Even if I like the theme, I lost too much time to build the platform engine and I don’t think I will be able to finish with only 12h left… Here’s what I did until now.

It’s the first time I try to post something during the 48 h

I’m currently working on some sort of puzzling where you must escape a rainbow prison by destroying the right tiles.

You have to reach the border without waking up the guardians ( red balls )

Play it here !

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 20th, 2011 at 5:52 am and is filed under LD #21. 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.

5

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 17th, 2011 at 10:54 am and is filed under LD #22. 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.

…you’ll be a part of me… forever…

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This entry was posted on Sunday, December 18th, 2011 at 10:03 am and is filed under LD #22. 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.

I’m a bit late but here’s the Post Mortem for   Super Strict Farmer 

It tooks me some time to figure out what to do with the Tiny world theme. I was just thinking to a little piece of ground floating in the air. So I decided to adapt a famous boardgame ( my favorite ) named Agricola to a short and more accessible version .

I think I succeded in making it shorter ( boargame version play are 2h-3h long ) but the result is still very difficult to handle and not very intuitive.

You can play Super Strict Farmer  here !

The Timelapse is here

What went right :

– Preparation / Efficiency

On the week before LD23, I focus my attention to go to bed early and slept at least 9h-10h per night  ( that’s a lot for me ). It made my 48h very pleasant, I slept only 6h in one shot and had almost no focus problems. It didn’t help to take good decisions, but I had my head clear when I had to implement them

– Animation and arts :

I’m used to graphics gale and can work fast with it. I spend a few percent of my time on graphics and could focus on the core of the game. I just wish I had more time for particles and special effects

– Artificial Intelligence :

Well. I was thinking I wont have time for this in 48h. So I first decided to make the computer player play random move and balance difficulty with initial advantages ( more food, peoples or ressources ). I finally decided to give 2 hours for AI and I dont regret it. I mean, the result is not perfect but working on it was the most fun part of the project. Trying to give score for each possible action, made me think like a player ( not a game designer ) and it works like actually testing your game and detecting his weaknesses. At the end, I made the AI compute opponet best actions so it can try to steal them from you. It made the game more interesting and in my case very introversive, because I really had the feeling to play versus myself.

– Title

I had fun imagine it and draw it in 90’s super street fighter style. I was thinking that maybe, it could be the best title and then… I saw Copulous 😀

What went wrong :

– Simplification of the orginial Gameplay :

One of the bad points of Agricola is that you have to wait the end of the game to have a clear view of your score. It make it very obscure to new player, and I was thinking I could avoid it by creating ingame-actions that let the player trade ressources for victory points. I could not balance them in time, and was forced to add a final grain/sheep/cattle count. It ruined my original idea.

– Balancing :

Even if the result is playable, the game balance is unstable and took me most of my time. It’s difficult to estimate it, but it should be around 9-10h . I could have better intro screen and better ingame help if I didnt spent all this time on balancing.

– Boardgame :

Trying to adapt a boardgame to a short casaul game for LD is not the best choice I could make. This kind of boardgames are not very popular and I know that only few people enjoy their mathematics. I think I ended with a game too simple for boardgame veteran and too complicated for unitiated.

– Loneliness in a crowd :

One more time I had a chance to share this Ludum Dare with a lot of friends who was participating in the same place ( deepnight, 01101101, thotor , valandre ). And once again I stayed focus on my work not trying to go around and see what they were doing. But this time I have the solution : LD24 will be a jam entry for me

wizard says , ” I’m in ! ”

boulder says , ” It’s dangerous to go alone, take this prize ! ”

wizard says , ” I can’t dude, money would ruin my magic powers”

boulder says, “… ”

My tools :

– Coding : haXe

– GFX :  Adobe Flash CS5 and/or GraphicsGale

– SFX : Bfxr and LabChirp

– Music : Sunvox ( my first try for music, I hope it will work )

– my lib

Good luck to everyone !!

You can play it here

The title screen is ready :

For the theme evolution I made a game with beetle teams fighting each other.

Please play it here !

The player control none of the team but he can bid for one of them. If he win the other team evolve and he have to switch his favorite team or persist on the first one for the next fight. Until he fails.

There’s 16 different skills but you will never select any of them.

The most difficult part of the gamedesign of beetlefield was to not let the player focus on one team as “His” team. That’s a bit frustrating, but I wanted him to concentrate on analyze rather than the classic level-up-your-character thing

I was really unsure about how it will work, so I added an incentive to the game.

Player can save the last team they bid for so they can sort of “possess” it to fight with other players team.

What went right :

– Experience : This is my 6th ludumdare and the first one when stress is not overwhelming me. That makes my week-end more enjoyable than the other LD. I even finished my todolist 3 hours before submission time, which is a very reassuring thing to do

– Music : That was my first time creating my own music for a game. I’m always spending few time before LD searching for a tracker I could use, but this time I think I found one I like. This is sunvox and I plan to train with it for next LD. I know the menu and ingame music I created are a bit basic and repetitive but well… I’m still proud of them

– Surroundings : We were gathered at the Motion-Twin company office. 11 developpers working altogether, it was a very good athmosphere. They all made an amazing work which really helped me to push my limits further.

What went wrong :

– Few Skills : Since the game engine was ready on saturday morning, I had tons of time for titlescreens, music and all. But I regret now I did not spend more of this time for extra skills. They are the game core and with more skills all the battles would have been unique.

– Fonts : I was never satisfied with fonts and spend to much time looking for them.

– Sfx : I reduced the tweaking time on Sound Fx because of the time I had spent on music. The result is my sfx are poor, especially the button tick and selections. I’m only happy with the beetle death sound.

– Not enough beds

Tags: LD #24, post-mortem

I decided to make a post-compo version with the new skills I had no time to add in the 48h compo version.

In this new version, beetles will be able to fire missiles at their opponent or teleporting in their back to avoid bullets. There’s also a mutilate skill for blewing some legs off and burst of missiles as well as seeker projectiles. Ice shards slow down their target and cannibal can gain life by eating the bloody spots on ground.

You can play this new version on kongregate and save your armies there, so you will not have to copy-paste DNA code anymore.

Thank you very much to everyone who rated my game generously enough to make me reach this #5 position.

Congratulation to every winners of Ludumdare24 and congratulation to everyone who learn something by sacrificing those 3 days on the the glorious altar of video game making !

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2012 at 10:20 am and is filed under LD #24. 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.

My Battle Gear for the 48h compo :

- Coding : haXe with flashdevelop

- GFX :  Adobe Flash CS5 and/or GraphicsGale

- SFX : SION with my own MML editor ( Many thanks to 8bitmatt who made me discover this great music language )

- My personnal  lib

You can check my previous LD entries here :

5

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 13th, 2012 at 11:26 am 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.

Hello !

I will take a boat in a few hours from Andaman to Chennai. It shoudl take 3 days, so I may be in depending on the weather and the chaotic indian boats shedule.

If I arrive in time I will use haxe  graphics gale and my libs

By the way, I worked hard on my 7DRL entry Kali’s Ladder. If you like roguelike please have a look and send your feedbacks here

This entry was posted on Monday, April 22nd, 2013 at 11:16 pm and is filed under LD #26. 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.

My 9th LD… And still excited like for the first one

This time I’m back in the Motion-Twin Factory and will code in nearly perfect conditions !

I will work with flashdevelop and Haxe

For graphics : Graphics Gale

For music : my own tool VMML if I go retro, or maybe sunvox or pixitracker

here are my libs

If you didn’t try VMML ans still looking for a music/sfx editor, you can check my previous post !

Suffering a lot with all the object interactions.

And I’m pretty sure I will find out on monday, that tons of good adventure game maker could have spare me this mess.

Anyway I will do my best to finish this in time !

Good luck to everyone !!

Only 6 hours left and so much work to do !

I still have no sound, but I have just finished the save system and the title screen :

Hold on everyone !!! It’s the final straight !

This is a screenshot of my game.

You need to connect planets by using trade / diplomacy / alliance between the 4x aliens races.

I’m in for my 13th Ludum Dare I hope this number will bring me luck

My tools have not changed much :

code : haxe + my libs & maybe some heaps

gfx : graphics gale

sfx + music : VMML 

… The juggling Snowman …

I made a timelapse for Snowball Juggling Olympio my LD31 Entry :

I had to reboot my project 6h after the start. My initial idea was some sort of shooter arena with a very small ship and a very big arena 😀
The black screen sequences are my actual sleep time, it was pretty short on this jam… Not sure if it was a good thing or not.

Snowman face animation

Because some people asked me to, I also made a small tutorial to explain the snowman face animation. I’m not very good at making tutorial, but I’ll try.

The syntax used is haxe.

In this exemple the face will follow the mouse position in the screen.

WIDTH and HEIGHT are the game size.
RAY is the head ray.
mx and my are the mouse screen position transformed into a value from -1 to 1.
elements is a list of the face elements such as the eyes, nose, mouth etc. They all have a dx & dy offset between -1 and 1 to represent their position on the face.


var mx = (mouseX / WIDTH) * 2 - 1;
var my = (mouseY / HEIGHT) * 2 - 1;

for ( e in elements ) {
var cx = mx + e.dx;
var cy = my + e.dy;
var ddx = Math.cos( 1.57 * cx - 1.57 );
var ddy = Math.cos( 1.57 * cy - 1.57 );
e.x = ddx * RAY;
e.y = ddy * RAY;
}

var angle = Math.atan2(my, mx);
var dist = Math.sqrt(mx * mx + my * my);
nose.rotation = angle / 0.0174;
nose.scaleX = dist;

The nose element have a specific code to change his shape depending on the angle and the distance of the mouse to the center of the screen.
On the image you can see the nose also have a base element with no transformation so it can keep a round shape at the base. this element also add a small shadow using the DARKEN flash blendmode.

The use of the cosinus function make the linear values of mx and my become curved values. ddx and ddy are still between -1 and 1 but their value tends to stick to -1 and 1 more quickly. This is where the fake round face feeling happen.

This is not a 3D projection and, therefore, far from accurate especially with diagonals. In my case I had to mask my face elements so they dont leave the face area. You can see more details in the source code of my game.

I would love to enter this Ludum Dare but something new ( like 7 days new ) may alter my workflow :

I want to keep my game small so pico8 will probably be my choice.

Good luck to everyone !!