The Dare

I stumbled across LD36 by accident, when it was already in progress.  “How neat!”, I thought; “Too bad I can’t participate”.  I already had commitments most of Saturday, and I don’t work on Sundays, which left me only six hours of working time before the Compo would end.

Well, I decided to *just do it!* anyway!  The result:  Type-O-Tron.

The Game

Type-O-Tron is a (hopefully charming!) typewriter simulator.  Typing is trickier when you don’t have a backspace key and some things (like the apostrophe) are in places you’re not used to!  There’s also a bit of story in there.

Download it here (it’s an executable .jar, so you need Java installed to play it).  I hope you enjoy it!  I would love feedback since this is the first time I’ve done a Ludum Dare.  It’s best played with headphones (I think the sounds ended up a bit quiet).

I was playing by Compo rules, though my timetable was shifted from the live Compo so I couldn’t enter it officially.

The Timeline

I used the last six hours on Saturday instead of crashing after my full day as planned.  It was complicated by the fact that I was sick and had a terrible headache, so I couldn’t look at my computer monitor very much.  It was pain, but I got really excited about making a game.

Except for those six Saturday hours, I started my clock on Monday morning.  I’m self-employed and work from home, and was fortunately able to take half the week for making a game :).

I wondered if I could finish a Compo entry in only 18 hours so I could submit it to the live Jam, but sadly, no.  I was able to pull it off by 2am Tuesday evening / Wednesday morning, though!

Here’s the timeline:

• 6 painful hours on Saturday (7pm-1am)
  • brainstormed and picked an idea
  • drove all over creation looking for a typewriter for making sound effects
  • found inspiration typewriter images and began drawing keys
• Break for Sunday
• 18 hours on Monday (8am-2am)
  • unhealthy amount of drawing typewriter parts
  • wrote the story and dialog
  • recorded dialog and remaining sound effects
  • processed all sounds and got the finished sound assets
  • got a libgdx project up and running
  • picked and packaged fonts
• 7 hours of sleep (2am-9am)
• 17 hours on Tuesday (9am-2am)
  • pretty much all the game mechanics and programming
  • beginning/ending scripting and player choice texts
  • typewriter “animations”
  • even more time drawing typewriter parts
  • testing, testing, and more testing
  • make an executable .jar file to package it up

After staggering across the finish line, I let myself look at the other amazing games that were submitted for real, and stayed up another three hours exploring them.  I also fiddled around a bit trying to make some native builds with a JRE included (have never done that before) but at that point I was shot so gave up on it and went to bed.

Tools

Here’s what I used:

• Code:
  • LibGDX (Java)
  • Eclipse (Mars.2)
•  Sounds:
  • Zoom H1 recorder
  • Audacity
  • Sennheiser headphones (HD280)
• Graphics:
  • Wacom Intuos Pro (Medium)
  • Paint.NET
  • fontsquirrel.com (fonts)
  • LibGDX’s heiro bitmap font generator
  • LibGDX’s texturepacker
• Story and Notes:
  • Notepad++

Thoughts from the other side

I probably spent 12 hours just drawing the graphics.  Drawing is not my strong point (I’m a programmer by trade), and getting through the graphical assets in time was a big challenge for me.  The upper part of the typewriter base suffered since I had to cut corners to get it done on time.

Next time, I’m going to steer clear of any idea that involves “just make and animate 40 ____’s”.  The typewriter keys got pretty tedious to position correctly in the code for animating, and I had to cut some of the animation out to make it in time.

I also sunk more time than necessary managing some ugly event scripting code (play this audio, then after it’s finished present this choice, and do these things after…).  I made something up on the fly that worked, but it would have been really handy to have already spent some time thinking about an architecture that would turn actions into objects.  That way I could chain them without nesting so much.

I almost didn’t post the game here.  I started looking at other great games that were “official” and better than mine, and began telling myself that since I couldn’t submit my game officially no one would be interested.  Or that it was really bad.  Or whatever.  (I’m a perfectionist.)  But in the spirit of *just do it!*, I’m taking a deep breath and posting it here anyway!

All in all I think it was a success, especially since my wife is better at playing it than I am :).  I hope you enjoy it!