I spent another hour or so pluggin away at things (collision/player control always seems to need endless tweaking to get right). Then stopped for a bit to cook a worryingly healthy spicy vegetable soupy thing for lunch.

The weather was so good I couldn’t just bolt it down and get straight back to work, so I spent a quarter of an hour dozing in the sun and listening to music. Waste of time? Possibly. Worth it? Definitely.

After that got back to work and started putting some gameplay building blocks in:

Check out the latest build to check out what’s actually going on. Still looooooads to do, so time to fetch yet another cup of tea and get back to the grindstone.

I’ve just been putting in sokoban-like boulders in (although it might not be obvious yet I do have a plan here!) It was pretty irritating to do, and it was something I’d picked as “oh, that’ll be easy”, so also somewhat annoying.

The difficulty came from having sokoban-like elements in a game that has smooth-ish player movement, complicated further by wanting the boulders to be affected by the ice and springs in the same way as the player is. In other words, “Now entering Special Case City, population YOU!”

I expect there’s a few odd cases I’ve not caught yet, but I think (hope) the worst of it is over now. Check them out in this build.

This is important, honestly, no, really!

Also, I made myself some chorizo and red pepper pasta for tea. Which was pretty great, and I made too much of it, so I’ve got some left for when I undoubtably get peckish later.

Well, it’s been a little while since I last posted. I’ve mostly been working on level design. I slept for a little, but was feeling very restless (I even got up again having turned my computer off for another hour or so). So i’m running on less than 5 hours of sleep which is less than ideal.

Level design is being fairly interesting and enjoyable, but boy is it taking a looooong time. I’d figured on spending around 3 hours on it total, and I’ve put in at least that amount just to get to the halfway mark. I kind of knew from the start that doing something so level-centric was going to be a tough call though, so there’s no-one to blame but myself. I *think* that’s a good thing.

There’s a build with the half-finished level design in at http://jwhiting.nfshost.com/ld/17/build05.swf .. If you get stuck you can usi vi-keys (hjkl) to move between the screens (badly).

Part of me wants to keep plugging away at the levels, but I think I’m probably best fixing up the many quirks and rubbish things, thinking about sound etc. now. I pretty firmly established last night that I can do the level design bits whilst v.tired, so I should do the harder things whilst I’m fresh.

Time to go and find some breakfast.

Took a break from the level design for a bit, and went to the shops to get some milk for breakfast and other supplies.

Then I did some work on tidying up some of the most irritating sticking points, as it was making the game a little unplayable. Finally I’ve just finished doing some little two frame animations to give my hero a bit of life.

You can check out the animation in action here, because of my bug fixing it ought to be a lot more playable than the last version too.

Finished. Finito. Over at last.

That was a truly epic weekend. Apologies for the lack of interesting posts this afternoon, but I was having to crunch like crazy just to get the damn thing done. There’s a bunch of things I want to say about it, but I’m stupidly tired, and can barely focus let alone type, so I’ll leave it for a post tomorrow.

For those still struggling on, good luck!

I mentioned in my final I’m-Just-Gonna-Write-This-Then-Go-Pass-Out post that there was a bunch of stuff I wanted to write up but was too tired to at the moment. So:

Yesterday afternoon/evening was a real struggle. I’d done most of of the level design by then (a pretty herculean task in it’s own right), and early afternoon wrote two lists of the things I needed to do to make it a game, and the things I wanted to do to be happy with the result.

The first list read:

• Finish level design.
• Put in overarching game logic.
• Add intro and ‘outro’.
• Test that all orbs are reachable.

The second read:

• Add sound.
• Add music.
• Add ‘epilogue’ levels
• Add map
• Add sound + music toggle buttons.
• Add reset button
• Save game progress to cookies
• Test Test Test.

.. and I only had about 12 usable hours left. Obviously my work was cut out for me. So I put some music on, stopped blogging, stopped eating (not wise, I just forgot I needed food) and got my head down.

Somehow I managed to get everything on those lists done aside from progress saving (oh and possible one or two of the three ‘Test’s). Hard, but, I think/hope it was worth it.

Isles of Color

Just worked out that I spent approx 18 hours each day actually working, so, 36 total, ouch! Had a really brilliant time though, cheers everyone for making it the event that it is, particularly everyone on irc. Being able to chat to people going through the same stuff really buoyed me up when I needed it most.

There’s a timelapse video coming (it should be moderately entertaining as I spent so much time on level design), and I’m sure I’ll write up a proper postmortem at some point once my thoughts have settled a bit. Will have to get voting too, over 200 entries!? jeez!

So, a small collection of post-compo stuff here, timelapse, post mortem + bugfixes.

My timelapse is up at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ2UFsvPK4k if anyone’s interested. Looking back I spent a *lot* of time creating levels, but I kind of knew that already. It’s kind of fun to see them grow, though with the benefit of hindsight, taking more screenshots, and producing a ‘highlight reel’ after the event would lead to a more satisfying video.

What went right:

Had a clear design idea. I was lucky enough to start Saturday with a very clear idea of the game I wanted to achieve. It was (overly) ambitously large, and relied on being able to do a large amount of decent level design in a short space of time, but having such a clear vision of what I wanted kept me on task, and prevented me from wasting much time simply trying things out.

In-engine editing. I’ve been converted to the idea of doing level design in game ever since playing around with Cube god knows how long ago. So early on I wrote a system to support editing of levels without leaving the game (I didn’t even have an edit mode to flick into, editing happened literally at the same time as playing). There’s simple no way I’d have been able to design as many screens as I did if I’d had to keep flicking between level editor and game (or, worse, text editor and game).

Simple mechanics that interacted nicely. The 3 core mechanics (springy things, ice, and rocks) were chosen mostly on a “what can I implement quickly” basis, but I was very happy with how well they ended up slotting together.

What went wrong:

Too damn big. Whilst having a clear idea was great the specific idea I had committed me to making waaay more content than was comfortable within the timescale. There are 40 screens in the final game, and nearly as many puzzles, and this is *after* I’d scaled back my original vision significantly. I took a huge chunk of total time, probably approaching 8 hours on pure level design. I ended up having to cut other things I wanted to put in (extra animation, localised fauna etc.) as a result. Having said all that it was really cool to realize something on that scale.

My music is dull, repetitive and quickly annoying. Just a combination of of it being a generally a weak area for me, and having very little time to burn on it (1hr fairly late into Sunday, when I was completely knackered). I came very close to not bothering including music at all though, so I guess overall I’m glad I managed to put something in. More practice required before next time though.

Less testing time than it could have done with. There ended up being some significant and unpleasant glitches (infinite-loops, an inescapable area etc.) that I just didn’t have enough time left to find. Ties pretty heavily into the “too damn big” point, with that much content there’s going to be problem areas, and it’s going to take hours to find them.

Not taking Monday off work. Simple, but regrettable, trying to do a full days work after a 36hr game development marathon was not fun!.

So, all in all, I shot pretty high, way too high in fact, so it feels pretty great that I managed to realize my original idea fairly convincingly.

The glitches + bugs have been annoying me a lot, so I’ve been working on a fixed up version, available to play at http://jwhiting.nfshost.com/ld/17/islands_better.html. So far it has fixes for all the specific glitches people have reported (thanks for the info!), as well as a few I found myself. Also I’ve put in code so that if anyone does run into an icky infinite loop situation it should at least recover from it fairly gracefully. I also plan to add some sort of progress saving system, so that it doesn’t have to be completed in one session.

Anyway, that post was pretty epic all told, congratulations if you made it to the end

Now I’ve just got a lot of games to play 😀

Hey all,

After how great the last one was I wouldn’t miss this for the world. Going to be using much the same setup as last time, flex, some base code, the GIMP, as3sfxr, audacity, whatever. Asuming I get the time I’ll probably be making music in HighC.

My base code is available here. For those that care about how ‘from scratch’ everything is, it’s probably about the same level of leg-up as Flixel or FlashPunk, but I started it before those emerged, and I’m comfortable with it now. It’ll be enough to hit the ground running, but not to take all the huff out of the sprint.

Oh, and as it seems to be the done thing, this is what I’ve done here before:

I hope everyone is as hyped as I am. Have a great time, and make something amazing!

Tags: montage

Well I wasn’t all that happy with the theme to start with (last night I was saying that it was the only theme I really didn’t want). I prefer to make non-violent games, obviously this theme isn’t great for that.

Anyway, some brainstorming and a shower later and I had an idea that I liked. Maybe it’s not such a bad theme after all. It’s not going to be straightforwardly violent either, so thats cool too.

Working on getting the basics down at the moment:

So things are progressing pretty nicely. It’s a while since I’ve put enemies into a game that I’ve made, so doing so is quite a fun challenge.

A first build is available here. Contains movement-y stuff, and a teeny bit of animation. Certainly nothing that special yet, but it’s a solid start.

Thought I’d also share a photo of my rather excessive ‘desktop’ arrangement. My housemates have gone off on holiday for a week, so I’ve decided to claim the entire dining room table to myself:

Also, my housemates being away means I’m looking after this little madam:

As far as I can tell Tinkerbell’s main job this weekend is to be really distracting (and cute).

Forgot to put up pictures of my breakfast, so he’s a double value food photo post:

On the left is my second breakfast (the first was cereal, it was a long morning okay, OKAY?!). On the right is my lunch, chorizo + caper pasta, lovely

Work on the game is going pretty well too. There’s a build containing most of the core game mechanics that I’m planning to use (but very little gameplay) up at http://jonathanwhiting.com/ld/18/build02.html

I’m really pleased about how well the shot enemy rolling thing turned out. With a bit of luck I might be able to make the game feel really punchy. For now, back to work I suppose.. There’s still loooooads to do.

Tags: build, foodphoto

Well given how sleepy I’m feeling now that I’ve eaten I think it’s probably time to call it a night. I’d hoped to get a *little* bit more done than I have today, but I think I’m still on-track.

Spent the afternoon/evening finishing off and tweaking my core game mechanics to a point that I’m really quite happy with.

Also managed to fit in an hours run, which was completely invigorating, but is probably conspiring to make me rather tired now. I’ve a beautiful local running route that I can hit within 5 minutes of leaving the house, there was rivers and cows and horses and the beginnings of a sunset. I’d have taken photos were my camera less unwieldly.

Oh yes, and completing my days food photos, I had a quiche (store bought I’m afraid, but I did make the salad dressing myself at least):

Tags: build, exercise, foodphoto

I’m Making cutscene’s!

I should probably be finishing the main game first, but that’s coming on pretty well too. I’ve done all the level design at least, and it’s all looking pretty good:

Just hoping I’ve got time to pull all the other pieces together before the deadline.

I’d really expected to be bricking it by now, with tonnes of vital an unstarted, let alone unfinished work still to do.

Thankfully I seem to have judged the scope of my game fairly well, there’s still hours to go, and I’ve already moved firmly onto polishing rather than producing.

Just put a simple particle system in, and it’s working wonders, really adds a lot of movement and drama.

I’ve also written some music that I’m only mildly unhappy with, which for me is pretty spectacular.

Oh and I took half an hour out to cook some Cheesy Oat Bread (it’s like a cross between scones and cheese twists, but with bacon). It doesn’t look especially spectacular, but I promise you, it’s amazing.

After all that cheery optimism I can just tell something is about to go badly wrong, urk..

Well, after somehow getting through Monday without actually falling asleep at my desk or something, it feels like the time is write for a bit of a general LD18 retrospective.

First off I want to say a huge thanks to everyone for making it such a huge and brilliant event. I had a really great time. This goes double for PoV, who made it run so smoothly despite being too busy to actually enter; and to the crowd in #ludumdare that made sitting in a room on my own for two days a far less antisocial way to spend my time than you might expect.

Speaking of sitting in a room on my own for two days.. Here’s a video of me doing just that. Apparently I fidget a lot.

Right, Post Mortem Time. I’ll put it behind the break so I don’t need to worry about spoilers. Or in other words, if you haven’t played my game yet, try it now 😀

During voting Enemies and Weapons was just about the only theme that I really didn’t fancy making a game for. Typically I try to make non-violent games, less for any moral reason, and more because they’ve been done before in so many different (and sometimes excellent) varieties. I was distinctly un-impressed when I woke up (at 5am!) on Saturday, and blinked blearily at the theme.

Given my initial reaction I was surprised to find a game idea I liked relatively quickly. I started off trying to find ways of putting a non-violent spin on the theme. I couldn’t find a metaphor that fit well enough, and I liked, so the non-literal approach wasn’t going to work. I then came up with the idea of a game in which the enemies are weapons and you desperately wish they weren’t. The prase “reluctant pacifist” stuck, but from early on I had this quite strong vision of a stereotypical game-y beefcake soldier, who is trying (and largely failing) to prevent his actions from destroying a (comparatively) innocent army.

The game ended up being a bit more violent than I’d initially planned, but the comedic bouncing of the enemies made that entirely worthwhile. I think/hope that, when played the pacifist way I captured a certain amount of that initial concept.

What went right:

These were to an extent a happy accident, originally I was going to go forth and just stick some regular shooter bullet spray fighting mechanics in, but, lead initially by the crouch-to-fire animations I put in I came up with something a lot more medative, and mechanically deep. I’ve stuck the game on newgrounds and kongregate, and this style hasn’t been winning all that many fans, but I don’t care, because *I* like it.

Over the last year or so I’ve been building up some real comfort and familiarity with a smallish set of tools, and now it’s really paying off in heaps. The reason I managed to find so much time to work on bits of my game was that I didn’t have to spend a moment thinking “How do I do this?!”, I could just get on with doing it.

It wasn’t a comic game until the first moment a dead enemy bounced about spinning wildly. That moment was basically the core moment the final mood of the game was decided, and it’s a mood I don’t generally strive for; but that I’m really happy with.

What went wrong:

The biggest problem with the game from my perspective is that the “get hit by a bullet to ‘jump’ higher” mechanic is too challenging to pick up from just observation. It is also a bit too challenging to actually execute sucessfully. A lot of people have quite reasonably been saying “You can’t get back up!”, and it’s something I really should have anticipated and dealt with.

Whilst I do like the idea of decending and re-ascending themeatically, combined with the previous mechanic it lead to a situation in which the difficulty spikes *massively* at the halfway point. This is plain old fashioned bad design, at that moment the difficulty should be going down not up for a moment, but the level layout I chose made that a little unworkable. Live and learn I guess.

Anyway, I think this might have been a little bit epic. Congratulations if you got through it all!

Till next time o/
Jonathan Whiting

Just a quick post to say I’ll be in this LD. It’ll be my 4th. I’m using the exact same basecode as last time.

Just packing my bags so I can head off to Cambridge for the gathering there. Really looking forward to it, should feel far less isolated than previous LD’s (although I think I might miss my dual screens a bit).

Anyway, best of luck everyone!

Well, it’s begun. Spent four hours in a coach yesterday to get myself down to Cambridge, but it’s definitely feeling worth it hanging out with the rest of the LD’ers down here. We’ve got ten people at the moment, furiously tapping away, complaining about Unity obscurities, taking this piss out of Visual Studio and talking though game ideas. It’s pretty great 😀

Wasn’t overly impressed with the theme when I woke up, it’s not so much that I think the theme is bad, more that I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do for it. I’ve settled on an idea now though, it might not be perfect, but it should do.

Burnt a good couple of hours working on physicsy things, I always feel a bit twitchy about doing that sort of thing, but it seems to be coming together okay so far. Now I just need to, y’know, make a game >_<

First Build

Well, today certainly hasn’t been plain sailing. I struggled with the theme, I struggled with the phyics, and I’ve struggled all sorts of other miscellany too. I’d planned to be sunk deep into level design by now, but instead I’m only just about ready to begin that step. Today has been a looong day, and tommorow kind of looks set to feel even longer.

Not sure how/if this is all going to come together, I’ve bitten off a lot, tomorrow will tell if I can chew it. Ah well, hanging around with the Cambridge crowd is making it sociable and fun, so never mind

A great deal of the stuff I’ve been doing has been under the hood, rather than over, so I don’t have as much to show as I’d like yet. This should be a *small* taste of what I’ve been up to though:

So day two is firmly underway, and, whilst I wouldn’t say I was doing badly as such I still have one hell of a lot to do. Panic is starting to set in, but that’s fine, panic keeps you sharp, right?

14 hrs to go, and I still need to do most of the level design, add instructions, tweak and fix loads of stuff, add sound, add music, add a goal and y’know, actually finish the damn thing.

Better get back to it I guess, I’ll leave you with a (probably rather confusing) preview build, controls are directions and space (to pick things up).