In again!
Doing a solo compo as usual.
Art:
Music: 1. Audacity 2. musagi 3. Instruments at home – Yamaha keyboard, Court electric guitar, Pedals..
Programming: 1. My new JS Canvas basic library – JSCF GitHub 2. Unity game engine 3. C++ DirectX 2D simple framework GitHub 4. Blender Game Engine
about time! Rushing to start work =]
First time gif-ing. Just a shot of a stupid obstacles and dash ability of the player.
I feel like its obligatory to make this post: I finished!!! (about 5 hours ago, 30 minutes before deadline)
Wait.. where are all the gifs of your game?
Now lets talk a little irony. Its been a tough Ludum Dare having no internet connection for straight two days for the most annoying reason. They ran out of power. God! the irony!
Yup, a powercut of my internet providers made me continue offline for a whole day. This is the second day so I'm typing from my phone via LTE.
It took my 3 freakin hours to upload my entry via LTE! Think about the improvements you would make with this time! So I had to give up on instructions (posted them at entry page) and options menu that really wanted to do..
But honestly,the product is way more polished than any other entry I made before. Just a shame people need to read instructions ahead and cant bind keys.
I just hope u ppl will like it. Can't gif it or things of the sort. I'd be satisfied if this even gets posted.
The game is about running out of mental powers.. but really... it's just about glowing boxes having a fight ;)
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/powerless-3
The last one had 160 plays which isn't a lot but considering (my estimation is that) it's more than people who played my entry it's quite cool!
So here's my compo entry powerless soundtrack:
https://soundcloud.com/goproduc/powerless
You can download it do whatever you want with it etc..
I mean my entry [X] is so close to [math.ceil(XRATINGSLEN/10.0)*10] ratings!!!
We can actually make it!
I like round numbers!
I hope y'all have OCD!
...
Man why can't we just post-mortem like usual?
Well... It's been fun =] My fifth Ludum Dare comes to an end.. and with it the results and well Even if I'll rank pretty low I think I earned my skill during these compos I participated in so far. Kinda weird but I wanna start from the take-away of LDs as a whole.
For the first time (dare I say - in years, since I participate in every third LD) I feel like I managed to fully realize an idea and execute while still being pretty chill and having fun during a Ludum Dare. I feel like throughout the Ludum Dare compos my time management and overall attitude has changed and slowly but surely I'm able to bring a product that is thought through and designed. I feel that I've earned these skills that might turn really helpful during sprints of game development outside Ludum Dare and the community's support over the years encouraged me to make my games enjoyable and even simply realizing that they are! Making a game engaging in a sea of other indie games is pretty tough and well, when you get a nice comment you know that even if you rank low that you're in the right direction as an indie developer.
Time management - The time management went pretty well, especially considering my previous Ludum Dares! It went so well that even with all the terbulations (in the next section you'll see what went wrong) I had time to complete a decent product. I was pretty satisfied with that, if everything went smooth I think I would've made everything I wanted to make in this LD (options menu and so on)
Coding - coding improved a lot, especially because I didn't manage big masses of JS code untill recently, and I feel like it's going pretty well. My custom engine made progress lately and during the compo I actually was able to improve and fix some stuff in it and still keep my game interesting mechanics-wise. I became very familiar with unit and unit modifier code that the design of games for LD became much easier!
Polish/Feel - Even without the menu I wanted to have the game feel relatively slick. I was very happy with the controls and the comments seems to reflect something similar so I feel pretty satisfied about that. The feel of the game of non-stop action and responsiveness is there.
Theme - highly related to the theme and managed to intergrate it in multiple meanings and ways.
Sound - I succeeded surpressing time-consuming recording difficulties and turn them to an advantage. Lo-fi problems became scary cracks after spending time effecting them and using them in a creative way. As a piece the soundtrack isn't really complex but I was satisfied that I didn't hold myself from doing whatever I want and pulled off odd time signatures fluidly. I didn't compromise on the feel I wanted to give to the game up to the tiny parts like the time signatures (pretty varied: 7/8, 15/16, 11/16, 4/4, ...). As always it's available on soundcloud.
Art - usually I'm pretty bad at art but somehow manage to get something out there. This time I feel as if I was too much bothered with perfecting such minor things that ended up pretty much indifferent and improve effectively a very tiny part of the game. Next LD I'd love for the art to be more original. The art right now is sorta lively, but I'd love to get it to be even more lively the next time: animations! effects! interesting lighting systems and so on!
No Internet/expect the unexpected? - well my internet provider was cutting the internet cause they literally ran out of power (there was a powercut)... ironic? well I thought it was funny untill I realized how hard it is to do an LD without internet. I spent 4 hours uploading my entry via LTE instead of making the menu I wanted. sigh. They stopped providing for about a week if you're interested to know what's it like to time travel and stuff..
Sound - wait.. this was on the "what's right"... wth? Well, it's true that the outcome was cool but really I had a struggle with recording and time was wasted due to this. I have to improve my recording process.. so tedious and have to be more prepared.
This is my 6th Ludum Dare, but my first in the game jam - finally teamed up! So we're a team of two (me and @kimik) and we're going to try and use tools we have little experience with, so wish us luck!
List of tools we're gonna use:
And as always, have a happy Ludum Dare!
It was fun while it lasted but we decided we don't have the time to finish with a decent product, having dayjobs and all. Gl to the rest of u