After giving myself a week to reflect, I’ll say my piece on how my second Ludum Dare went.

I keep a full text log when doing Ludum Dare, and I may publish the entire thing if there’s interest or I feel like it. For now, here are some highlights:

Day 1 – 6:46 PM
    Test build worked the first time. I’m not sure if that’s a good omen.

Day 1 – 10:50 PM
    So evidently entire matches are getting decided by minute differences in ship position. That’s what I have to assume because I’m getting inconsistent results and nothing else is random.

Day 2 – 11:20 AM
    I could never have had this many ships on screen in vanilla Flash.

Day 2 – 1:02 PM
    This game is still missing any kind of player interaction whatsoever.

Day 2 – 4:47 PM
    Got four power buttons working, but since I only implemented the explosion power, they all linked to that. Proceeded to spend 5 minutes trying to blow up everything with all four copies of the explosion power. Failed.

Day 2 – 9:19 PM
    Managed to unravel my game mechanics and successfully allow the player to exit a level. That took more effort than I wanted it to and less than I expected.

Day 3 – 9:37 AM
    Sound is done.
Day 3 – 9:44 AM
    …unless I decide to change the victory noise to something that’s not an ear-piercing whistle.

Though The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is a good movie, I think my experience categories during this LD are better described with a different set: What Went Right, What Went Wrong, and What Was Facepalm-Worthy.

What Went Right

-Schedule Once again, I was lucky enough to have a fully open weekend for Ludum Dare. I also like my timezone, as I kind of get three days to work with. Ludum Dare started at 6 PM for me, giving me a fairly relaxed first day where I could just get my basic concept down. Then I had a full day in the middle to really flesh things out, and the last day for polish. At no point during this structure is there any incentive for me to lose sleep, because if I stayed up too late it would just hurt my next day. As things worked out, I was able to get the basic concept down in the first hour, get a working demo by the end of Day 1, get all combat mechanics and powers plus music, graphics, and a lot of menu stuff done Day 2, and have plenty of time the next day for polish, level design, sound design, and finishing the menus. At no point did I find myself wishing for the extra 24 hours I would have gained doing the Jam. In fact, I was extremely relaxed for the last 6 hours, figuring that I had plenty of time to do whatever was needed.

-Code I love Starling now more than I ever did before this project. So much stuff that was convoluted in regular as3, such as angles, object disposal, and event handling was made much cleaner. Texture Atlases are a really convenient way to manage graphics once you’re used to them, and the performance boost is amazing. I was also blessed with a relatively bug-free game – there were a few bugs, but nothing really show-stopping and very rarely anything that took more than 5-10 minutes to resolve.

-Graphics I should focus some time on refining and improving my style, but I think I might be on to something with simple, clean vector graphics. They work really well for Ludum Dare because I can get something decent looking without having to spend too much time. It’s not the most amazing aesthetic, but it works.

-Concept The first thing I do when the theme is announced is open up a text file and start brainstorming (I think better with a computer than with pencil and paper.) I considered doing a game where you played two games simultaneously, but they interacted in a fundamental way, such as if enemies in one world could only be defeated by attacks from the other. My second idea was a more plot-oriented one, where you played in a world being invaded by demons, and to stop them you needed to go through the portals and break the machinery in the demon world. I rejected the first because I wasn’t really inspired and the second because I didn’t think I could do it justice. The idea I settled on, as written in my log, was this:

Alternatively, I could do something totally different and try to find a non-standard definition. Wikitionary gets me this:

(usually with “well-“): Having favorable rapport with a powerful entity.

    The idea that comes from this is a game where planets are connected by warp lanes, and send ships down those lanes
to try to capture other planets. Pretty standard stuff, the trick would be that the player doesn’t control any of this. Instead, they are a god that is aiding a particular civilization. This would mostly involve raining divine wrath on your enemies.

I think this one worked pretty well.

What Went Wrong

-Audio I should probably have focused more on this. My composed-in-an-hour Ludum Dare music has gotten mostly negative feedback, and I’m not exactly a master of BFXR. I’m supposing that SFXR and similar are more suited to more ‘retro’ games and that perhaps I should look into other options. Even if the audio’s not to everyone’s taste, I had time to put in mute buttons, so it shouldn’t interfere with the game too much.

-Submission Hour First of all I’d like to point out that I can’t seem to find this mechanic anywhere in the Ludum Dare rules. I legitimately did not know about it my first LD, and found myself scrambling to get the thing uploaded before the main compo deadline. Not having my own website or a good plan, I eventually uploaded to a Google Site and hoped it would work. I hoped this time would be different. My final submission time of 10 minutes before Submission Hour ended says otherwise. I tried the same Google Site, and I am still using it for the download and source download, but after half and hour of failing to pass wmode=’direct’ into the page embedcode so the game would actually show up, I concluded that the effort was going to be fruitless. With half an hour remaining and my stress-o-meter near the point of exploding, I ended up registering for itch.io and putting the game there. Success, but after much more difficulty than I would have liked.

What Was Facepalm-Worthy

-mimeType is case-sensitive. And that’s why my XML import took 20 minutes longer to get working than it should have.

-AS3 Vectors are a feature I should have known about a year ago. I’d been coding in a language for over a year without knowing I could do the rough equivalent of strongly-typed arrays.

-LD29 Since my last LD was LD28, I forgot that I’d skipped one and labelled all my files, project folder, and even the log with “LD29” instead of “LD30.” Took me half the compo before I noticed.

-BFXR I thought I’d somehow lost my copy, couldn’t find it anywhere, and was midway through downloading a new copy when I noticed the desktop icon for it.

Conclusion

Overall, I’d consider this a successful LD from a production standpoint, and I’ve been getting mostly positive feedback – certainly an improvement from last year when most people were complaining about having trouble leading shots (to be fair, it was too hard.) I’d like to thank the organizers for giving me and so many others this opportunity, the makers of all the great games I’ve played so far, and everyone who’s given me feedback so far. You guys rock!

Iter Bellum Deus is available here.