Gameplay is becoming a bit more apparent now

http://centipede2013.herokuapp.com/

Really quite pleased with how well this is going, might treat myself to pizza soon!

http://centipede2013.herokuapp.com/

A rudimentary asset-less game is up there, it hasn’t got a game over screen but with the arrow keys you can move around to steal ‘flowers’ and avoid being shot at by the defences.

I’m not really sure how to make the gameplay less sucky though, it’s not as addictive as I’d have hoped.

Playable at http://centipede2013.herokuapp.com/

• I’ve managed to get it so that it’s not too easy from the very beginning, and you can actually die if you’re not careful (hurrah).
• I’ve also added animations and drawn a load of stuff in SpriteSomething on my iPad
• I’ve made sure it’s obvious that you get hurt when you’re hit by a bullet
• I made a decision to only give one flower at a time as it keeps it difficult

I’ve actually probably spent about 6 hours putting together the game, and another 6 hours tweaking, tweaking, tweaking – it turns out it’s really hard to make a game ‘fun’ and ‘difficult’ etc.

I’m not quite there yet, tomorrow I’m going to

• Add an on-going score counter
• Add code for ‘game over’
• Add touch controls for mobile devices
• Add instructions on start so you know what you’re doing
• Add sounds

That is all pretty trivial and then I’ll get onto adding more things to make the game more “interesting” and “fun”

• There is a tendency for the ‘cover’ to erode by the 10th level or so, might consider a way to keep it coming back
• Power-ups would be cool. but not really sure what sort of power-ups to use

Time to eat some cold pizza and get coding!

I left myself a to-do list last night and I want to get cracking through it as I’ve got ideas about sound that I want to explore with all of the spare time I have given the game is already ‘finished’ !! 😀

Well that’s a first, not only did I start 12 hours after the event started, I ended 12 hours before the event ended.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=7112

That’s most likely because I kept the scope small and stuck to basic arcade features, I’m quite proud of it however as

• It has a relatively sane difficulty curve
• Surviving is skill based (based on the people I’ve tested it on)
• It works on my iPhone and my iPad and my Laptop
• It is bordering on actually being fun (a novelty for my creations)

Now to go and drink some coffee.

I’ve held off on writing this because I was waiting for reviews and issues to come in so I’d have something to post-mortemise about.

I have been sat here most of the afternoon playing and rating games, whilst reading the ratings on my own game in case things were broken.

Actually, nothing is broken apart from Audio – which is the usual story with HTML5 games even in these days (sadface), so I uploaded a fix that on platforms where it wasn’t going to work, that audio could at least be disabled (it was only generated fuzzy noise anyway).

Lesson learned there, TEST ALL THE BROWSERS

What else have I learned? Well, I actually finished my entire game by the end of Saturday, by doing the following things

• Using an engine so I didn’t even once have to worry about collision, pixels, rendering, etc
• Focusing on the game, rather than art or sounds
• Keeping my features to the bare minimum and making sure there was an end-to-end experience in place

Following that, I spent a few hours when I was tired

• Making some art
• Generating some sounds
• Playing and noting the things that annoyed me
• Getting other people to play it and noting things that annoyed them

The next day was solely spent just making the game fun to play

Yes indeed, after spending about 8 hours building the game, I then spent about 8 hours in the following loop

1. Play the game
2. Note down what wasn’t fun
3. Think of a way to fix the problem raised by #2
4. Implement the fix for the problem raised by #2
5. Goto 1

It seems to have paid off, as the reviews being written are favourable indeed, my favourite being

“Easily gets into my top 3 of LD25! Keep it up!”

I am strongly encouraged by this as a note of the things I have learned at past Ludum Dares and now cannot wait until the next one where I might try to be a bit more ambitious but still try to “finish the game by the end of day #1” as that really seems to be the best way forward.

So it’s nearly 11am on Saturday morning and I’m just starting.

I tried thinking of something clever, but completely failed – I had a couple of great two-player ideas but the problem with those is they require two players and are awful when it comes to voting therefore.

So I’m opting for the 10second waves in a bullet-hell survival game and seeing where I get with it. I’ll enjoy making it.

I’m building completely from scratch in HTML5 Canvas with no engine or anything beacuse this is the kind of game I can get away with doing that in.

My repo can be found here https://github.com/robashton/ld48_27 and it’ll be updated regularly.

Wish me luck!

So I’ve made the basic bullet-hell shooter now

https://github.com/robashton/ld48_27

Playable here http://tensecondhell.herokuapp.com/

Any ideas on how to make this game actually fun would be much appreciated

So crappy 

It’s playable at http://tensecondhell.herokuapp.com/

Basically, the waves come every 10 seconds and get harder and harder – that’s about it . Now I’m there I can focus on making it fun at least

I’ve uploaded and submitted here http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=7112

Obviously I’m not finished yet, but I’ve had something playable now since the first 8 hours and this is a statement that I’m pretty much done feature-wise

• I need to play with some sounds (and I don’t want bleeps and bloops for a change)
• I might play around with extra firing strategies

But other than that, I’m done

I’m pretty happy with it

I don’t think I’ll worry too much about spending a lot of time on this this year. I just got back in from a week of drinking in Vilnius and could do with some detox and sleep.

Still, 12 hours of development goes a long way if you focus!

I’ll be doing mine with vanilla JS most likely.