And I am in. First time. Will be usng html5 and javascript. Paint.net and sfxr on top the text editor. Did not have much time to prepare, but very excited.

I watched the announcement of the theme and then spent the first few hours sleeping, because in UTC+2 it was quite early.

Next, ideas. I initially read the themes in the final voting, and had some small ideas for some of them, but somehow really ignored the Villain theme. So when I started thinking I had  trouble coming up with truly good ideas that I liked. Finally came up with two candidates, and settled on my current one (which I won’t reveal yet). Decided to go with tiles and began creating a tile engine in javascript and created some images, animations and sounds. I can now draw the playing field, and I have some creatures. Like this cow.

No, the cow is not the villain. I was surprised how well I got started with drawing my own tiles and characters, and had fun creating them. Now will have to work on some game concepts, because the initial idea seems maybe too simple. And perhaps not villainous enough.

My simple tile engine is working now, characters and scenery gets populated on the screen. With animations. Created a title screen and an introduction sequence using the tiles as well. All seems to have come together nicely. The game turned out to be a puzzle game, and I already have several levels designed.

Still struggling with some game design issues: cannot decide how to use some elements of gameplay. It also feels too simple at this point. But my mind starts to go blank and it is time to take a break.

Here is a shot from the game field.

Note: The goat on the right is there, because it seems to be such a big hit this time, and I decided to incorporate that too. I just wonder what I will do with a goat.

I am almost done. Title screen done, intro done, outro done, gameplay, levels and graphics done (although I still need some testing to do), sound effects added. Music is missing, but I am not sure I will be able to pull that off. Also cut out some half-baked ideas and features to try to make it into a complete game.

Here is a screenshot from the intro for “Villanus Haerfest“:

I have goats too (unfortunately they did not make it into the intro :)).

Game done, submitted and slept the night. It was an intensive weekend, even though I only put in about 22 hours of work into the game. I really enjoyed creating a game in this timeframe. I also learnt a lot of things

I read the theme right when it was announced. It was 4 in the morning for me. I wanted to sleep a few hours after that, but the first hour I just could not get any sleep as my mind was working on ideas Once I got up after a few hours of sleep, I did about 1.5 hours of idea  generation, the result of which was the rough idea of my puzzle game. There were no goats or gnomes in there at this point.

I also wanted to interpret the theme in some way that would not be obvious right away. That is how I ended up in the farming world after reading the Wikipedia article on Villain

Here is the game page:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=18720

What I ended up using:

• Visual Studio 2012 for editing the HTML, Javascript and CSS
• Paint.net for drawing all the visuals
• Audacity for editing the sound effects
• iPolysix to compose the music
• Lame and oggenc2 to encode the music and sounds

What I will have to improve:

• Need to have a framework ready. One that would manage loading resources for example. Or manage my tiles better. The current framework I put together during the competition needs some rework.
• I did the tilemap composition by hand. I know there are tools to handle this, will need to look those up.
• Music. I created and added some music at the end, but I am not 100% satisfied. Will need to improve on that.

Tags: postmortem