Play it Here! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=10976 Lack of sleep, FlashDevelop open three days straight, and twenty tabs open at all times littered with documentation? Yep, it must’ve been a Ludum Dare weekend! It was a total blast, and I think we must be doing something right because this last LD was the most fluid and least stressful yet! I think Stargazers is our most complete game and one that I would enjoy working on some more.

It took us a few hours to decide on a theme but it eventually blossomed into a game idea. We wanted to keep the gameplay as simple as possible to fit with the Minimalism theme so we decided that the mechanic would only be clicking on stars to connect them. We got some incredible feedback already on features people wanted to see included to keep the gameplay from getting repetitive and stale and hopefully we’ll invest some time into a post-LD version of the game to incorporate some new ideas and mechanics. For this LD though I think keeping it minimal was a necessity and it helped us really polish the game.

Once the idea had been decided upon I started prototyping the gameplay while Cake started work on the graphics. It didn’t take long at all before there were dots on a screen that could be clicked and linked up to each other, then a bit more and the level would “end” when you linked back up to the star you started with. That was all well and good but we needed a way to evaluate how well someone did. I ended up doing a bitmap comparison system that draws the “correct” constellation and compares it to the drawing of the constellation the player created. It’s not a perfect system but it worked well enough.

The most fun was probably working on the moon cycles. Looking up documentation for curveTo and tons of examples of people using it to draw circle segments so that I could accurately represent a shadow traveling around the moon, it was awesome. We originally had bigger plans for it, and you all might see the fruits of those ideas in our post-LD version of the game.

As always, LD was totally worth it. I would trade away restful weekends for LD anytime. I can’t wait to play all of your games! Now then, we’ve got games to play. Thank you all for being such an amazing community!

I can’t believe LD is already over. D: I feel like it goes by way too fast *EVERY* time. Zeik and I had a blast this time, having barely recovered from spending 3 scorching days at the Coachella Arts and Music festival the weekend before. And honestly, “Stargazers” is definitely one of my favourite games we’ve made to date. It’s the most complete game we’ve made so far IMO, and I’m really proud of how it turned out.

Time

Time was awful to me this weekend.  I had to periodically pull away to work on school projects and google hangout with classmates, or friends would come over and hang out. >.< But at the same time, we dealt with our time management a lot better this time around than in the past. Less crunch time and more sleep as well!

Art

I had spent the whole month or so beforehand gathering different images to absorb for inspiration. While I only used a fragment of those images due to the theme, I was fairly happy with the way the art started coming together. I was actually pretty disappointed the theme was Minimalism. I felt a small sense of obligation to hold back on what I originally intended to do art-wise. My original ideas and direction for a LD game were much darker, detailed, and elaborate. But at the same time, the art style really helped in having me work on less detailed art work and more of the game’s general visual design.
Lessons Learned I think next time I’m going to really try to put less heart and determination in pre-deciding the game’s art style before we even make it! Stargazers looked great, and my process was slightly hindered by begrudgingly changing my original ideas to something new. I also need to sketch more! I’m starting to get out of the habit of sketching, and I feel like it’s making my art slowly more and more static and less interesting.

Also, something that Zeik didn’t mention is that this LD is marks the 1 year mark of when Zeik and I started making games!

Cheers, Zeik! You’re a fantastic and amazing partner!

Tags: postmortem

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 1st, 2013 at 9:24 am and is filed under LD #26. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.