Check (and rate) the game here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=1947
Making a game in 48 hours is never easy, but thankfully it was less hard this time. Mainly because I decided to use tools I was more familiar with, instead of using the weekend to learn a new tool or framework.
I started the weekend with the idea of making a super-hero canabalt. Something that lends a bit of variety to the one-button run genre. A constant threat from the rear, a path that makes it difficult to stay out in front and some kind of upgrade system.
I structured my development a lot more than usual, with index cards and a vague agile methodology (and the entire living floor). I tried to sleep well during the weekend, getting 6 hours on Friday night, and 9(!) on Saturday. I also ate well, cooking rather than the usual takeaways, and only drinking one energy drink the whole weekend. (I did manage to polish off 5 pots of coffee though, which was around 25+ cups.)
What Went Right™
Organisation – I didn’t feel stressed much at all during the weekend. I managed time for music and even some graphics polishing at the end (not much mind, I’m not an artist and it’s hard to make faeces shine). All in all, I always felt like I knew what I was doing, what I had done, and what I would have to do.
Tools – I normally take a sackcloth-and-ashes approach to development: “If it can’t be done on the command line, then… you’re lying, because everything can be done on the command line. Fiend!” – But this weekend, I used FlashDevelop and worked on windows most of the time. FlashDevelop really is unparalleled when it comes to Actionscript coding.
K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid) – I nailed down the initial mechanics early. Platformer with tilemaps, jumping, double jumping. I did it all with multi-coloured squares too, sprites were an afterthought. I didn’t try to invent a new genre, and I didn’t try to rewrite the entirety of FlashPunk’s BitmapData handling (see: LD #19). I took a simple idea, and made it.
Asset Pipeline – I learned the workings of D.A.M.E. very early on in the weekend. Got familiar with its output format, its awkward, awkward tools, and it’s habit of refusing to write to CSV on occasion because it believes MXMLC is still holding on to the files (although this is more likely Adobe’s fault). I got much better at using Graphics Gale for initial pixel pushing and animating, and then using Photoshop to touch up and bake in some vague lighting.
Emitters! – Who doesn’t love little objects that fire random things in random directions? More Emitters, I say. More. I wish I could have Emitters every day of the week. My next game might be made entirely out of Emitters.
Guinness – Thanks to my first point, Organisation, I afforded myself an hour on Sunday for a few relaxing pints of Black. Boom.
What Went Wrong™
Tilemaps – I spent a lot of time trying different ideas on how to procedural generate the maps. I had never made a platformer before, nor any game that made use of tilemaps. My first 30+ hours, I simply used a very very large tilemap, ~10000 tiles wide. This allowed me the ability to continue working and come back to this issue.
Eventually I decided upon much smaller (200 wide) tilemap segments. These were manually arranged in sets within the Level class, with each set corresponding to the players current powerup progression, and then randomly appended to the scene when the player was < 1600 pixels from nothingness.
This worked fine for a while, until I realised that these tilemaps were persisting, and even being called in collision routines LONG AFTER THE PLAYER HAD MOVED PAST…. Some rewriting here, and some destroy()’s there and we gained a little bit of performance back.
(It’s worth noting however that I didn’t infinite-ize ALL of the tilemaps in the game, and getting more than 2000m will cause the world to end in a dramatic, double-buffer kind of way, go-on, I dare you.)
Helicopters – See those bombs that keep dropping? Aye, they’re coming from a helicopter. Do you know why you can’t see the helicopter? Because I suck at drawing helicopters.
Wall Jump – Not as easy as I first thought, I had it working early on, but it didn’t feel right and it looked weird. Definitely a brick for the post-compo window.
Communicating with the player – Even in a relatively simple game (perhaps more so if its a well establish genre, actually), its hard to communicate certain ideas, goals and hazards to the player.
My intention for this game was for the player to only lose if they got caught (or, more accurately, blown up). This meant you didn’t lose any health if you fell down a hole.The holes served simply as a setback, in order to close the distance between you and the doom of fiery sky-bombs.
Seemingly, people missed this, and thought it either odd that health wasn’t removed by falling down, or that it was cruel that health wasn’t restored when returned to the last checkpoint. In the post-compo version, I will address this with 2 changes.
First, I will record player position AND bomb position at each checkpoint, and restore on death, as opposed to just the player position being restored as it is now (and then the bombs being teleported to a nearby threatening location).
Second, when a player dies, I will animate the scrolling of the screen back to the checkpoint position, display both player character and distance from danger. I will then visually display a reduction in this distance, to reinforce the punishment.
What’s Next?
Aside from the aforementioned changes, I have a few other ideas I’m going to be implementing in the near future, including, but not limited to:
Story mode, with a number of discrete, designed levels, catered to the current unlocked DNA.
New DNA’s, including Spider-Monkey, Electric Eel and Mole.
Highscores, self explanatory!
Better graphics, self revelatory!
High Definition Jazz Kittens, only at participating stores.
Crazy Idea?
Passive Multiplayer
After a playthrough, a replay of the players run, along with the generated map of their run would be saved with their highscore. Next time someone plays, instead of getting a freshly generated map, they would retrieve one from a server, along with the “ghosts” of everyone else who played that map. Allowing for an indirect, asynchronous level of multiplayer competition.
Conclusion
What a bloody great way to spend a weekend. I always enjoy it too much. This time I feel more accomplished and I’m looking forward to working on this game for quite a while to come. Hope you all had a great time too!
Timelapse
Tags: as3, flash, Flixel, postmortem, timelapse
