{"author_name":"KilledByAPixel","cat":"LD #32","comments":[{"author_name":"Germanunkol","time":"August 27, 2015 1:25 am","epoch":1440656700,"text":"This looks really, really good!<br \/>\n Well done on the fire, the physics, and the entire setting (grayscale with a few colours really gives it a great atmosphere).","spam":"N"}],"epoch":1440635580,"likes":3,"metadata":{"p_key":"13342","p_author":"KilledByAPixel","p_authorkey":"2075","p_urlkey":"48597","p_title":"The Monster I Am \u2013 Postmortem","p_cat":"LD #32","p_event":"LD33","p_time":"1440635580","p_likes":"3","p_comments":"1","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"2075","us_name":"KilledByAPixel","us_username":"killedbyapixel","event_start":"1440115200","event_key":"29","event_name":"LD33"},"text":"<p>Another Ludum Dare has come and gone, and I&#8217;ve managed to cobble together something that resembles a game. This time the theme was &#8220;You are the monster&#8221;.<\/p>\n <p><iframe width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ujo75MUfiEM?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n <p><strong>Friday &#8211; Concept<\/strong><\/p>\n <p>I had some trouble coming up with a concept at first\u00a0and\u00a0started writing down as many ideas as I could. The idea of an old black and white monster movie came coming up. I was thinking about old monster movies like Godzilla which\u00a0reminded me of Rampage so I played the NES version for a bit to help come up with ideas. The funnest part about Rampage\u00a0is\u00a0climbing on buildings and breaking them down, so I decided\u00a0to concentrate on mostly that. At the time I wasn&#8217;t very confident on my idea though and was afraid to get moving very fast because I was\u00a0hoping that a better idea would come up. I ended up wasting about a few hours adding some random feature to my game engine that wasn&#8217;t even used on this project.<\/p>\n <p>The only real bit of development I did on Friday was to quickly\u00a0block out what a scene might look like using the tile editor in my game engine. This screenshot shows about as far as I got the first\u00a0night&#8230;<\/p>\n <div id=\"attachment_496005\" style=\"width: 560px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img class=\"wp-image-496005 size-large\" src=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/screenshot_0001-550x309.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"550\" height=\"309\" srcset=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/screenshot_0001-300x169.png 300w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/screenshot_0001-550x309.png 550w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/screenshot_0001.png 1280w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Friday night \u2013 3 hours in \u2013 Rough concept<\/p><\/div>\n <p><strong>Saturday &#8211; Building Physics &amp; Platforming Mechanics<\/strong><\/p>\n <p>I tried to hit the ground running on Saturday and\u00a0worked through most of the afternoon getting the building simulation working. It&#8217;s a pretty simple concept. Buildings are made out of square blocks and\u00a0connected to neighboring blocks in a grid. Blocks apply a force to their neighbor\u00a0to keep them connected, and break if they get pulled too far apart. It took a lot longer then I hoped to get the physics tweaked out properly. It&#8217;s like if you apply too little\u00a0force\u00a0the the buildings just fall apart, but if you apply too much they freak out and explode. So getting that working took most of the day and I was discouraged at many times because I thought the idea would not pan out for technical reasons. One problem throughout development was that the physical simulation is fairly taxing and does not run at full speed in debug mode.<\/p>\n <div id=\"attachment_496007\" style=\"width: 560px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img class=\"size-large wp-image-496007\" src=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/screenshot_0025-550x309.png\" alt=\"Saturday Night- 24 hours in \u2013 Physics sim on buildings\" width=\"550\" height=\"309\" srcset=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/screenshot_0025-300x169.png 300w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/screenshot_0025-550x309.png 550w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/screenshot_0025.png 1280w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Saturday Night- 24 hours in \u2013 Physics sim on buildings<\/p><\/div>\n <p>I also added some simple platforming mechanics\u00a0and the ability to grab onto buildings. First tried using a distance joint for\u00a0grabbing but threw that out in favor of just manually applying an acceleration to the grip point. Spent probably way too much time working on the player sprite and went through many variations. I started with my sprite from LD31, morphed it into\u00a0something like Frankenstein, then went\u00a0greyscale, and finally back to color with a more surreal\u00a0looking sprite. I thought glowing red eyes would look\u00a0cool, but it wasn&#8217;t visible enough and I wanted to draw more attention to the player so I\u00a0switched it to be\u00a0a glowing sprite with black eyes. There were a few revisions in between\u00a0that I lost, and research into other ideas for characters.<\/p>\n <div id=\"attachment_496008\" style=\"width: 258px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-496008\" src=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/players.png\" alt=\"Player sprite evolution\" width=\"248\" height=\"92\" \/><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Player sprite evolution<\/p><\/div>\n <p>I wasted much of the night\u00a0on Saturday. Took many breaks include a several hours long dinner with a friend. By the end of the night I was still not sold on my concept and it didn&#8217;t really come together until the next day.<\/p>\n <p><strong>Sunday &#8211; Fire, Enemies, Random Levels<\/strong><\/p>\n <p>I worked pretty hard on Sunday in an attempt to make up lost ground. Adding the fire spreading\u00a0across\u00a0the buildings\u00a0was a major improvement in making the simulation interesting to watch. I also added a kind of electricity simulation that turns window\u00a0lights on\/off\u00a0randomly if they are connected to the ground.<\/p>\n <blockquote class=\"imgur-embed-pub\" lang=\"en\" data-id=\"RemcMHy\"><p><a href=\"http:\/\/imgur.com\/RemcMHy\">View post on imgur.com<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n <p><script async src=\"\/\/s.imgur.com\/min\/embed.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n <p>One major thing still missing was any kind of enemies that attack the player. I ended up with only enough time to add one\u00a0enemy type, planes that fly around shooting the player\u00a0with a machine gun when they are in range. The flight patterns took more time then I expected because\u00a0I wanted them to fly somewhat realistically to match\u00a0with the realistic physics on the buildings. Since the game wasn&#8217;t much of a challenge with only this one enemy type I ended up making the fires damage\u00a0the player, still not sure if that was the right decision because it can detract from the joy\u00a0of destruction.<\/p>\n <p>I spent about an hour on\u00a0Sunday adding sound effects. I&#8217;m not very\u00a0happy with the results, but it&#8217;s better then nothing. There was a lot of other features\u00a0that I probably could have skipped. For example there is an\u00a0intro section where the player starts small and transforms. It was a cool idea but I didn&#8217;t polish it enough to call it out and it will probably be overlooked by most players. Also the little tiny humans are kind of hard spot, and their physics\/AI\u00a0is\u00a0wonky\u00a0but I wanted them to give a better sense of scale.<\/p>\n <p>The last thing I added was the random city generation which I banged out\u00a0in less then 30 minutes. It was a risky thing to add at the end, but I didn&#8217;t know what else to do after you destroy the city. There wasn&#8217;t time to add any randomization on the trees or little humans, so they always in the same places from the editor. I would have liked to add a lot more variety\u00a0in building type and stuff but there wasn&#8217;t enough time\u00a0for such luxuries.<\/p>\n <p><strong>What Went Right<\/strong><\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>Visually looks pretty cool and is fun to watch.<\/li>\n <li>Physics destruction sim is pretty cool.<\/li>\n <li>Gameplay demonstrates that this could be a decent game\u00a0if polished.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p><strong>What Went Wrong<\/strong><\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>Building physics is a performance hog. Does not run well in debug mode.<\/li>\n <li>Sound effects are horrible.<\/li>\n <li>Got discouraged, didn&#8217;t trust my idea, and wasted a good portion of the weekend.<\/li>\n <li>Visual Studio keeps freezing up and I have to manually shut it down in task manager. This happened at least\u00a010 times and throws off my forward momentum because I forget what I was working on and\u00a0lose my\u00a0place in the code.<\/li>\n <li>Wasted too much time working on\u00a0stuff that got thrown away or didn&#8217;t matter.<\/li>\n <li>Needed to spend more time polishing jump physics.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <blockquote class=\"imgur-embed-pub\" lang=\"en\" data-id=\"iiX9V0q\"><p><a href=\"http:\/\/imgur.com\/iiX9V0q\">View post on imgur.com<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n <p><script async src=\"\/\/s.imgur.com\/min\/embed.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n <p>I&#8217;m glad that I participated in this Ludum Dare, though it&#8217;s not my best entry. I took a chance\u00a0on\u00a0a technically risky idea and it payed off pretty well. Also, I think this is probably my strongest in visual imagery in\u00a0a Ludum Dare. \u00a0I will continue working on it and release an enhanced version with 2 player support\u00a0soon.<\/p>\n \n <p>Tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/postmortem\/\" rel=\"tag\">postmortem<\/a><\/p>","time":"August 26th, 2015 7:33 pm","title":"The Monster I Am \u2013 Postmortem"}