and has a proper ending sequence.

In level one you should avoid shooting the barrels exept it is the less painful alternative (like being hit by the green beams).

In level two radiation is your friend..

Tags: instructions

Like many, I did a timelapse this weekend! I did a webcam capture as well, for the first time. It was funny seeing snapshots of my pain and/or elation at different points throughout the weekend. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLDeczIW2JI

Tags: timelapse

I think that the stuff that happened behind the scenes this time were rather interesting, so I decided to write a post-mortem.

The compo began at 6:00 AM our Finnish time, and when I woke up at 11:00 AM, I instantly began to work on my (first) entry. I had had 2 ideas from which to choose from, but the theme wasnt’ really fit for either of them. Anyway, I decided to force the theme a bit and insert my frog-with-a-sticky-tongue-idea to the game. I also realized that I want to do a time lapse, so I downloaded Chronolapse and set it running.

The first few hours I spent by playing around with the physics and testing different tongue methods. A silly bug that was “hard” to notice took a bit of time, but not too much. It was harder than expected to get the frog look right, and I tried several foot and ‘arm’ sizes, ending up with quite big legs and no arms. The silly eyes were a part of the design right from the beginning. I went for a long walk with our dog Turre, took about 2 hours. And ate pizza. Smoked Salmon Pizza. yum.

After that I started pondering about the method for creating the background and walls. It was clear that I’d need several different sorts of angled walls, to make the physics interesting. After some (lots of) pondering, I ended up with using a list with the wall-creation commands, so that I could easily change the layout. After even more pondering I decided to load the background ‘art’ externally, which was the easiest but also a bit stupid way to do it. I had to code a separate editor for the levels (may sound normal, but is actually quite rare in MMF2). I wasn’t exceptionally happy with the simple look of the game, but the engine seemed to work fine.

At this point I started doing other things for a while, such as posting the food picture and reading some MSPaint Adventures. Not much has to be said about that. After getting back to work I decided to start adding other features, such as ‘enemies’ (spikes), and insects that you could eat. I really liked the effect I got to the insect-eating. but overall the score system made out of that was a bit random, considering the actual game was turning more into a puzzle (how to swing that tongue next?.exe).

When I had the basic engine ready, score system running and the game overall working, I started adding new levels. I had spent about 8 hours with the game, and started wondering why it has taken such a short time.

I didn’t feel overall that happy with the game, it was a bit too simple and random for my taste. Also, after seeing screenshots from games like Dock’s entry, I started worrying that the game wasn’t good enough. Anyway, I decided to finish the game I had started. Somewhere around 00:00 I had all the levels ready, and made a very silly ending screen. Fixing the last bugs and such took an hour more, but after that and after submitting the game, I wasn’t really happy with the game; all the others seemed much more interesting. Also, I realized that there was something wrong with MEncoder and my timelapse didn’t work! ;_; Anyway, went to sleep.

(You can find the Cavefrog download link from the bottom of this post!)

The Next Morning – The next game

I woke up at 11:00 AM, and started quite much instantly to ponder about the compo. I had had this over-ambitious idea of a settler having a mining site and exploring the underground caverns, actually even before Spelunky. Anyway, at 13 o’clock I went for a walk, during that I thought of the possibilities I have, and also my own capabilities. Seems like I was in a good mood for thinking, because after some dozens of minutes I had the main idea and item base of my ‘other’ entry ready. A rather sudden rainstorm interrupted my walk a bit, and I got really wet. It was kinda fun, actually.

I calculated that I had around 9 hours to work on the game that day, so I decided to be quick and controlled with the creation (oh yeah, that’s easy to be said). The 5 hours I worked before leaving for piano lessons were quite hectic, and I also forgot to timelapse the creation (;_;), so there isn’t much to say about that. The game progressed surprisingly well, and what’s even more unexpected, no game-breaking bugs showed up! There were some annoying phases though, getting the underground world to be created and then adding the enemies there – I had at first set the enemies appear before the actual caverns, which led to some hilarious scenes. I had chosen the graphical theme mostly because it was the fastest one to do, but also a bit because I like Atari 2600 and C64.

After returning from the lessons at half past 7 PM, I had still lots to do: adding 2 new enemy types, having treasures appear underground and creating the glitchy loose blocks, along with actually making the game over/winning screens. Somewhere during this phase I suddenly realized that I could make the game require more tactical thinking by adding the rising lava (yes, there’s rising lava!) to the end. That’d make the player hurry a bit, and possibly have to think a bit about the route back onto the surface. I was continuously unhappy with the enemies gathering into huge piles in some small gaps, and trying to punch you from too far away. I didn’t manage to get all of this away, but probably most of it. I’m still kinda unhappy with how the projectiles work though.

I went over the time I had planned by 1½ hours, but that time was really needed for adding sound effects and squashing bugs. When I finally sighed after working for 11 hours on the game, I was really happy with the result. Though I had a schoolday tomorrow, so I had to send the entry without checking if it’s actually beatable. I feared a bit that the lava’d rise too quickly for the players. Luckily my fears weren’t needed; though I’ve yet to see someone apart from myself who can beat the game.

I will probably make a Deluxe version out of this sometime later, and I must say that I enjoyed this ludumdare very much! Especially when I finally found the IRC channel. I’ll sure e participating next time, whenever that is. I can imagine items like stun gun, umbrella and electronic drill. Perhaps even a jetpack!

Pros & cons on the creation and game overall:

+ I think the graphics fit the style rather well. I like the look of the player itself, and also the grin on the face of the health meter.

+The game isn’t too easy. Granted, some of this is caused by bugs, but I like how you have to think a bit how to move while descending deeper.

+The game is surprisingly bug-free. There are some bigger and some smaller nitpicks, but overall I wonder how there weren’t any worse bugs around.

– The bugs that are around are quite annoying. The most notable glitch is the one that happens when you jump on the corner of a loose block: You slide horizontally and technically fall through the block. This bug is even more annoying because I can’t understand what causes it.

– The game became a tad too confusing. I think my choices of buttons are somewhat logical, but I can see that especially the ladder will take some time to get working correctly.

-The dynamite is unuseful. No-one wants to explode huge areas, not in this game, because they block easily your path further/back.

-The game became a little too much like Spelunky. I don’t know if I should be happy or sad when people say that the game is a Spelunky ‘demake’ or something like that, because the base idea is a lot older. However, I think I unconsciously took some design choices that make the game resemble Spelunky, starting from the outlook of the player! 😉

Overall, I really enjoyed this compo! Thanks guys and gals! Sorry for the lengthy post-mortem.
Download Cavefrog through this link!

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

I’m really pleased with how this one turned out (and kind of amazed at how much I managed to get done over the course of two days!).  It’s weird how my motivation went in completely the opposite direction to the last one.  In that one I started off really excited only to hit a wall on Sunday afternoon, while on this one I started really down (the theme’s caverns?  Really?), only for my enthusiasm to ramp up more and more as my game progressed.  It took me ages to get to sleep last night, I was so wired from it all.

I’ll start with the bad, because it’s only little things:

• Stupid jumping bug.  Platformers really need to have solid collision detection, and mine kind of fell down (ha ha!) there.  It’s no good if you’re jumping up to a ledge only to fall through it into the lava below.  It only took 5 minutes to fix when I came back to it this evening though.  The perils of writing a game in only 2 days…
• The music.  I’m not sure it really fits the rest of the game.  I was going for an underground, subterranean theme, but I think it’s just a bit too sinister.  I should have tried to do something more upbeat.
• The theme.  Given all the existing games already set in caverns, I can’t help feeling I would have made a weirder, more interesting game if one of the other themes had won out.  Still, given how Caverns of Light turned out, I’m not too fussed…

The good:

• The graphics.  Doing everything in Inkscape really turned out well, and other than a few slight glitches where certain tiles get drawn over others, I think it looks really polished.
• The ‘connect the lamps to lightboxes’ mechanic.  Particularly the moment when you activate a lightbox and the sky gets lighter as it plays the ‘light-up’ sound.  That’s a great moment.  And I think the mechanic has a lot of potential.  If I’d had more time I would have definitely made the level bigger and more complex.
• Doing the level editor first.  Getting this out the way before I did anything else really made things easier for me than if I’d done it the other way round.  Once it was up and running all I had to do was implement the game logic for navigating round the level.  Incidentally, I didn’t use up anything like the maximum space in the level (the full size of the level is 1024 x 768 tiles, which is pretty huge), so there’s scope for other people to make better ones…
• Building a complete (if a bit slight) platformer in 2 days!  I’m still grinning about this…

Now for the timelapses.  I’ve actually got 2, because I did the music and sound fx on a different computer (my laptop’s not set up for making music), and I didn’t bother joining them together.  First, the main one:

Ludum Dare 15 Timelapse 1

And the music one (this takes place between 10:30 and 12:00 on the Sunday):

Ludum Dare 15 Timelapse 2

Tags: timelapse

I scribbled together a compo postmortem late last night (as I seem to do now). Woke up this morning, edited it a bunch, then decided to submit it to Gamasutra blogs… in the off chance that it might get featured.

Hooray for off chances. 😀

http://www.gamasutra.com/

If you don’t see me watching you from the Featured Blogs section of the site, then hit this link for the article.

http://www.gamasutra.com/…/Ludum_Dare_15_Was_Hugeer.php

Pretty cool.

Tags: press

Viewable here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKdPC42_F3Q

This was my first LD, and it was a lot of fun. I’ve learnt quite a lot from it I think, and I don’t think I’ve ever got so much work done on a game in such a short time-span.

I used C++ with several SDL libraries. Graphics were created in the GIMP (and Paint…), and the sounds were created in about 10 minutes using SFXR.

I did briefly consider using GameMaker instead, and at several times I thought to myself ‘All I’ve done so far I could have done in GameMaker in a couple of hours!’ but I’m glad I didn’t. It would have felt like a cop-out really. Not to say that anyone using GM was a cop-out, but I’m glad I took the challenge of using C++.

What Went Well

• I got an idea fairly quickly, and actually managed it in the time frame (I would have liked to add more stuff, but at least it is a game).
• I had a horrible, game-breaking memory-leak but managed to fix it in very little time.
• I knew my way around the GIMP enough to animate Ted using layers – I’m always very frightened of having to animate things.
• Mostly, it all works. The collision-detection between moving things and the ground is pretty random and bizarre, so you can climb walls much higher than planned. The dinosaur movement was put in in about 10 minutes at the end when I realised the game was impossibly easy. The game is hacky, but it’s pretty close to what I wanted.
• Click-to-shoot! Wow, I was pleased when that all came together. The bullet heads toward where you clicked, and always at the same speed – at first I got in a complete muddle as to how to do this, but then it was really simple. I like it. The whole ‘click, shoot, bullet hits wall, rock breaks off and falls’ thing works really well I think, and I’m pleased with it.

What Went Badly

• That collision-detection is awful. Checking collisions between the ground, which is a grid where 1 across = 1 tile; and the coordinates of everything else which are 1 across = 1 pixel, was tricky and horrible. I did it badly. When I eventually gave-in and added proper box collisions for the interactions between player, rocks and dinosaurs, it was instantly much better.
• The levels aren’t interesting. I hadn’t originally intended it to be an infinite, random tunnel, but I hadn’t originally had much idea of how it would be a game. I just knew “Shoot rocks so they fall on dinosaurs”. One, random level seemed much easier. The first area is fixed, then the rest is generated as needed, one column at a time. I tried several ways of having each column based off the previous one, but slightly altered, but they all went wrong. So I got it to generate a random number, and pick a pre-defined column from a list based on it. Less interesting, but at least I could guarantee that you could actually get through the cave.

What I Would Do Differently

• Prepare in advance and get a basic… I can’t think of the word. A basic code-base which has drawing and tiling stuff already there. I spent far more time getting that set-up and working, and repeating code that I could have used a base class for.
• Framework! That’s the word.
• Get more sleep the night before it starts. And, in fact, several nights before that! I kept making silly mistakes, like copying code and forgetting to change x to y in the copy, because I wasn’t firing on all cylinders.

Things I Didn’t Have Time For

• Graphically, the cave looks pretty horrible. I’d hoped to get time to have a tiling system based on what was around each tile: so a piece of rock hanging from the ceiling would look like a piece of rock hanging from the ceiling, and not just a square block.
• I’d also hoped to animate the dinosaurs. Just didn’t have time.
• It would have been good to actually show Ted holding a gun, with bullets coming from it. With the image flipping though, it would have taken time I didn’t have. I wanted several animations for Ted, but like the dinosaurs, it didn’t happen.
• Improved collision-detection! It’s abysmal.
• Particle effects! Another thing I’d hoped to have time for.  Would have made it look less boring, possibly.
• A proper menu. The menu in the final thing is the one I bunged in as a placeholder because I realised it would be handy to have later.
• The text-drawing function I used has an awkward quirk in that it always draws an opaque background. I got it from the internet a while back, and though I tried fiddling with it, I couldn’t make it transparent. Makes the menu look even worse.

I may well make a post-compo version with lots of these things added-in, but then again I’m incredibly lazy at this sort of thing. So maybe not. Still, I’m pleased I managed to do it, even though I’m not going to win any prizes.

~AtkinsSJ

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

So I intend to flesh out Killbots over the next week and then see if I can get a sponsorship for it. Current ideas include:

Your two squads are composed of different types of dudes: one fast squad, one powerful squad (assault and fire team).

Choose from one of 3 different heroes to accompany each squad (3 fast heroes, 3 powerful heroes)

Heroes get exp and levels, allowing you to get skills with special abilities

Spend money to upgrade your squads (more in-depth than currently)

Several levels, still partially randomly generated, including attack missions, defense missions, etc.

Cover is destroyable, and buildable (with engineers).

That’s about it — any other suggestions? I want to make the best game I can over the next week :).

Check out my official entry for a link to the Win32 version of Mineral Miner. Now more of you can play it and rate it! I didn’t have time to make in game instructions nor did I have time to make things obvious, so please read the instructions on the entry page before playing.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 31st, 2009 at 6:44 pm and is filed under LD #15 - Caverns - 2009. 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.

Here’s my timelapse. Enjoy!

“Dwarf Caverns” Timelapse

Tags: timelapse, youtube

Looks like a few people are having troubles running my entry ‘Life is Guano’

I am working on the OS X port of it right now. I will look into the problem with the windows build failing to start.

I am 99% sure this is just a library problem (I am linking against a specific version of DevIL and SDL_mixer both which I have not used in the past)

I’ll post another entry when this is fixed.

Here’s my post mortem…

Darkening

I wasted a lot of time trying to do something which I thought would have been easy with pyGame. I was trying to draw the wall sprites darker the further away they were, to give the illusion of depth. I’d assumed it would be one function call to do this, especially as Allegro has a function to do it draw_lit_sprite (though on reflection, that’s using a colour table in 256 colour mode) but I had no such luck. Blitting a transparent black rectangle to the sprites didn’t help either, because I needed to preserve the transparent pixels of the sprite. In the end I gave up trying to darken the wall graphics but I did waste a lot of effort here.

Artwork

I chose to paint all my graphics in GIMP, which was a marked deviation from my usual comfort zone of pixel art. As such, the artwork probably took longer than it should have and looked a bit crappy to boot. That said, I do think that my tablet skills were improving over the course of the weekend. It’s certainly made me want to practice drawing more.

Text / Graphics Hybrid

My game was a strange combination of text and graphics. I wanted to do the whole eye-of-the-beholder-type first-person view thing, because I think they’re cool. But I also wanted to make the game a text adventure because I thought I would be able to inject more gameplay elements into the thing without having to generate graphical resources to accompany them. But by the end I realised that it didn’t quite work out like this. For example, I wanted to have the player looking around and finding items on the floor, text-adventure style. But I couldn’t get away with this without drawing said items to display in the graphical viewport, because otherwise there would be nothing to indicate their presence and the player would have to use the “look” command on every square or something. Maybe with a bit of tweaking I could have established a system where I could add features without having to back them up with graphics.

Text Input / Output

I was somewhat delayed due to having to roll my own text input and output in pyGame. I had to write my own word-wrapping and stuff using the character width information from the font metrics. As for input, I had to manually map key events onto the letters they should represent (hence the lack of uppercase). The more I think about it, the more I think that maybe I should have just gone with a plain old console-based text adventure and scrapped the graphical part.

Perspective

I made a bit of a goof when I was planning out the first-person view. Somehow I ended up with something whereby the graphic for the square that the player was supposed to be on ended infront of them. That is, you could see the front of the block instead of being inside it. I realised too late that possibly the row of squares at the same depth as the player were probably a special case which needed to be drawn differently and I couldn’t get away with just scaling the same graphics. As a workaround I chopped the sides off the viewport so that the graphical mistake was no longer visible.

Combat

With around 4 or 5 hours until the deadline, I decided to throw in some monsters. I drew a bat and a skeleton and threw together the worst combat system known to mankind. This was a stupid decision in retrospect – the game didn’t need it, and its presence worsens the overall game experience. I was going to have a “sleep” mechanic whereby the player could sleep to regenerate their health, and a maybe a time limit to reach the goal so that there is a downside to sleeping. Not to mention some kind of experience and levelling system. I didn’t have time for any of this, so there is actually no point in fighting the monsters – the player doesn’t gain anything from it. So what we have is some monsters that keep turning up to annoy you that you have to keep running away from. It was pretty hilarious to see a skeleton appear while talking to a dwarf, though.

Puzzles

I started hacking together the puzzles and map with around 3 hours to go. At this point I was tired and my enthusiasm was dwindling, and as a result my imagination was just plain broken. I could have done more interesting things with the puzzle system I’d put in place and I wish I’d made more time to do so.

Overall: Playable

I finished a game! Well, at least in the sense that I got something to the point where there is an attainable goal, and it provides some kind of challenge along the way. After my last 2 ludum dare entries not going anywhere and being totally unfinished, achieving something playable this time was a nice thing to accomplish, at a personal level. I think it’s restored faith in my own game-making ability. I didn’t have time for sounds or any kind of proper intro or ending. But then again, I never do! I must leave time for polish next time…

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, reflection, whining

Here is a timelapse of my entry. It shows some of the game at the end.

Tags: LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, physics, timelapse

Ludumdare 15 is over! This was my third time entering, and my first time having a successful entry. It wasn’t without its problems though, so I figured I should do a write up of how it went.

The idea behind the 3D environment was to make 3D ’tiles’ that can be put together in a grid arrangement. These were made in 3D Studio Max and exported to be used in Unity. The shapes had their texture co-ordinates setup so that they share one material for all of the objects. PCs can render a LOT of geometry so long that it shares the same material. This concept worked out pretty well, as the final game runs nicely on even the shittiest laptop!

I also decided to go with low-resolution textures, with 32×32 per metre square. This didn’t quite work out unfortunately because 3D Studio MAX’s UV texture co-ordinates are pretty inaccurate at low numbers, and even unfiltered textures suffer. This method was a thoery that didn’t work out, but that’s okay.

The graphics in general are very rough. These are all my ‘first pass’ attempt at graphics, and I didn’t have enough time to clean them up. The tiles for the walls were never really finished properly, and some of the areas didn’t get a proper treatment for the floor. In general I think the graphics look okay though, and I was pleased how consistent the visuals are.

Building the 3D environments also took me a while longer than I had hoped. Things because faster when I started from scratch, but I didn’t expect the environments to take so long. Unity’s editor isn’t too helpful with this either because there are no easy ways to select multiple objects, so I had problems with things like enclosed areas being invisible or hard to click on.

I lost a bit of time by wasting time on code that wasn’t important. I spent a while trying to get good keyboard only controls working, which I later scrapped because they clashed with the mouse controls, and I didn’t have time to make a toggle (despite the mouse controls being a bit annoying for some). I would have been better off spending that time on a title screen and ending screen, which I regret not implementing.

I used ‘SFXR’ (CFXR on the mac) for sound effects, and I was massively pleased with the results. I started work on some music but I couldn’t get anything to suit the theme. Sorry the sound effects are a bit loud! I was pleased to get some sounds in there though, it makes the whole game feel much more responsive!

In terms of game design, I didn’t really have a solid game design figured out. Towards the end I decided to use what I had working well (doors and object-keys) and make the game progress based entirely on those. I think this worked out okay, with the game being a bit of a challenge but not so long to become boring.

All in all, I think it went okay! I am looking forward to the next ludumdare!

I’m pleased I managed to finish this. Here’s my post mortem.

I spent most of my first day wrestling with a bug in libnds associated with the way it calculates sprite addresses in VRAM. I managed to fix it, but by then I’d lost all motivation for working with the console.

That’s when I started to get a bit … creative with the theme, and really got my teeth into it (no more, I swear). I really wanted to make something that wasn’t cave-based, so I contemplated other things that might be considered cavernous, and thought of mouths.

Gameplay

Overall, the gameplay was close to my original vision. The core gameplay of shooting and healing is all there, I just would have liked to put some more extras into it, like the ability to level-up lasers. I also wanted to make it a lot more silly … but I might do that sometime post-compo.

I quite like the input scheme of mouse-look and X to walk, and C for jumping instead of the more ‘traditional’ WASD. I wanted to make the dentist walk more like a person and not a usual platform-game character – he can’t walk backwards or change direction mid-jump. Some people will hate this, but I thought it suited my theme more at the time.

Coding

I used BlitzMax for the game, which I don’t use very often. However, it was a perfect choice, given the limited time available. It has an incredible range of features built-in, and I doubt that I’d have been able to make the deadline if I’d have to write all the graphics and sound code from scratch again. (Also, SuperStrict is cool.)

Graphics

Using Illustrator for the graphics was an enormous help; I used it to mockup the design and then was able to make sprites from the different visual components. I’d definitely recommend using some sort of vector editor for quickly prototyping visual styles. The only drawback with using Illustrator was the need to manually find the origin of sprites, which was time consuming.

Sound & (lack of) Music

sfxr is really useful for deadlines. 😀 I originally wanted to put in some cheesy sounds of pain, but time prevented it. Music was a complete non-starter.

Overall

Although I probably won’t win anything, I really enjoyed my first Ludum Dare. And that’s what it’s all about!

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

as the title said … Cavern Crawler (now) Packaged for Windows

you can find it here!

LD15 timelapse from Hamilton Lima on Vimeo.

Tags: athanazio, cave, glaucon, LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, time, timelapse