Week-end events cleaned up at last !

First time ever in LD48.  I have only one goal : deliver !

This is what I will probably use :

• Language : AS3
• Lib : Flixel
• IDE : Eclipse
• Graphics : Pickle + the mighty sprite generator by bvanschooten (thanks a lot !)
• SoundsFX : BFXR
• Music : LMMS, unless I find something better tonight

I have some ideas for most of the theme in the final voting round (probably useless but I found it was a good exercise). The biggest difficulty for me will be to find an idea of a game simple enough to be created in 48h (or less since it begin/end at 3am in France).

Let’s go !

First day is over for me as I decided to enjoy the evening with my girlfriend.

Obligatory advancement screen shot :

The day have been very productive. The main mechanics of the game are done. My game goals is to collect coins without falling from the always moving platforms. Various bonuses and not so bonuses are planned (double speed, double jump, 1 tile only platforms, etc.)

I am using AS3/Flixel, learning as I go. I didn’t know anything about flash before warmup week-end ! Only a week is short to discover a new langage and framework, but I think I am doing well. I spent most of my day RTFM, and when the manual was not clear enough, RTFS (read the f***ing source :D).

Tomorrow I will implement the bonuses and title screen. Maybe a HoF if I have time.

If you want to try the game, it’s here : http://ld48.anbcorp.net

Man, I am exhausted. I didn’t know finishing the game would be so long and painful. And I didn’t include half of the ideas I had.

Anyway, it’s finally over. Hopefully I will get to the first half of the scoreboard :p.

So here is what I have :

Vote for me, or at least try the game !

I made various types of coins, to force the player to try to reach valuables one. Also they are no longer moving, I found it was silly.

There are not enough powerups to my taste, in number and in variations. I didn’t have the made to made more, and I wanted to made a complete game (that is : title screen, game and highscores).

The past 48h hours have been instructive for the least. Engaging the compo with barely any knowledge of AS3 was challenging, but I learned a lot. More importantly, I think I have learned to learn fast, which is invaluable.

Can’t wait to test some of the other entries, but this will have to wait until tomorrow. It’s 1:30am here, I need to sleep !

See Ya !

All right, let’s do this again !

Last time I went with the additionnal challenge of teaching myself ActionScript during the compo, and it went not so bad.

For the next compo, I will use my favorite language and try to make something very enjoyable.So my weapon of choice will be :

• Python and pygame
• Pixie for graphics, along with various stuff of the interwebz (free tilesets, character generators, etc.)
• BFXR for sounds, and LMMS for music
• SublimeText or (g)Vim as editor, I have not decided yet. I will try SublimeText during the warmup week-end and see

Also, depending on the theme and my progress, I will probably use my little pygame framework to speed up the programming part.

It’s avalaible here : https://github.com/anbcorp/minigame (Warning: very early stage of development)

It’s over for me, it’s 2am here and I need to rest. Also tomorrow the real life begin again (work…)

Here is my entry

It’s been a strange week-end. I din’t do much on the first day, then suddenly everything when fast. But in the end, I didn’t have the time to include everything.

The thing that I will regret the most is music, and I wanted to have a story too… In the end, yet another score game, just to pretend it’s a finished one.

Anyway, cheers to all jammers and compo-rushers. I will do a longer post later.

Obligatory postmortem post.

The theme didn’t really enjoyed me. After a while, I came up with some ideas all based on ‘terrestrial’ view of the theme (by opposition to the ‘marine’ view that a lot of participants had).

So my idea was to make a simple game where a mole had to find valuables beneath the surface, and bring them back on top. The idea was to force the player to plan out its digging so he can come back easily. This was later enforced by the time limit and respawning time bonuses (worms).

Here is my entry

My entry post is here, and I just made a little video of the game.

The good

• Python is really my favourite language. I’ve been using it since 2008, and daily at work. So I felt very comfortable developing the mechanics of the game
• My basecode saved me a lot of time, especially on collision detection and tiles display
• Sublime Text 2 is a very good text editor. It’s been two weeks since I started using it, and it feels very natural despite I’m coming from (g)Vim.

The bad

• Pygame documentation is very concise. I had to make a lot of testing to figure out some of the concepts.
• No music, and very poor sounds. The game fills very empty and it saddens me.
• Poor graphics, I wish I took more time to make them. I need to practice a lot doing them.

The ugly

• Took the challenge too casually, relaxing, going out… in the end I was lacking time to finish the game.
• Distributing python game is insane. I spent almost one hour figuring out issues with py2exe. Some people had troubles running the game too.
• In the end, stupid bugs (no level boundaries check, random crashes) because of the above

I don’t think I will choose python again. The language is awesome, and pygame is ok but distributing is really painful. I think every game should be playable by everybody, regardless of the platform he or she is using. What the point of making a game if nobody can play it ? I kind of regret the simplicity of flash for that. My LD26 entry was made with AS3, and I received tons of comments by the end of the first judging day. This year, I think that there are less people commenting my game because it crashes/don’t run or simply because you have to download and unzip it.

Maybe I should learn javascript ?

Who am I kidding, NO WAY ! :p

I’ve fixed the most annoying bugs in my entry, mostly crashes. Windows and OS/X versions have been updated.

Also, as it was a constant request in the comments, I added support for wasd keys. Now you don’t have any excuse to not play the game and try to post the best score !

You can play it here