{"author_name":"Frozen Fractal","cat":"LD #22","comments":[],"epoch":1324246440,"likes":2,"metadata":{"p_key":"60583","p_author":"Frozen Fractal","p_authorkey":"7882","p_urlkey":"96336","p_title":"A lonely ninja calling it a day","p_cat":"LD #22","p_event":"LD22","p_time":"1324246440","p_likes":"2","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"7882","us_name":"Frozen Fractal","us_username":"thomastc","event_start":"1323993600","event_key":"8","event_name":"LD22"},"text":"

Whew! What a ride! What an experience! And above all: what a game! I’m extremely satisfied how well my first Ludum Dare went. My game, called “I Am A Ninja”, though short, does not have too many bugs, is fun to play, has a nice graphical style, even does some character building… it just looks done<\/em>. Here it is! Click the screenshot to play!<\/p>\n

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Screenshot of my game "I Am A Ninja". Click it to play!<\/p><\/div>\n

Yesterday I collected a list of things that had to be done today, and in part thanks to luck (not getting stuck on tricky bugs), in part to good planning, I got through them all.<\/p>\n

I started with adding a storyline to fit in with the theme. Well, maybe it’s not so much a story as it is a character and his characterization… but it fits, nonetheless. Unfortunately it is told through text only and does not integrate with the gameplay.<\/p>\n

I then drew up some instruction graphics to stick at the bottom of the page. Unobtrusive, but there when you need them. On smaller screens they’ll be below the fold, but I think that price is worth paying for not slapping the instructions into the player’s face.<\/p>\n

Then came the most challenging and fun bit: drawing animations. I’d never done this before, but as my character is just a 32 by 32 pixel silhouette it was over almost before I got started, and it looks nice. The animations are packed into a single 128 by 128 image, with 4-frame animations for each of 4 states (standing, walking, swinging, falling). The protagonist is actually the only sprite in the game; all the other things are pure canvas geometry. (There’s one more image for the noise overlay and another for the instructions.)<\/p>\n

Then I built two more levels, for a total of three. My brother’s playtesting shows that an experienced gamer can get through in about 10-15 minutes, which is perfect for a game of this scope. However, when building levels I really don’t have a clue what I’m doing… I just throw stuff together randomly with some regard to how difficult I think it would be. I have little to no experience in this area, and I hope it doesn’t show too much.<\/p>\n

The same goes for sound effects. If there’s one thing I don’t like about my game, it’s those: they don’t fit in at all with the style. But without a decent microphone, I was stuck with bfxr<\/a>, which makes all games sound like the MS-DOS era. I wonder if it would have been better to have no sound at all. On the bright side, I just noticed that sound does not work at all in Firefox, so I get some A\/B testing for free!<\/p>\n

With just a few hours left, I turned to polishing. The first step was a dying animation; simply making the player disappear would not do. So I added a simple particle ‘engine’ and made the character fall apart into a bunch of white sticks when he dies. Combined with the sound effect (one of the better ones), it really gets the idea of “painful” across.<\/p>\n

Then, once I had the particle system anyway, I reused it to make the hero leave behind a trail of sparkles. When swinging through the room on your rope, this gives a really nice effect. I initially tried for a black smoke cloud instead, but that just came out looking as a cartoon-like cloud of smelliness.<\/p>\n

Finally, I added a nice animation for the end of a level, sucking the player into the vortex. Turns out, it’s quite tricky to tie this into the physics: your standard Newtonian mechanics just end up in oscillations. Some friction that increases near the centre of the vortex did the trick nicely.<\/p>\n

The finishing touch was to replace some jQuery show() and hide() calls by fadeIn() and fadeOut(). It makes everything feel so much smoother.<\/p>\n

And that’s it! Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoy my game as much as I did making it!<\/p>","time":"December 18th, 2011 5:14 pm","title":"A lonely ninja calling it a day"}