This has been the fourth time I’ve attempted to participate in Ludum Dare, and it has produced the third LD compo/jam game I’ve released. Now, it’s time for me to talk about it:

What went right:

Actually finishing the game. I was so uncertain that I would finish this game, until the last few hours of the jam deadline.

Transitioning to a new platform. I made all my previous (mini) Ludum Dare games in either Flixel or FlashPunk, which are some really awesome frameworks focused on creating games in Flash, but I believe Flash is starting to become the new ‘Shockwave’, and will slowly be losing support from game developers, as the web, and HTML5, slowly evolves.

What went wrong:

Inexperience with melonJS. I was originally going to use craftyJS for my game, but, a week before this Ludum Dare started, I switched to melonJS, as I had some issued with Crafty (which I also had little experience with). This lead me into…

Nearly giving up. It was only within the last 4 hours of the jam deadline that I decided to take what I currently had, and attempt to turn it into what I consider a finished game.

Ugly code. Because of my inexperience with melonJS, I had a lot of really unoptimized code, and I took many shortcuts, just to get the game working.

What was dropped:

Falling / shooting spikes. I had planned to include falling spikes into the game, but due to my inexperience with melonJS, this was dropped, and dangers in the game were reduced to spikes.

Colour changing character. I originally planned to have the character’s sprite change to white once they entered a dark area. I dropped this, due to the problems I had with inexperience with the engine I was working with.

Checkpoints. Many comments on my game’s page complain about the loss of their powerups once they make a tiny mistake. I had originally considered checkpoints, but they were dropped from the game, as I has no time left to implement them.

I am currently working on a post-compo version of Stykk, and I have cleaned up the code a lot, and I am also going to make it so you don’t lose your powerups on death, making it less frustrating. (I will also include the original behavior as a ‘rage mode’)  

Watch my entry page for updates!