{"author_name":"Ryusui","cat":"LD #32","comments":[],"epoch":1431376680,"likes":0,"metadata":{"p_key":"17340","p_author":"Ryusui","p_authorkey":"12635","p_urlkey":"52643","p_title":"S-LAYER Post-Mortem","p_cat":"LD #32","p_event":"LD32","p_time":"1431376680","p_likes":"0","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"12635","us_name":"Ryusui","us_username":"\/author\/ryusui\/","event_start":"1429228800","event_key":"27","event_name":"LD32"},"text":"<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-32\/?action=preview&amp;uid=12635\">S-LAYER<\/a><\/em>\u00a0is my sixth Ludum Dare Game Jam entry, and my third successful entry in a row.\u00a0It&#8217;s not the first shmup I&#8217;ve made; that distinction goes to\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-28\/comment-page-6\/?action=preview&amp;uid=12635\">Hitotsu &#8211; Last of the Dragon Keepers<\/a><\/em>\u00a0back in LD28, but I&#8217;d like to think it&#8217;s the better game by far in terms of graphics, gameplay, and gimmick.<\/p>\n <p>I finally got around to releasing my Post-Compo Version 1.2 a couple days ago, and in honor of this milestone (the first Post-Compo release I&#8217;ve managed to get out the door since\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-23\/comment-page-3\/?uid=12635\">Corebound<\/a><\/em>\u00a0back in LD23!), I&#8217;m gonna try to sit down and discuss some of the stuff that happened during the game&#8217;s development, both before and after the submission hour.<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li><em>S-LAYER<\/em> runs at 160&#215;120, the lowest resolution I&#8217;ve ever made a game at. I wish I could remember the\u00a0precise article I read that made me sit up and go &#8220;wait, you can\u00a0<em>do<\/em> that?&#8221; so I can give it proper credit. I&#8217;d like to think going lower-res helped me stretch my limited art talents further than usual; at any rate, I think\u00a0<em>S-LAYER<\/em> looks better than\u00a0<em>Hitotsu<\/em>, which ran at 320&#215;240.<\/li>\n <li>Like my previous\u00a0two entries,\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-30\/?action=preview&amp;uid=12635\">Five Floors, Two Worlds<\/a><\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-31\/?action=preview&amp;uid=12635\">One-Floor Dungeon<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em><em>S-LAYER<\/em> was made using the excellent <a href=\"https:\/\/love2d.org\/\">Love2D<\/a> framework. It could have gone differently, though: I had the idea of entering MiniLD 58 with a project written in\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.stencyl.com\/\">Stencyl<\/a>, but I couldn&#8217;t quite get it to come together. That failure inspired my decision to go back to Love2D for my LD32 project &#8211; if it hadn&#8217;t happened,\u00a0<em>S-LAYER<\/em> might have come\u00a0out much differently, or not at all!<\/li>\n <li>In my initial\u00a0concept for\u00a0<em>S-LAYER<\/em>, the &#8220;baton&#8221; was supposed to be\u00a0a high-tech ovipositor: you would stab enemies with it, and they&#8217;d explode into tiny automated drones which would swarm other enemies and destroy them. This got scrapped in favor of simply taking over enemies outright and making them fight for you, an idea I&#8217;ll admit I ripped straight out of\u00a0<em>Darius Gaiden<\/em> (and possibly other\u00a0<em>Darius<\/em> games), but it did beat out my original &#8220;spawning drones&#8221; concept by a country mile in terms of sheer cool factor. That&#8217;s not to say there aren&#8217;t still hints of it present: your fighter is still deliberately insectile in appearance, and the title itself &#8211;\u00a0<em>S-<strong>LAYER<\/strong><\/em> &#8211; was originally meant as a nod to the whole &#8220;parasitic wasp&#8221; \u00a0mechanic.<\/li>\n <li>The eye blocks were the very first &#8220;enemy&#8221; I came up with. I&#8217;m happy\u00a0I was able to successfully implement them, complete with a rotating eye tracking your ship&#8217;s movements.<\/li>\n <li>The bright pink walls were meant to resemble some sort of biomechanical entrails (complete with tanks of neon green bile). This aesthetic ended up spilling\u00a0over into the enemy design: the popcorn fighters are pairs of lungs, the mines are hearts, the rapid-fire heavies are livers, the bouncing pink things are stomachs, and the vertical-flying obstacles are supposed to be intestines. All of them are outfitted with glowy bits and\/or protruding pieces of machinery to reinforce the whole &#8220;gruesome hybrid of meat\u00a0and electronics&#8221; look.<\/li>\n <li>One of my biggest disappointments with <i>Hitotsu<\/i> was having to compromise on the final boss. I sought to rectify that with\u00a0<em>S-LAYER<\/em> by designing and implementing the final boss early &#8211; before I&#8217;d even come up with all the regular enemies, in fact! I quickly sketched out the overall appearance in Photoshop using a thick binary brush (i.e. pencil tool), scaled it down to the game&#8217;s resolution, imported it into <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aseprite.org\/\">Aseprite<\/a>, and then refined it into the final graphic you see in the game. I think it might be the most elaborate graphic I&#8217;ve ever produced for a Ludum Dare project (apologies if it still kinda sucks ^_^;).<\/li>\n <li>Most of the sound effects were created in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bfxr.net\/\">BFXR<\/a>, but the snarl of the eye blocks as they shoot out of the walls, the end boss&#8217;s death growl, and the buzz of the locked baton are actually my voice recorded and tweaked in <a href=\"http:\/\/web.audacityteam.org\/\">Audacity<\/a>. (And there&#8217;s more where that came from in 1.2: the &#8220;whoosh&#8221; of the title screen logo as it comes on screen is my voice as well, and I recorded some speech samples for the end boss.)<\/li>\n <li>The background &#8220;music&#8221; in the initial release is a heartbeat-like loop created using <a href=\"http:\/\/distractionware.com\/blog\/2013\/08\/bosca-ceoil\/\">Bosca Ceoil<\/a>. There were enough people saying the game didn&#8217;t have music <em>at all<\/em>\u00a0that I composed something a little less subtle for the 1.2 release using\u00a0FL Studio: still a heartbeat-like back beat, but now accompanied with some foreboding high-pitched strings intended to amplify the creepy atmosphere. There&#8217;s also a boss theme now, as well as ending and game over music. (Bosca Ceoil is some great software, and free to boot, but it drives me\u00a0<em>nuts<\/em> how it doesn&#8217;t remember\u00a0the directory I last saved in!)<\/li>\n <li>The initial release has some bugs, as you might&#8217;ve noticed. I reduced the end\u00a0boss&#8217;s HP to 3 for testing purposes but forgot to change it back. (It poses a proper challenge in 1.2.) More frustrating was the inexplicable performance drop as the game progressed: if you made it far enough on a single life, the game would stutter and eventually become nigh-unplayable. After some extensive refactoring, I eventually discovered the problem was a simple typo in the cleanup code for &#8220;dead&#8221; objects: two cases where I&#8217;d put a period in the &#8220;remove&#8221; function call instead of a colon. Whoops!<\/li>\n <li>The Post-Compo release was\u00a0<em>going<\/em> to be 1.1, but the feedback I got from my last-minute bug testers\u00a0resulted in a bunch of new features and tweaks getting added. There were just enough improvements to warrant\u00a0bumping up the version number.:3<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>Overall, I&#8217;m happy with how\u00a0<em>S-LAYER<\/em> turned out, and I&#8217;m proud of how professional the Post-Compo version looks and feels. A real title screen with a real logo! Music! High scores! Pause menu! And so forth! It took a while to get it polished, but I really hope it&#8217;s worth the wait for those of you who enjoyed my initial release.<\/p>\n <p>And maybe this will\u00a0<em>finally<\/em> be the game I get around to expanding into something worth putting up on itch.io or Greenlight. Fingers crossed!<\/p>","time":"May 11th, 2015 3:38 pm","title":"S-LAYER Post-Mortem"}