here are ome snapshots of my game, pretty boss, eh?

you can play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14064

I made a trailer for my game ‘The Plain of Evolution’. Please check it out! And a comment would mean the world!:D

 

If you guys just can’t get enough of game jams, there’s another one going on at BaconGameJam this coming weekend. They usually get a modest turnout – 10 or 20 games – so it’s pretty chill.

 

I thought I’d be too exhausted, but after sleeping 12 hours a day since Ludum Dare, I feel great! And I’m excited to use this as an opportunity to correct my mistakes in Ludum Dare without waiting 4 months for the next Ludum Dare 😉

 

So if anyone is insane like me, maybe I’ll see you there

This was my first Ludum Dare and I made a game called “Moore’s Game“. It’s basically a journey through the evolution of video games – starting with Tic Tac Toe on a line-printer and ending with a ray-casting first person shooter.

Technology-wise it’s written in JavaScript, using the 2d-context of the HTML5 canvas element.

What went right

Speed – apart from the few times where I got stuck (more on that later), I was working pretty fast. Pong, Breakout and the raytracer for the Wolf3D-like level were done really quickly. It helped that I disregarded every coding best practice in existence. Even though faking namespaces via objects or closures is possible and common in Javascript, I didn’t do that and just put everything into the global namespace. That made for messy code (more on that later) but speedy development.

Although I (think I) was fast, I couldn’t finish everything I had originally planned. More on that later (that’s going to be a big what-went-wrong section, oh my…).

Technology choice – Modern Javascript interpreters (read: browsers) are blazingly fast, given the (security-)constraints in which they have to operate. The canvas API is simple and straight-forward. And the result is playable on every operating system with a modern browser.  What’s not to like about that? Javascript as a language has it’s share of problems, but it’s not too bad. It has really just the wrong syntax for the dynamic, lisp-like language it actually is.

The competition – as I said, this was my first Ludum Dare. I had the most programming-related fun since …ever, really! I also didn’t expect such a cool community. I was on the IRC a little bit, during the competition, and I was stunned how friendly and civilized everyone behaved. It’s the internet, people, you are expected to endlessly insult each other!

No, Ludum Dare is just great – it won’t be my last one!

What went wrong

Scope – that was my biggest problem. I just planned too much features. And while implementing those I had ideas for even more and more and more… I originally wanted to blend the gameplay from one game-generation into the other (that is, playing a bit of a Mario-Bros.-like jump-and-run with Pacman, for example) – but I had just no time for that. The games itself were all simple and small – but there were eight of them.

Which, by my current calculations, were at least seven games too many for a 48h-competition…

Code Quality – let’s not talk about that. This was hands-down the worst code I’ve ever written. I’ve written BASIC on my calculator that was better structured… I just didn’t have time to stop and think. So, copy-and-paste it was, mostly. And brute force. And a lot of “what’s the most stupid thing that could possibly work at least half of the time”.

Pacman– I still don’t know how the hell I managed to get completely stumped by writing pacman. I was on the wrong path, somehow and as a result I wasted much too much time even getting it to the sorry state it’s in now. The ghosts just move randomly, the frame-rate is ridiculously low, it’s buggy as hell. And it doesn’t even look too much like pacman. Not good.

Adventure – The lucas-arts inspired point-and-click adventure level was first planned to be the *cool* level of the game. The one that would pay back for all the bugs in the other levels. Well, no, that didn’t work out. I wrote half of an engine for it, but there just wasn’t enough time – and I didn’t really know how to actually write a point-and-click adventure game engine… So I started that level over – with about 4 hours left – and basically cut down all the features until it was just one big if-else tree. Not good, part 2.

Time management – It’s easy to lose track of just how much work is still to do when you’re working on eight different games at the same time. And losing track I did.

Knowledge – Before I started, I thought that I generally knew how to program all the games I had planned. Well, yes, generally. But what are good jumping dynamics for a platformer? How should I do collision testing? How do I insert scaled sprites into a ray-casted world? By which rules do the monsters move in pacman? I have no idea. Oh, and no time to find out… Not good, part 3.

What I’ll do different next time

I’m going to write one game. Like, one.

1

One! Eins! Uno!

One single, polished, working game that’s fun to play.

Not freaking eight badly made ones…

Thanks everyone!

Ludum Dare 24 was fun! 😀

Tags: postmortem

Hi, everyone ! If you played our game you probably know that we didn’t had the time to finish it properly and because we love finished work we decided to make an enhanced version post-compo :).

One of the new levels !

To be clear : This version doesn’t count for voting !

For more informations, go to Our post !

Ahah, it’s hard to test a game with one tester (who’s also the coder), on one computer, on one OS. I just discovered with a friend that the slower is the computer, the faster the character falls. Totally uncool :p

So I made a small post-compo of my game ( run and transform ), correcting theses strange bugs, and taking in account some feedbacks. The game is now far easier (it’s the cool word for “playable”).

Downloads :

Windows, Linux 32 bit, Linux 64 bit, MacOS, .love file, for sources and MacOS

The .love can be opened on Mac with LÖVE (love2d.org) or renamed to .zip to get the sources.

Also, discovered the hard way that if I don’t write a comment and hit “save” on a rating, it’s not taken in account. So much lost votes

Have fun!

 

Tags: post-compo, screenshot

I originally uploaded a gameplay video for my game Alien Rockpool (playable here) shortly after the competition ended, but Youtube kept corrupting the upload and it looked like it was being played on a clapped-out old TV which was getting very bad reception… (the effect would’ve been quite funky had it been intentional)

Anyway, with a faster connection I finally managed to get it uploaded properly. Couldn’t fade in the sound, so it’s a bit….# BWAAAA! So verily, tuneth down thy digital luggole transmitters. o___O

I’ve decided I’d like to take the game further and develop a new version taking into account some of the criticisms (very helpful – thank you!) which have been posted so far. I’ve had such a great time with this competition (given I loathed the topic when it was chosen) that I’m really looking forward to the next one!

 

What went right

Coding – In past entries I spent far too much time and energy trying to maintain good coding practices. That was completely thrown out the window this time around, and, though we had to deal with a lot more bugs during development, I actually finished a game.

Basecode – I owe a lot of that success to having a solid basecode this Jam as well. In previous attempts, I had a basic idea what I wanted to make and prepared base code for that. More often than not, the theme would completely shatter those ideas leaving me with very little useful code. In this jam, I included a wide variety of libraries, and was able to choose ones useful to my project.

Map Editor – In particular, having the ability to import .TMX files right from the start was a godsend. The ‘export to lua’ feature of Tiled is great, but not perfect.

Teamwork – Despite being in separate locations, it was a very different experience having someone else to bounce ideas off of, complain to, and test gameplay. It’s much harder to justify slacking off to someone else than it is when you are competing alone.

Graphics – This was my first time entering with a partner, and having someone else looking after graphics removed one of the most stressful parts of a compo for me. It also changed my design pattern. Normally I use placeholder graphics, and then create final sprites/textures once the code is solid. This time, Alex had a lot of the graphics done before I even had the code to support them. This eliminated a common trend of my past entries where I would write a feature which later had to be cut due to lack of graphics.

What went wrong

Timelapse – I messed up my Chronolapse / VNC configuration, making my timelapse screenshots completely unusable.

Music – We had planned on being a three person team, with someone else looking after the music. It didn’t end up being finished in time, so we had to use placeholder music I created earlier in the compo. (I used GreaseMonkey’s Autotracker, OpenMPT, and FL Studio 10.)

FPS – I didn’t have much, if any, time to optimize the raycasting engine. While the walls are pretty fast (using quads to draw them in stripes) the floor and ceiling are drawn pixel by pixel, which is painfully slow at anything but microscopic resolutions. Fortunately our graphics were already intentionally low-res, but even so, the game simply doesn’t look as nice scaled as it does full res, and I know a lot of people are not going to be able to play it with those settings.

Theme – We had to completely scrap our original idea due to the theme. I’m still happy with how the game turned out, but it definitely took a very different direction than we had intended.

Tags: ld24, post-mortem, postmortem, video

This was my first Ludum Dare and it was amazing. For the first time in my life, I produced a binary that can run on (some) other people’s machines and actually looks kinda nice, in a retro/minimalist way.

This is not to say I’m completely happy with my performance.

 

The Plan

My game: Cannibal Slugmage of Eden. (link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14121 ). Originally, the idea was to have a generic roguelike where instead of mana, you harvest evolving slugs. However, I have never done AI before, so by the time I decided I should probably stop planning and start coding I was wondering if having enemies was a bad idea. The solution: make the player one of the slugs.

You are a slugmage. Your sisters(*) mock your gift, but you’ll show them all. Use your sisters’ life force to fuel your unholy might as you slowly shape them into mana-thralls. Your goal: to gather enough power to ascend to godhood and remake the world in your own image.

Sounds good, right? And in fact, I am pretty happy with a lot of things about the game. But as always, it didn’t work out quite the way I wanted to.

 

Animations

If you try Slugmage, one of the first things you’ll notice is that it can be hard to tell what’s going on. I didn’t do (perfect) collision detection because I’m lazy, so slugs will occasionally step on each other, making them hard to interact with. Often, slugs will seem to disappear, when in reality they’re hiding under one of their sisters. But sometimes when they disappear, it’s because they’re actually dead (either at the hands of a sister or from simple drowning). Some of this confusion could be alleviated by a simple animation that plays when a slug dies.

There’s a similar issue with spellcasting. There is virtually no visual feedback that you’ve just done a wondrous and blasphemous thing. I wanted lightning bolts to actually feel impressive; I wanted flames to flicker; I wanted to see an expanding wave of the player’s color consuming the world. None of this happens.

 

The UI

I’m actually pretty proud of the UI I made. It’s pretty in its own little way, and it does show off some of the most important information. Parts of it were even tolerable to extend! (In particular, supporting spells and inventory-slugs in the information panel was pretty fun for me.)

Unfortunately, the UI was the most rushed thing in the whole game, and it shows. The problem?

COORDINATE TRANSFORMS.

For the most part, despite some of my triumphs, working with my UI was a nightmare. For starters, rather than passing click events to UI elements, there was a single global click handler that had to try and guess what you clicked on. (Literally “guess”. For example, if your mouse is ANYWHERE on the blue bar across the bottom of the screen, it uses those coordinates as an index into your inventory (which thankfully comes up nil)). Then, once the global click handler has figured out what it wants to do with your click, it has to do its own coordinate transform… which means it needs to know the size and position of literally everything on the screen.

I must have spent ten hours trying random permutations of arithmetic operators in search of one that worked.

I am… not good at coordinate transforms.

 

The Future

I’m not done with Slugmage. I think it was an awesome idea, and it deserves more than 72 hours of kludge.

Unfortunately, I did some things to my game that will make it very hard to extend, especially toward the end of the competition when I was desperate to add as many of the essential UI indicators as I could. Fortunately, I don’t care. I have learned enough from these three short days that I’m eager for a total remake (or perhaps a sequel with the same mechanics). I think I’ll call it…

Divine Sunsnail of Elysium

 

See you next Dare.

 

— Alyssa Trillioneyes

 

* I have ended up thinking of all the slugs (the Slugmage included) as female. Why? Simply because, in the code, slugs that are about to be added to the world (perhaps they had been birthed by a font or dropped by the player) are referred to as daughters, by analogy with mitosis.

I played some very fun games yesterday, laughed at the the one I helped create, and I hope to play more today so please go to my stream at 6 pm PST (-8 GMT) today.

I WILL PLAY YOUR LD24 GAME just as I did during LD 23 relax stream. Suggestions for other LD 24 games are encouraged as well.

I added a timelapse!

1/2:

It sounds really cool when you play the album blind.

Be sure to check out  my entry!

My first ludum dare, and subsequently my first LD post mortem.

I’m a game programmer for a living, but not in this time frame and not while having to come up with an idea and create all my own content. It was exciting to have total control over the end product, but also much more demanding.

I used ShiVa as my middleware engine, mostly because of my familiarity with it. I ended up up choosing to do a tower defense, but the core gameplay was just a vehicle to show off the genetic algorithm that generated the enemies and the towers you used. Anyway, lets get started:

Right

• Planning – After getting the initial idea, the planning on paper I did ended up being pretty accurate to what was needed for the final product. While planning it, I had an idea of what features would probably not make it in time, and those ended up being the only ones I cut.

• Genetic algorithm – Super proud of how well this worked, and also all the UI work I had to put in to show the player what was happening behind the scenes. This component took at least half of the total time spent on the game, and I really do love it. It nails the theme and makes the game procedural instead of static.

• Art – Since I’m a programmer, I knew this would be my hardest aspect. I ended up making it work for me by making most of it programmatic. I drew a basic grayscale version of the dragons and towers, and cut them up into pieces. I then scaled, tinted and assembled the pieces in code to give the various colors and sizes of the objects in the game. This meant that 80% of the art was done in code which ended up perfect.

Wrong

• Core game – Choosing tower defense is a LD trope, and I wished I had picked something else. The surrounding genetic generation stuff which I was most proud of could have just as easily fit into a twin stick shooter or RPG system. Anything would have probably been better.

• Testing – Didn’t get a chance to do much playing during the process. I had a goal in mind and worked towards it. Turns out the game can be either too easy or too hard simply depending on the initial tower and dragon generation. I should have put more limits and constraints during that process to even it out. Also you can craft comically broken towers, but I would NEVER fix that because it is great.

• Polishing – No time for this, was hoping to give the game objects some basic animation and adjust the maze layout. I spent the only time I did have on what I hoped would be the high impact inclusions, the particle effects and sounds.

Overall I’m happy with what I shipped, a game about dragon sex, and feel better prepared and even more excited to participate in future Ludum Dares. Thanks for reading!

Play and rate Mutating Scales

HELLO EVERYONE. I finished my game for the jam, but never posted here. So I’m here to deliver a public service announcement, you should play my game (and rate it)!

 

Play and Rate ExoSlime

 

There were a couple performance issues at first, but I’ve fixed them. If you tried to play before and it didn’t work, please try again.

Thanks!

Tags: gif, love2d, moonscript

Last year I entered alone. I quickly got short for time and had to drop a lot of ideas!

However, this year I had friends to do art for me, even though I was still the only programmer, I had a lot more time! My game ended up being polish and Bug free (I hope!). My friends had never done art like this before and were complete novices. Still I could not have done it without them and I am so very grateful.

So, Next time grab a friend who may not have any talent and force them to help with art, story, descriptions or Anything that will save you time!

Here is what we ended up with this jam: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=7301

– Zoomyzoom

yes! its finnaly here, the never before special edition of mohammads game for the ludum, compleate with Q/A,behind the sences, and a walkthrough!

will mohammad stay on LD?

will he compleate the game?

will you be a smart and  play it?

then, DO SO RIGHT HERE

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14064

for your Q/A can be answered here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH4WfnCtCNY&feature=youtu.be

and if your too lazy just watch the walkthough here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMz6TagnvRA&feature=youtu.be

and check out my site for more stuff! (or shit)

https://sites.google.com/site/mohammadgamescom/

 

although i have meger threats from my dad, the school i go to became a…E-SCHOOL!

so that means that my dad has no choice but to allow me to use the laptop for school,homework,textbooks,ect!

you know what that means!

oh and btw, im making a video editing program because i feel that maya’s C.G.I special effect option is too expensive to get, so ill develop one and release it to the public.

what you can do with it is that you can model and animate a 3d model in a background witch is your video. that way you have no more trouble having to use a green screen, adobe after effects (a big rip-off!), or anything else, just this.

more of this will be  released during the october challenge and mabye even released for…1 dollar!

(once i get a debit card…)

man, am i going to piss off maya and adobe!

better get my lawer!

My Ludum Dare Jam entry is Those Stupid Aliens. It’s a top-down space shooter.

The player is firing from a capital ship at the bottom of the screen. It has just gone through a battle, defeating the enemy battleship, stranding hundreds of aliens. As a result of the battle, it only has enough shields to withstand five hits. Your technicians are routing power and fixing subsystems, but they are tired. When you defeat a wave of enemies, it builds up the morale of the crew and they repair one point worth of shield. And that brings us to Those Stupid Aliens, and your job, as one of the last remaining gunners.

Using the mouse to guide the targeting reticule, and the left mouse button to fire, your goal is to shoot the alien ships that appear. They will show up in groups and express different characteristics based on the makeup of their internal properties. As the game goes on, the successful aliens will have their internal properties inserted into the gene pool, and the next waves will be created from this information. Eventually, you should see ‘smarter’ aliens which are more difficult to defeat.

 

What Went Right

Platform/Language/Library

I used Flash/Flex/AS3 with FlashPunk and the FlashDevelop IDE. I’ve been using them for over a year with a few different unfinished, but ‘demo-able’ projects so I was confident in my ability to use it for Ludum Dare and be able to complete something in 48 hours. I will definitely use FlashPunk in December’s competition and likely beyond.

Project Scope

My last successful entry was in LD48_15. The biggest thing I took away from that was the scope. I was essentially trying to implement a clone of a game I loved to play as a kid. Therefore, I already knew the features that needed to be implemented and tempered my desire to feature creep. For this competition, I tried to make sure that I limited what I intended to implement to make sure the project didn’t get out from under me. I came up with an idea that didn’t require level design or a sheet full of tiles. That certainly saved a lot of time and work. I kept the original , knowing that I wouldn’t have time to implement them all anyway.

Controls

I knew I didn’t want the player to have to use the keyboard much–or at all, if possible. Therefore I just implemented mouse movement and single click firing. No other buttons on the screen. If I had to, I was ready to implement a “Shift-Click” for a secondary action, but I never really let one enter the scope. The idea behind keeping the controls simple was that if I made something worthy, I could easily port it to a mobile touch device.

Sound and Graphics

On Sunday morning, updated my placeholder capital ship (which I’m still not really happy with), added sound effects and the explosion particle generator. Once I did this, it’s like the ‘game’ part of the game jumped out at me, even though the gameplay didn’t change. It really gained an old arcade feel and I think was a psychological milestone.

 

What Went Wrong

Allocated Time

I spend too much time doing other things this weekend. Mostly it was stuff with my family, but an hour here and there adds up. When the 48 hours were up, I was not done, and had to fall back on the Jam. Though I must say that this project moved along much better than any previous LD attempt in the past three years.

Alien Movement

For the bullet, I took the target location (the mouse click) and projected out the location that it crosses the top of the screen. Each frame it would move towards that location. For the alien movement, I tried to do something similar using the direction of travel (a normalized point relative to the original location) and the current location to create the target on the edge of the screen. That target would be recalculated whenever the alien changed direction based on it’s internal properties. It worked ok, but later I realized I only needed keep adjusting the target point to something beyond the max speed every turn. A simple multiplication instead of trying to figure out the math behind the projection and deal with different quadrants.

Feedback

One thing I didn’t get a chance to implement, or even figure out a decent signal for it, was feedback on the evolution of the aliens. I wanted to give some sort of indication that the evolution was happening or that there were successful aliens in the current wave. I never really came up with a good idea, so I never implemented it. I think some sort of feedback would have been great as it would help give the player a sense of change, rather than just witnessing wave after wave and having to notice changes all on their own.

 

Neutral

Music

I made the music using the online instrument Circuli. It’s a neat thing to play with, but I don’t think what I used fits the game all that well. I purchased the iPhone app, so I’ll probably mess around with it again, but I probably won’t be using it in the post-compo version.

Background Hum

I have a background engine hum during play mode instead of music. I don’t know how annoying it might seem for other people. I debated switching it to music, but the intro music didn’t fit and I didn’t have time to create anything. Since it’s constant, I don’t think it would work out with music at the same time. If the ship moved, then it could potentially only make sound at that point, but it doesn’t, so I think I have to decide which way to move forward with it.

Method of Evolution

I think the idea behind the aliens becoming smarter is good. It’s a survival of the fittest process, with every trait possibly live from the beginning. Every time you play, a new initial gene pool is created from randomized DNA. This makes it impossible to set a difficulty. You may get an initial gene pool that consists of aliens that are slow moving, large, and don’t fire very often. Or you may get  small, fast moving sprinklers. I sort of faked some progressive difficulty it raising the number of aliens in the wave. I’m not against that idea, but I wanted it to be gradual.

 

Aliens Future

One of the first things I’d like to do is change the alien graphics. I think I want to use bitmaps, but I also kinda like the vector look. (I’m actually cheating, the vector graphics are really bitmap placeholders.) At first, my intention was to use the look and the colors as purely cosmetic traits, but I to like the idea that they represent something internal. It would be a way to solve part of the problem of feedback that I mentioned earlier.

I also need to redo the evolution component. I never implemented mutations, which would serve to introduce traits that did not exist in the initial gene pool, and reintroduce phased out traits that might have better success in a different combination. I’d like to come up with a way that makes it possible to use the traits to have a couple difficulty modes without relying on wave size. The way I do it now is closer to a true evolution using survival of the fittest (which fits the theme) rather than a carefully planned difficulty progression (which some entries passed off as evolution). Somewhere in the middle is the solution.

Right now the enemies hover near edges, which makes sense since they are introduced there and often don’t have traits that move them away. I need to get them out of the edges without making them predictable at the start of the wave or do something that obviously goes against their internal traits.

 

Conclusion

I think I’m fairly happy with this project. I ended up with a game that feels like a game. Many times I’ve ended up at the halfway point and I don’t know what I’m doing or how I’m going to make it fun. I managed this time to come up with what I feel is interesting and has promise to be expanded to keep attention longer than a few minutes.

I definitely did better than I thought I would with the theme. I had originally been a big proponent of Evolution a few years ago, but cooled on it when I realized that it would take a long time to get a good algorithm set up. I’ve been thinking of this kind of stuff for over a decade. I used to sit in biology and other classes and diagram out some sandbox DNA projects that I never did implement. I’m surprised at what I have done in the weekend time frame, so I might go back and visit those old notes sometime, now that I’ve had a little taste of it here.

For the past few years I’ve been pretty disappointed in my LD participation over the past couple years. I mostly didn’t finish and gave up. Sometimes it was because I didn’t feel I had come up with a good enough idea on the theme, or ran into problems and didn’t have the heart to finish, or had too many other activities that I couldn’t avoid.  After my experience with LD24, I’m really looking forward to December.

Tags: as3, flashpunk, postmortem

If I’d had even another hour to tinker with Mesh before the deadline, I probably would’ve been able to add 3-4 more levels. I’ve been pretty busy at work, but took some time to knock a few levels out at lunch one day. I’m using a Google Doc as a level designer (see image at bottom), then translate that into rough JSON, then minify the JSON and test. It’s a bit cumbersome at the moment, but quick enough that I may not bother with a level editor.

For a live look at levels as I cook ’em up: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsSkS1z3LMmMdF9wMzVNQS10T3ZxRjdDUHFyOGJCakE

Also I’ll try to keep posting updated builds to a new URL on one of my dump sites: http://www.simianlogic3d.com/fun/mesh/001

 

For the theme evolution I made a game with beetle teams fighting each other.

Please play it here !

The player control none of the team but he can bid for one of them. If he win the other team evolve and he have to switch his favorite team or persist on the first one for the next fight. Until he fails.

There’s 16 different skills but you will never select any of them.

The most difficult part of the gamedesign of beetlefield was to not let the player focus on one team as “His” team. That’s a bit frustrating, but I wanted him to concentrate on analyze rather than the classic level-up-your-character thing

 

I was really unsure about how it will work, so I added an incentive to the game.

Player can save the last team they bid for so they can sort of “possess” it to fight with other players team.

 

What went right :

– Experience : This is my 6th ludumdare and the first one when stress is not overwhelming me. That makes my week-end more enjoyable than the other LD. I even finished my todolist 3 hours before submission time, which is a very reassuring thing to do

– Music : That was my first time creating my own music for a game. I’m always spending few time before LD searching for a tracker I could use, but this time I think I found one I like. This is sunvox and I plan to train with it for next LD. I know the menu and ingame music I created are a bit basic and repetitive but well… I’m still proud of them

– Surroundings : We were gathered at the Motion-Twin company office. 11 developpers working altogether, it was a very good athmosphere. They all made an amazing work which really helped me to push my limits further.

What went wrong :

– Few Skills : Since the game engine was ready on saturday morning, I had tons of time for titlescreens, music and all. But I regret now I did not spend more of this time for extra skills. They are the game core and with more skills all the battles would have been unique.

– Fonts : I was never satisfied with fonts and spend to much time looking for them.

– Sfx : I reduced the tweaking time on Sound Fx because of the time I had spent on music. The result is my sfx are poor, especially the button tick and selections. I’m only happy with the beetle death sound.

– Not enough beds

Tags: LD #24, post-mortem

What I had in mind

I wanted to make a game where you play a kind of a nerdy guy, at the top of human evolution. He happens to be stranded on a desert island after a plane crash.
You’d have to explore the island to learn and discover a way to get out of it.

The idea behind this concept is that you’re back to a primitive state at the beginning of the game (weak and naked) and you must evolve to escape the island: you have to improve your survival skills and become a kind of Tarzan at the end of the game.
The game mechanics revolve around a platforming with adventure/point-and-click elements.
What Went Right

No unexpected crashes or bad issues during the weekend.
I developed a craft system, it was the first time I thought about that kind of thing.
I managed to submit something!

What Went Wrong

It was way toooo big for a single man. The game represents less than a half of what I had in mind. It’s a classic mistake, I knew it but I fell into the trap.
I spent a day and a half to develop the game system and only 8 hours on level design, art and animations. It’s absolutely not the right balance.
Nobody has tested my game before I submitted it and the game suffers from that:
– A lot of Level Design issues: I did not realized that people would try to escape from the island by swiming away from it and I didn’t put any invisible walls to block the end of the room. Everybody’s falling into the void at the end of the ocean and the game is over: awful design mistake here!
– The craft system is not really understood at first and it’s a bit glitched: you can’t craft a recipe with two ingredients if there’s a third one in the top slot.
– Some recipes are not obvious enough. It’s ok for a LucasArts game where you accepted to spend time trying to combinate items, but I think a lot of people will not be so patient for a little, free, snack game.
I had no time for music.
User Interface took me too much time.
Drag and Drop Interface for crafting –> way too big
Conclusion :
As I said I made a very usual mistake: the concept was too big for such a small development time. I knew it when I had the idea but it was challenging so I gave it a try anyway. It’s a semi-failure because the game does not represent what I had in mind and for many people the experience will be ruined because of design issues.
I think I will do a post-compo version with the whole TurboDindon team, with new graphics, sounds and a real Level Design. You’ll be able to play it soon!

Thanks for reading, and remember to avoid leaving the island by swimming if you play the game.

Cheers!

Bisou