{"assets":[],"author_link":"author\/adhesion\/","author_name":"Adhesion","cat":"LD #24","categories":["LD #24"],"comments":[],"epoch":1347226020,"event":"LD24","likes":4,"metadata":{"p_key":"78214","p_author":"Adhesion","p_authorkey":"0","p_urlkey":"287224","p_title":"Death Death Evolution Postmortem, Timelapses & Soundtrack","p_cat":"LD #24","p_event":"LD24","p_time":"1347226020","p_likes":"4","p_comments":"0","p_status":"WAYBACK","us_key":null,"us_name":null,"us_username":null,"event_start":"1345766400","event_key":"12","event_name":"LD24"},"source_url":"2012\/09\/09\/death-death-evolution-postmortem-timelapses-soundtrack\/","text":"

For this LD, team RADMARS attempted to make a puzzle platformer where you have to die in order to progress. It was a big challenge, but I think we managed to make something pretty awesome. Check it out here: http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-24\/?action=preview&uid=7860<\/a><\/p>\n

We have postmortems for 3 out of the 4 members of RADMARS for you today (and timelapse videos for two of those). Up first is roushey, who decided to write a very lot for some reason:<\/p>\n

This Ludum Dare went\u00a0surprisingly\u00a0smooth. We started off Friday night cooking up a bunch of good ideas and finally settled on the concept that every time you die, you gain a new ability based on how you died. We then spent the rest of the night fleshing out all the abilities you would have, flagging them as necessary, nice to have, and eventually cutting some. After that we had a pretty solid plan to always tab back into and check where we were at. We also put TODOs for art, programming, levels, etc on the doc as well so we could quickly see what the other team members were doing without pestering them.<\/p>\n

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What went well:<\/strong><\/p>\n

First and foremost we bumped up team\u00a0RADMARS<\/em>\u00a0to four people, by adding brendo. This helped quite a bit, as he spent basically all of his time on level design. The biggest thing we learned from\u00a0Escape from Minimars<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>is that the level design needed much more love this time around. The biggest complaint (from us, as well as the comments) was that the game felt stale by the end. I really liked the way we created and \u2018painted\u2019 the levels for DDE as well. (as opposed to minimars) Brendo designed all the levels just using colored squares for all the different elements. ( red bricks for solid ground, green for platforms etc) \u00a0This way, we had all of the levels designed and playable before we even did the art for what the\u00a0environments\u00a0would be like. The only real direction we had was that we wanted to have 3 areas. ( as adhesion was going to make 3 music tracks ) I wish we\u2019d spent a bit more time thinking about it, but we settled on: forrest, caves, and \u2018nature-punk\u2019 future-ish kinda thing. It was really nice to have the levels built before I pixeled the map-tiles as I had a much better idea of what kinds of tiles to make. Minimars was the complete opposite, where I panted a buncha tiles and just had people make random shit out of those. Both work, but I like the former much better.<\/div>\n
Working with MelonJS was also pretty awesome. The creator, Olivier Biot, has been really active about updating it. We had some feature\/bugfix requests after minimars pretty much all of which were fixed in the next version. So awesome! \":D\"<\/div>\n
Tiled (\u00a0http:\/\/www.mapeditor.org\/<\/a>\u00a0) is fucking boss. I can\u2019t recommend it enough for working with a tiled maps.<\/div>\n
Version control! We used Git (still not quite used to it\u2026 I\u2019ve always used SVN) and its pretty much invaluable when it comes to working in a team.<\/div>\n
Voice chat & live streaming! All weekend long we had all 4 of us in voice chat (mumble) so we could quickly ask for things and get status updates (as well as dick around and make bad jokes, and complain about\u2026 well everything really. complaining is fun) I had a stream up on\u00a0twitch.tv<\/a>\u00a0which makes it very easy to show what I\u2019m working on with the team. I can demo animations, brendo got to see people\u00a0play testing\u00a0his levels, etc. really awesome. I highly recommend it.<\/div>\n

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What went not so well:\u00a0<\/strong><\/div>\n
The major thing that went wrong was scoping. There was a lot of detail and polish that (i think) is pretty\u00a0important\u00a0that we just didn\u2019t have time to do. The biggest of which would be the main character\u2019s sprite never changes. We wanted to have the character change for every different ability. The changes would only be minor, like a stripes, boots, a spiked hat but the fox squirrel red-panda thing had quite a few frames of animation. \":(\" this makes creating overlay elements that much more of a pain in the ass.<\/div>\n
I\u2019m gonna rant for a bit here so sorry ahead of time.<\/div>\n
Perhaps\u00a0I\u2019ve\u00a0just not found the right tools, but the process for making animated pixel-art characters is not so fun. Photoshop is probably the best tool to use for pixel art (that\u00a0I\u2019ve\u00a0worked with) its just got so many features, and\u00a0they\u2019re\u00a0all highly tuned and polished to make it as painless as possible to actually make stuff. The biggest problem with this of course being\u2026 animation. Photoshop\u2019s animation features are basically garbage, but\u00a0that\u2019s\u00a0not what\u00a0Photoshop\u00a0is for so thats\u00a0completely\u00a0OK. The biggest problem though is exporting the animations to a sprite sheet. Doing it manually is obviously\u2026 terrible. I\u2019ve tried using pretty much everything from scripts to\u00a0Photoshop\u00a0actions to try to make the process as painless as possible, but none of the solutions really fit well. I do realize that at the end of the day, its actually not *that* big of a deal, but I see it quite a bit like an IDE having\u00a0re-factoring\u00a0tools. If its a hassle or a pain in the ass to make changes, (at least for me) the \u2018fuck it\u2019 impulse flares up and the changes never get made. This is of course made worse by the fact that the drawing tools in most other pixel drawing apps I\u2019ve used just feel very immature compared to PS\u2019s \":(\" ) And the more complex your animations get, the level of pain-in-the-assery rises exponentially.<\/div>\n
I used Graphics Gale for all of the particles (explosions, splashes, smoke poofs, etc) because in terms of making simple pixel-art animations, it\u2019s really awesome. Its fast, you can go back and forth between frames easily, constant playback preview, and it can (at least\u00a0reasonably well) export to sprite-sheets. The problem with Graphics gale is that the way it handles layers is really clunky. If it\u00a0wasn\u2019t\u00a0for that, id be using graphics gale\u2026 pretty much all the time. Selection, copy & paste, are also really clunky and can be a bit weird. \":(\"<\/div>\n
I\u2019ve tried to use gimp, and Paint.NET as well.\u00a0They\u2019re\u00a0pretty good\u00a0Photoshop\u00a0alternatives, but if \u00a0you\u2019re already using\u00a0Photoshop\u00a0they really don\u2019t bring much to the table as far as animation is concerned.<\/div>\n
\/rant \u00a0Phew. sorry about that *_*;<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Process:\u00a0<\/strong><\/div>\n
Map Tiles & Parallax backgrounds: All pixeled in photoshop, grid, guides, selection, cloning, painting tools all make my life so much easier.<\/div>\n
Maps: Painted (tiled) using Tiled map editor.<\/div>\n
Characters: sketched and painted in photoshop, pixeled in photoshop, exported to sprite sheet using a photoshop action.<\/div>\n

Particles, explosions, and effects:\u00a0Directly pixeled in graphics-gale, no real sketches or anything like that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2018At the end of the day\u2019<\/strong><\/div>\n
Now that I\u2019ve had some time to sit back and rest, I\u2019m really proud of this game. There\u2019s a lot of stuff I would like to go back and change like the shameless\u00a0pallet\u00a0swap of the background in the third area, and the additional states of the avatar. I\u2019ll get to em uh\u2026 eventually! for now, Go\u00a0Team RADMARS<\/em>! (Also, all of the other LD submissions keep getting better and better each time.) Can\u2019t wait to do LD25 \":D\"<\/div>\n
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And his timelapse:<\/div>\n