I’ve finally had some time to sit down and write this.  It’s also my first Ludum Dare, so I wasn’t even aware I should do this until just the other day.

So I created C:\\Bluescreen.  The game turned out surprisingly well and I’m actually pretty happy with it.  It’s one of my better games, only because I believe it’s completely bug free and I didn’t try to pack a thousand ridiculous features into it (though I’ll admit at the end feature creep started to show up.)

The process:

So when the theme was announced I wasn’t really surprised and I was actually kind of rooting for 10 Seconds.  But once I realized it was official, I had absolutely no ideas in my head.  Luckily I was stuck at work (undercover loss prevention agent) so I had plenty of time to walk around and get my imagination going.  Finally I had an idea.

The idea spawned from a situation one of my developer friends had just recently gone through.  He updated a new driver for his graphics card and suddenly his pc bluescreened on restart.  After restarting several times he learned that he had approximately 10 seconds to delete the new updated driver before his pc shut down.  Eventually he got it after a dozen tries.  So I decided that because this kind of thing happens often, I’d use it as part of my theme.

So the original idea was to have a reflection of some nerdy kid in the screen who was constantly downloading viruses which you had to destroy before they bluescreened the computer.  Due to time, the reflection didn’t make it into the game, and due to the 1980’s theme downloading turned into installing software.  The software that contained the virus ended up being “Busty Cops II” and at the top of the installation screen in tiny font you could see the Paladin Virus Hunter Software (which you’d know about if you read the readme.txt from the title screen) warning you that the software contained malicious files.  Of course…. you install the pixelly goodness anyway and the game begins.

Language:

So I used Stencyl to code the game.  I’ve been learning C# in my downtime, but I knew I’d never be able to create anything worthy of LD in 48 hours with my knowledge so far.  So I went back to what I know.  Stencyl is really easy to use once you know the basics of logic and what each logic block does.  For a prototyping engine it does wonders for game jams.  As soon as I had the outline for the game I started writing the pseudo code in my head while I was at work.  By the time I finished art and was ready to start coding, I had the entire game written out already.  The only thing I had difficulties with was adding the power button to the PC.  I added multiple copies because I changed tactics halfway through and it was causing the PC to shut off and turn back on immediately which was a very frustrating 20 minutes.

The Challenges:

I think the only part that was really challenging for me other than time constraints was the music.  I’ve never actually created my own music for games before.  I usually have a friend do it, or borrow it from a website.  So after multiple hours of attempting to create something using various softwares I decided to find a random music generator.  Finally I went with Sfxr for sound effects and Wolfram Tones for the music.  It turned out pretty good for randomly generated music.

The Rewards:

After the planning stage I went immediately to art.  I hate using placeholder art because I call myself a game artist.  Creating sloppy boxes for placeholders is too difficult for me to do when I can just create the finished product with just a little more effort.  When I decided that I was going to mix pixel and vector art in the same game I got really excited.  I’ve used both in games before, but never together.  I decided to make the computer as realistic as possible (given my lack of vector skills) and then use the 80’s theme for pixel art, which was ridiculously easy since I only had to settle on one color…. green.

The fact that the game came out bug-free (to the best of my knowledge) within less than 12 hours of actual work makes me ecstatic.  Bug testing and fixing is the worst part of game dev to me.

In essence:

I’m thrilled with how it turned out and at all the good feedback I’ve had.  Usually I get a lot of “Why didn’t you do this?” or “This part is too difficult”, etc.  But I really haven’t had any negative feedback that made me cringe while hearing it.

Thanks for reading!  Go play the game!

Tags: compo, flash, post-mortem, postmortem, screenshot