Man. I have made a game! Thats pretty unbelievable. Wow.

Why the heck did I join Ludum Dare? And why now?

Hm. I guess Notch simply, or just accidently pushed me over to it. Also everyone else that randomly yells “JOIN LUDUM DARE”. Theres quite a lof of those people.

And there I was, having a registered account, voting for themes, hoping it wouldn’t be Twilight Fandom, with barely any game making experience more complex than if statements.

But it turns out I had an idea for exploration. A simple one even I could realize with a bit of experimenting around. How that idea came, I don’t know anymore. I think it was a fluent process after opening Game Maker and simply starting by making a platformer engine, kind of. Saturday was kind of depressing in the beginning. I think Iwas trying to figure out how I could use FMOD to use the simple stuff I wanted it to do. That took about 6 hours of my time. I have found simple solutions to my problems by not using examples of how it could work but instead of just doing my own shitty code. But it worked like I wanted it to! And that makes me… a tad happy.

If I would make another game like this, I probably would rely more on the 3D stuff FMOD has. It gives you more of a feeling where you are going to. Would I have tried to figure it out while being in Ludum Dare, I guess it would have sucked all my blood, eh, time away.

The way the game looks was something that evolved naturally too. At first I had some kind of placeholder graphics for the very beginning. But the rest never changed.

Hm, I seem to have overwritten most of it. Ah, here is how the game start initially looked like. After I got to the endings on sunday, changing the cheesy look of this was kind of a good idea.

I think most of the time was spent on sound. I didn’t notice, but making 36 sound effects and master them so they kind of have the same volume or destroy speakers, that takes a lot of time.

Look at the mess of project files I created.

For people that are interested, I used Ableton Live Suite 8. Lots of it’s internal Synthesizers and Effects. Also FM8, Absynth 4, Reaktor 5 and Massive. All VSTi from Native Instruments. Yeah, I own that shit. God damn, I’ve spent too much money on this.

I’m very happy with the sound results. I think some loops are really cool.

What else… after I got my code working, everything was just straightforward work. I actually worked most of the Ludum Dare. Although it’s such a small game. I blame my shitty coding. I could have made scripts so I don’t have to repeat steps over and over. But I was fast enough to finish what I have initially kind of planned, so it’s not that bad. Okay, to the pros and the cons!

PRO!

• I MADE A GAME.
• Good sound!
• Interesting experimental experience!
• Happily finding out 2 days are exactly the time needed
• Replay value!
• I MADE A GAME.

CON?

• The controls are confusing. Some people get it instantly, some don’t even know there are in total 8 different routes.
• The sound is sometimes confusing. Sometimes you don’t really get the difference. Using “3D” sounds or panning would have deminished this.
• The game is quite short. Some people might give it a shot once and then never open it again.
• The visuals could have been more involved.

Do I have something else to say?

APRIL.