I’m currently attempting to submit my entry for LD21 and thought I’d share some of the steps along the way with screenshots (from timelapse archive, <3 chronolapse).

No better way to start than a title screen:

I then got stuck straight into the concept I had for “escape” – solving puzzles to move up levels of a tower/dungeon to escape rising lava levels, with a snakes and ladders like “fall down 3 levels” mechanic if you got something wrong. First up, an indicator on the screen for your level and the level of the lava!

It wasn’t long before I scrapped that idea as I couldn’t think of how to implement a nice variety of puzzles that could increase in difficulty while being randomly generated (admittedly, I didn’t give the problem a lot of thought) and started work on my second idea, a side scrolling platformer where you outrun an advancing lava wave! I jumped into photoshop and threw together some concept art for the platforms you could run and jump along.

It became quickly apparent that there wouldn’t be much room for variety in level generation, and with tile designs like that it looked entirely possible to fall down a gap between tiles just by offsetting vertically. I could have worked on a more solid tile design, but instead I decided to forego graphics for the time being and get to work on random terrain generation, rendered as solid white for now, with a little red rectangle for the player! The “minimap” appeared and stuck with the game mostly unchanged all the way through.

Some time spent looking at a friend’s progress:

And back to my own work. Making quick progress now, I added a lava wall behind you and blue obstacle blocks floating in the air. At this stage I was intending to have the blue blocks as indestructable objects which were a lot less common than they are now and intended to have a seperate type of creature you would have to shoot and kill as you progressed across the world.

Next on the agenda was meteors raining from the sky! Rendered as simple circles themselves they were very uninteresting to have falling across the screen, so I added smoke particles trailing behind them. These were supposed to grow in size and lose opacity so they’d become invisible and be destroyed when they were completely unseen. It didn’t work as intended at first and there was amusement when they added to my lava wall and started covering the screen with “smoke”. It made the game much harder to play, and because they never despawned the game went slower and slower! Glad I got screenshots to remember it.

Smoke particles fixed and tested against different coloured backgrounds, the game was coming together nicely now – it needed an end condition though. I quickly made an image for failure and added it to the game. Also added a distance text at this point, so you could see how far you were getting!

Time for some more fancy graphics – cue the Lava Tsunami of Doom, for which the game will be applauded and named. Also added 2 background layers which scroll at different speeds.

The game was still lacking something while playing though, so I figured I should add some sounds. Audiotool.com for background “music” and bfxr.net for sound effects. Pow!

And then with everything else done, graphics for the rest of the game!

And that’s that!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=5019