Hello everyone,
first post here on ludumdare, I’ve been tinkering away on my own on a few game projects over the past few years, so I thought I might as well join LD this year.
I’ll be using Pygame, Tiled, Photoshop and Pxtone,
Should be fun!
When voting for themes, do remember you are going to have to make a game based on the theme AND play upwards of 700 games based on the theme you choose. Try to think a little before upvoting “Beards” or “Kittens”, if you can’t instantly think of at least 5 completely different games for a theme, it isn’t a good theme. Also, downvote non themes, i.e ones dependent on implementation, we want to see a wide variety of games, not 700 black and white games, or 700 pixel-art games, etc. Just remember that if a theme is in the top 100, it just might win, so try to be sensible please.
I think it would be mighty appropriate if the theme “1” had 1 vote to it’s name.
Hey guys, for anyone who’s using pygame, here’s a tilemap loader that loads .tmx files generated by Tiled. Not sure if I’m going to even use it in my ludum dare game, but I thought it might help someone out, so I’m releasing it here.
Alrighty then,
Getting the basic stuff down pretty quick, just need to make my guy fall and hit the ground instead of falling through it, plus being able to use doors and pick up stuff.
Fancy lighting effects and movable boxes! I think I’m done for the night, not going to tackle jump physics til tommorow morning.
Well, it’s starting to turn into a game, I just need to mop up a few animation bugs and add more puzzles and tiles, and it’ll basically be done enough to start doing the finishing touches (title screen, show when the game is paused, ending, etc.)
I’ve finished my LD22 entry: I Want To Be Alone
I’ve uploaded a windows binary and a python source package, unfortunatley I don’t have a Mac so mac users will have to wrestle with OSX’s built in python interperter, which I hear has some problems.
Anyways, my game’s page is here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=7106
48 hours and one wild ride later, my first ludum dare is finished. I’m pretty happy with the end result and generally things went pretty smoothly.
Now onto what went wrong:
– My code is a mess: Like the horrifying lovecraftian all consuming elder god kind of mess, it’s covered in global variables, basically everything wrong to do with segmentation, and a lot of ungodly long methods, all sorts of bad practice stuff.
– I am not a musician: I didn’t spend too much time on the sound, but I’m not very happy with the way it turned out, I should have spend much more time learning my sound editing tools before the compo.
– Needed more time for puzzle elements: I’m not happy that basically the only mechanic for puzzle solving is just carrying boxes around, I would have liked it if there were some more interesting changes to the gameplay than ladders (which were quite rushed, and it shows). Maybe if I had some kind of simple scripting system or something I could have implemented a basic adventure game sort of system, but oh well.
Well that was kind of a downer, now for what went right!
– No problem coming up with an idea for the theme: I came up my idea not 5 seconds after the theme was announced, having an idea in mind from the start definitley saved me time in the long run.
– Pixel art is fun: I really enjoy pixel art, and it makes for a good break from programming, over the past couple years I’ve been working on a pixel art game in my spare time, so I had plenty of practice, and the art went quickly.
– Super crude faked lighting makes the game look so much better: I’m really happy for a suggestion I got to add some basic lighting, it makes the game look a lot better with minimal effort, and plus it adds to the general moodyness to have some harsh shadows.
So what things should I keep in mind for next time? I should definitely come up with some gameplay elements before diving into programming mechanics. I need more practice making music and sound effects, because they really help in making a game feel “finished. Last but not least, I should definitely look into making a personal code library to help keep my code clean by giving me more of a framework to work with.
I’m really looking forward to LD23, and I intend to play and rate every game if at all possible, it’ll be interesting to see what others have come up with. Good luck to my fellow participants, I look forward to playing everyone’s games.
Tags: postmortem
I will be entering LD #24, so we’ll see how this goes the second time around.
I will be using:
Pygame + Python 2.7
Adobe Photoshop CS3
Either Pxtone or Fruity Loops, have not decided yet
Tiled
Good luck to everyone, and I hope this will be an awesome Ludum Dare for everybody!