What a fantastic weekend! I’m beginning to realize why people always stress the importance of forcing yourself to take breaks. This is an incredibly self-involving craft, and I got so caught up I probably only took about 6 hours worth of breaks throughout (excluding sleep, of course). So, I’m broken but incredibly satisfied, and I had a great time.

View my entry, “Cells”, here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=3643

Post-mortem time:

My biggest gripe – adding sound and music has eluded me AGAIN! I also let it slip last time. I’m fairly new to a couple of Actionscript 3 concepts and embedding and playing sounds seems to be pretty simple, but I must be missing something very obvious because I always have problems. I did manage to get sound working in a previous project I worked on, but for whatever reason I couldn’t get it going this time. So, I opted to carry on with what I knew rather than spending hours messing around with sound.

The other problem is that I have more experience with 3D and digital art than programming, so even if when I don’t have trouble coming up with a gameplay idea I still tend to focus largely on graphics. I loved the theme this time, but had a hard time coming up with an idea, which meant by the end of the first day I still didn’t have an iota of gameplay/interaction code. The player could run and jump and all the technical aspects were in, but no game. I only came up with the hacking idea on day 2, so I didn’t leave myself enough time to create more challenging puzzles.

That being said, I was very happy with the hacking concept and I think the final game could be tons of fun as a puzzler if those puzzles were more taxing. With things like watching for enemy paths, following electrical connections and being able to hack more floors above, the game would be somewhere between an escape the room game and an arcade puzzler.

The graphics was the other aspect I was very happy with. I managed to get an animated character in too and even though his animations were a little rough, I can see that a little animation makes a huge difference. I wanted to do more with lighting – as you got higher the floor you were on would be brighter – but that, and many other tweaks, will come if and when I update the game. I also love the dark and slightly spooky atmostphere and I’d love to tie a creepy or mind-bending story into Cells.

Overall, I’m really happy with my entry. Good luck all!