I’ve been too busy at work and at home (and sleeping this afternoon ;-)) to write a post-mortem yet, but now I’ve finally got some time – so I’ll just jot down some quick lessons learned…

The previous time I participated in Ludum Dare I spent a lot of time designing a very complex puzzle game, it was so complex that I failed to complete development of the features needed to build interesting levels and gameplay… so this time round I went in the opposite direction and hardly did any design at all, fearing that I won’t be able to finish an entry. So this time round my game is pretty much feature complete – it’s just not much fun :-(!

Once I’d finished coding all the features, I found that it was quite time consuming and difficult to build interesting puzzler levels, I think this stemmed from a number of problems:

• Enemy features were not interesting enough
• There wasn’t enough interesting interactions between enemies
• I was quite tired / sleep deprived by the time I started on level design
• Designing good puzzles takes time, I think the time constraints on this competition maybe make puzzle games a poor genre choice (too dependent on good content)

I also had boatloads of problems with publishing my entry, I wanted to do Java Applet or JNLP, but I still haven’t gotten around to either – both are a bit difficult to get working, so this is something I should figure out how to do before competition as part of setting up my tool chain.

So my list of things to do differently next time:

• 48 hours is a long time (6 work days) – even if you lose 12 hours to sleep, etc. you still have 4.5 days.
• Following from the above:  spend at least 4-8 hours on design at the start (including level design on paper) you’re too tired in the last 8-16 hours to design fun levels then.
• Tool-chain setup should include testing web publishing of the game.
• Puzzle games are a poor choice of genre, rather do something more arcadish with running or jumping or shooting.

All that said, I’m still quite satisfied that I managed to complete an entry – flawed though it may be… I can’t wait for LD19 as I definitely have lots of room for improvement!

I finally made it ! Abemus windows binary. Now you don’t have any reason to not try it out 8)

bye

Just made these two videos. One is the timelapse video I took to show my development process and the other is to show off the gameplay for those that cant run flash (Linux) or dont want to actually play the game, just want to see what the fuss is about 😛

The timelapse was produced using 2300 ish screenshots, one taken every 60 seconds by Chronolapse.

Enjoy:

Timelapse

Gameplay

You can play the game here: http://mikecann.co.uk/ludum-dare/ludum-dare-hour-40-complete/#thegame

Tags: 48 hours, game, timelapse

Yeah I ‘finished’ in time for the Jam! (Okay so I just tacked on lives/game over, and avoided all polish I’d hoped to add, but it’s fully playable now!)

I hope you enjoy it

entry page

Made timelapse and gameplay videos. Even though I didn’t have enough time to finish the game this LD was lots of fun again for me

timelapse

gameplay

Here’s a well known method to not achieve much of a tangible result for LD48; try to learn a new tool from scratch during the compo. In my first hour of coding I decided, what the hell, let’s learn how to use the Akihabara HTML5 game engine … Actionscript, Javascript, all the same to me ….

Akihabara appears to have no official documentation at this stage, hence I spent about 4 hours trying to learn how to use it properly by following the examples and comments in the demo games (namely a Pacman clone ‘Capman’, a shump ‘Solitude’ and a simple Zelda-esque RPG demo). Only when I was about to quit and fall back to using Flixel instead, did I think to search for a tutorial .. and found this excellent one (which doesn’t appear to be linked from the main Akihabara site. Hmrph. I’d also bookmarked it 3 months ago and forgotten. Double Hmrph).

Examples like swellmades ‘Attract‘ make me wonder if I should have bothered trying to use an HTML5 game engine at all.

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

After hours of hectic development by myself, Bartbes, Roybie, Textmode and thelinx, the LÖVE-PARTY is proud to present: Fistful of Beef!

Click the pretty screenshot to see a gameplay video!

As was explained in a previous post, the objective is to destroy all cattle by catching a bull with your lasso, swinging it around your head and smashing all the other bovine scum to pieces – preferably as quickly as possible!

We were off to a horrible start, and after the first 24 hours, none of us really thought we’d get anything done in time. But here we are, some 45 hours later, and we now have a pretty cool little game! A proper post mortem will be posted tomorrow, but for now, we’d just like to get some sleep. Have fun playing the game and please do leave a comment.

Go play the game!

The LÖVE-PARTY, out!

Tags: final, Fistful of Beef, Love, the LÖVE Party

A bit late to post this, but I thought the submission entry would show up on the blog. 😛

So yea, the game is finished and submitted. You can play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=rate&uid=2311

Enjoy!

Timelapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIOyWFkWTdw

Tags: finished, timelapse

My girlfriend’s sister was in a fairly bad car accident last night, and is in the trauma center of the local hospital as we speak (or type, really). I’ve gotten nothing done today, and there’s no chance my team will be able to finish in time as a result. I really like our game though, so it’s likely that we’ll complete it and post it up here afterwards, just for kicks.

Peace, all.

Some stuff came up today, and I didn’t have time to do anything whatsoever with my game. So it doesn’t look like I’ll have anything for the jam tonight. Oh well

Here’s a final playable build, from what I had finished up last night! I decided to embrace that placeholder music and use the rest of the loops from the game it’s from, which, as it turns out, is kinda thematically similar to what I’ve got in mind.

Again, good luck to everyone racing to have something finished up tonight

So what happened was this….

I tried to make and RTS right….Yeah. Anyways, due to alcohol, illness and guinea pig births. I was unable to finish in time for the compo, but i figured hey, I’ll get it in time for the Jam. Then I discovered my game sucked, the logic was borked and AI + Turning Circles  = HELL.

So I started again… like 5 hours ago…. and here is the result. Credits to go mkevin747 for CC image of the Demon. Really made my day 😀

FROM THE CLUTCHES OF SATAN HIMSELF (windows)

Title Screen

In Game

Hi all

I won’t finish my entry in time cause live got in my way…

I will finish the game later so and will post it here when it’s done

(id software style)

here is a short timelapse video:

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!

As I couldn’t make my game in time for the compo, I will try to finish it for the jam.

My game is very simple, grab enemies with right mouse button and then shoot them to other enemies with left mouse button.

Here is a screenshot of the game, in the next hour I will try to improve a bit the graphics because current graphics sucks 😀

If you want to test it, please follow the next link: GrapplingHookus

It took a bit of research and a bit of waiting but my time lapse for Cat Splat! is available.  IN HIGH DEF!

48 hours of game competition, ~24 hours of development compressed into… 6 minutes!

Cat Splat! Time Lapse

Ignore the black bars, that’s me working on my macbook instead of my iMac

Sorry I couldn’t submit a separate entry so I’ve just tagged it alongside my compo entry (it’s essentially unrelated to that).

It’s called Enemies A. S. Weapons and you have to kill that guy with that name by picking up bullets lying around, of which bullets are your enemies.

Made in 15 minutes using MegaZeux, you’ll need that to run this (it’s open source, you’ll just have to go hunting for it on sourceforge or something).

http://pubacc.wilcox-tech.com/~greaser/stuff/ld18/easw.zip

Although it’s not as finished or feature-complete as I would have liked (what is with Ludum Dare), here’s my jam entry Cannonon. A simple top-down 2D shooter where you hack weapons to take control of them. Includes 3 simple levels and two different types of weapons.

View the entry here or play it here.

I’ve just submitted my Revenge of the Living Dead “enhanced” version to the Jam, thanks to your feedback! Now it has a “compass” to guide you to the nearest human. Also fixed a lot of positioning bugs and improved the graphics a bit. Here’s the entry link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=rate&uid=1572

Well, i was going to enter an updated version of my game into the Jam, but it won’t be finished in time :/.
But do not despair! it /WILL/ be released, but not as part of the competition (‘ll add it to the current entry, etc)

I finished in time, yay!

😀

I apologise if there are any bugs… as I have had no time to test it! Also, I would like to spend more time on the artwork at some point, give it a proper proof read (ANY proof read), and make some music… But for now, this is it. 😀 (It’s really, really stupid. I apologise.)