No, I did not come from Candyland.

So hey, Ludum Dare! I’ve been following this event for quite some time, gonna be honest. This time I was seriously willing to join in, but me and my friends got a better idea: we’ll join the jam, under the name Dead Pixel Games.

We’re starting a group of indie game devs to conjoin skills and make games with a focus on fun and quality. I (the founder) am the sound designer, three friends of mine are the graphic designers and another one (7Soul, you probably heard of him already) does the coding. Let’s see what we can do on this jam, as it will be (in terms) our first game! :3

After that, we’ll start producing some small titles and, if possible, move on to more ambitious ideas. Of course, none of us are tidelocked to the group only. If you need someone to design music/sfx for your game, you can call me and we’ll discuss! (of course, if I’m not already working on something).

Peace out! \o\

Kay, DPG is on the compo. This will be our first game as of now (not the first one we ever made, the 1st we made with this team), and we’ll try to make it properly polished, since there will be 5 dudes working on it.

MAH FRIGGIN TOOLS:

• FL Studio
• bfxr
• Graphics Gale
• Construct 2
• Audacity?

Not sure what they’ll use, this is just my toolbox. I just hope we can pull off something decent in time, and maybe even work more on it after the compo.

OK SO YEAH.

Since we’re tackling the jam as a team (composed of 5 douchebags), each of us does something. 7Soul will do the coding for it, and I will do the audio, while 3 friends of mine will focus on graphics. May not even approach Construct since he has the full version whilst I got only the free one because I’m a poor man. :c

But a few days ago, I decided to do an audio-only warmup. A very VERY simple melody pulled out of my ass while looking at a landscape. Here it is:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/726082/Soundscape%201.mp3

I was staring at this picture and tried to come up with a song that fits it. It’s ridiculously short, but it was a simple melodic experiment. Tell me what you think in the comments section! ^^

Man, Ludum Dare is hard, even as a team. 5 dudes working on a game, and still took us the exact 72 hours the Jam allows. Was surely a crazy ride. I could go on about the “we learned alot, next time we’ll kick more ass”, but we hear enough of that already. :3

So here’s my experience during this wacky weekend.

The Good

• I just can’t believe I managed to spur 7 god-damn songs and a full batch of high-quality SFX in 2 days! Didn’t even need the 3rd one, all the audio was done by Sunday. Shows that I’m becoming speedier in delivering my work.
• Got a better and more practical feel of my tools, something I never really had before this game. Learned to use them in unison (FL + Audacity + bfxr + freesound.org etc.) to overcome the lack of recording tools, and got some good results.
• Learned how my team self-organizes. This game alone allowed me to follow the rhythm of my colleagues and adapt to it on the run, since we have no set leader/manager for the actual game-making. And boy, we work pretty well together! 😀

The Bad

• DO NOT MAKE A PUZZLE IN LUDUM DARE. Not even for the Jam. Unless you really know what you’re doing. You wouldn’t believe how difficult and time-consuming it is to make a single logically-solvable level, let alone 10+ of them.
• We bit more than we could chew, but still managed to work around the issue. My idea got a bit too carried away for LD’s proposal, and the theme entered mostly in the story, and very little in the game itself. (yes, the game’s idea was mine)
• We didn’t execute the idea flawlessly, to be honest. The game was fun for me, but I do understand where people are coming from when they say the box-moving was a bit tedious. It was bad planning, but from my part mostly, since part of the level design was mine too.

The Details

1. FL Studio is pretty strong!: This weekend I put the poor thing through some crazy stuff to get the correct sounds, and it did a pretty good job. Cut one in Audacity, effects in FL, edit the rendered sound, get the freqs right… it was very confusing. FL is excellent, you guys should try it out.
2. Not everything gets to the end: A tip for artists out there: don’t expect your “magnum-opus” piece of game art (sprite, bg, concept, song, whatever) to go into the final game. Not because it was hated, but just because the game worked better without it. Such is true even for coding and game design: a LOT of things are cut out for the sake of a better experience in general. From the 7 songs I made, 3 of them didn’t make it, for the sake of auditive consistency and file size. And these three were calmer, soothing versions of the ones in the game, meant for the surface ambients and cutscenes. Shows how erratic game devving can be. =/ EDIT: Turns out it was just a bug! 7Soul had a power outage that wiped this section of the game’s code, adding only the adv. songs. He already fixed it! But the advice above is still valid regardless.
3. Communication is key: This game took us every single hour we had, but still came out. We finished an actual game. I can certainly say that it was partially thanks to Skype, since none of us know each other personally. By being able to request each other’s aid without resorting to scrappy alternatives, we managed to get a much smoother workflow going. So if you’re setting up a team or working with one, pay a good attention at how your team will communicate. Protip: voice-chat leaves the hands free for working. ;D
4. More is about to come!: This is not the end for us, oh no. We are gonna make MORE games. Now that we know how we work together, we’ll improve a lot more, and bring more polished work to the indie game world. Dead Pixel, in case you don’t know, is the team we made. 5 brazilian devs, mostly artists. Even if we’re not specialists, we know what we do best, and we’re always improving. So expect more games from our group!

Conclusion

This was very fun. Certainly a great learning experience, and got us finishing something for once. You can follow us on http://www.deadpixelgames.com.br (the site is in both EN and PT) for news about our crafts, or our twitter accounts.

At Twitter I’m @Xwing9, and our group is @indiedeadpixel.

HAPPY 10th BIRTHDAY, LUDUM DARE! AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH! <3