So it seems to be the time to write my post mortem. We did the game as a team of 3 pepole. As always the workload at my job peaked in the weeks before LD. So i had no time to prepare my self and the tools.  We met at 9 in the morning, discussed our idears and started to setup our work environment and took a closer look at the engine we wanted to use ( melon js).  We had a rough idea what we wanted an so we started.

What went right (in short):

• Teamwork!
• Stability of the game we nearly never had broken builds
• The idea
• Tools

What went wrong (in short):

• the preparation
• the definition of our goals
• the communication outside of the team

Conclusion:

The teamwork on this was great. Everyone was supportive and helpful. It was really fun to do this project. We managed it to have mostly stable builds. That helped to test the sprites. It was the right choice to use git on this. A rather special challenge was to get Tiled running on one of the Computers. Had no admin login for that so we used a vnc remote connection. The preparation was a problem. We could have saved a couple of hours if we had testes our development environment.

During the making of the game we just had a rather rough idea we where following. Looking back i think we should have defined more goals for us. The game is hard to beat. That is a thing i like and a thing close to the theme. There could have been sooo much species bud they never made it. We picked that up on our “death sceen”. An other great thing would have been a second level, to show the evolution of the player.

Played Cage Flight yet?  You ought to

The framerate is set by the server, and people were complaining that I’d set it too low.  I’ve reconfigured the server to run at 12 fps, but its hosted in Sweden and is there’s a lot of latency over the Atlantic to contend with.

So I’ve also published instructions on how to run your own server.  If anyone can run a server at a higher framerate in North America, that’d be awesome!  Please post link

PLAY :: RATE :: TIMELAPSE

You need to socially evolve to get the girl you want. To have money, a car, popularity, etc. That’s what I tried to tell in my last game.

 Warning: This is intented to be a parody game, so please don’t take any advice in the game into the real life 😉

In this post-mortem, I’ll try to explain what things of the development process made me mad, what made me sad, and what made me glad.

It’s not a fun game!

At least for the last 30 minutes, the game wasn’t fun. That was driving me nuts through all the development process. I was thinking “I need to make this game fun, but how?”. Finally at the last moment I decided to make the “power-ups” come from the right side on a random basis. Before that, they were static.

This wasn’t my original idea

Indeed it wasn’t. I wanted to make a more strategic game, in which you had to train yourself to get more girls, and eventually you could get Lucy, the girl you always wanted. Of course, that was out of the scope because of the short time. 

I only had 24 hours

I woke up at around 8pm (yeah, I know), looked up the theme, and tried to think something cool. Obviously, nothing cool came about, or only ideas related to genetic algorithms, which I didn’t have the time to implement. At the end, I could have made a better and more balanced game with those extra 24 hours.

I’m (still) not good at pixel art

Not a bit. I lost too much time drawing and redrawing the characters and the background, and even though didn’t come with something cool. This is definitely something I need to improve for the next projects.

I had many versions before the “final” art

I couldn’t use my framework

My framework was on process on refactor when I learned that LD was the next day. So for obvious reasons, I couldn’t use it, and had to stick with plain Actionscript.

The Resource Maker saved lot of time

Indeed it did! If you haven’t checked out, my Resource Maker can process a folder and generate a Resources.as file which contains embeds for the assets found in that folder. I made a simple *.bat with a call to Resource Maker, hooked it on the pre-compile process, and I didn’t have to write a single embed line

I was well organized

There is something I’m more and more aware of: TODO list are a win. After I had some idea of what I wanted to do, I wrote a TODO list on a text file with what I needed to make in order to complete the game. Next, I had to stick to the plan, adding and removing things as necessary. After 12 hours, I was already implementing sounds and music, since the core game was already finished (although it was still boring).

 No interruptions

I wasn’t interrupted at all (except for going to sleep, going to the toilet and sleeping). That was a good thing since I was fully concentrated on the development.

Good prior sleep

Since I woke up at 8pm Saturday, I already had a full sleep. So all I needed was sleep only 4 hours during the development.

Good post-render effects

I followed this tutorial to make my fancy post-render effect. It took me around 3 hours to implement it, and it was well worth it

A quick comparison between normal mode and “fancy” mode

Easy music maker

Since I’m not a musician, this tool helped me a lot for the music. What I needed to do was to generate good sounding music, and put them together in a sound file.

Walkthrough

Tags: as3, evolution, flash, jorjon, ld24, post-mortem, postmortem, social evolution

This is the first time I really finished a game for the compo and I am myself satisfied with it, so it deservs a postmortem!

Story time…

I had nothing what I wanted to learn on this LD so I decided I will actually try to do a game this time. I chose to use Processing what I didn’t used after I learned it on the Octobers LD, so I refreshed my knowledge  in it and went shopping. Bought a lot of stuff and now the amount is proven to be enought. I didn’t slept before the compo because I had real life in the way and the theme anouncement is at 3 am here. I managed to be up by wanting to beat Notch so badly – someone posted a gif where Notch is dancing…

After the theme anounce I had now idea what to do because I thought everyone will make pokemons and misinterpret evolution with upgrading, so I rejected all this kind of stuff that came in to my mind. After some time I had an idea to make an evolving land – because land can evolve – and I always wanted to make a tilebased game. So I started to partition the window into tiles – used OOP design from the begining. First I tought I made an L-system what will evolve but I didn’t made one before and didn’t know this is a slow algorithm. So after drawing some fractals with it I finally decided to sleep a little.

After waking up – about 3 or 4 hours later – the idea of using a Game of Life algorithm imadiately banged me in the head. So I started implementing it and played a little with the  random seed and the rules. Some times later I found out I can make mountains and lakes evolving with it. This was so cool but I wanted forests there too. At first I made properties for the tiles that can hold resourcesand the forests but shortly I realized forest must be seperated because it would be bad if I can’t had forests and resources at the same time on a tile. Then fiddled some with it and put up a video.

Now from this point everything was clear for me. I started to implement a zoom function – which is the textured play view now – but I have ran into a very nasty bug which took me 3 hours to fix. After I added the rest of the functionality – like blowing up things – and made another video quckly and went to sleep.

The last day –  overslept a little – I made some gfx – with non seamless tiles – and posted a pic. After I saw my game – this was the first time I considered it a game, beore it was a simple algorithm – with textures I redesigned the code to be more modular so I can add other screens. Made the gfx for the HUD and the menu. And it’s done – about 2 minutes before the end of the competition!

What did I do right?

Closed all social sites and stuff except the #ld48 hashtag and mentions on twitter and the ludumdare channel on irc. I checked others once saturday and once sunday but didn’t red anything just what was sent for me personally and I was interested in. Also I didn’t wached any videos on YouTube just check once everyday and added new videos to the watchlater list.

Found a way to keep myself in a feel of wanting to make a great game before the compo. Mainly I wanted to beat Notch but I saw later on twitter he isn’t very motivated – that time my game was enought motivation for me though.

For every idea in my mind which took me a minute to think through I sad “Too complicated get the f*** out of my head!”. This way I managed to keep it simple and get the best ideas first almost always.

I managed to drink just as much beer so my mind is creative but at the same time I can constantly concentrate and work.

…and what not?

I was stuck with the L-system too much because I was tired and couldn’t get my mind to move on and because I like fractals too much. 😀

I messed an LD up with a nasty bug and now I wasn’t able to think through what can be the cause. And basically the code is run by magic still. I don’t know why that part of the code is working. I was so desperate I just moved around code mindlessly into ifs/elses and out and added +1s or -1s randomly to everythin, rewritten the whole thing a few times and voila! Magic! XD

After compo stuff

I made a walkthrough video of my game.

I started a review series where I try to review 5 games a day – battling with my bad english – selected mostly from those games which creators rated mine. Here is the list:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDA5CBD08ABBD9DA8&feature=view_all

Be sure to like the videos and rate my game to get into the reviews. Also subscribe so you get notified of the new episodes, and share so others can watch too!

Tags: GotEL, postmortem, review, story, video, walkthrough

I’ve done some updating today based on feedback and things I didn’t get a chance to finish up.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/61777182/Geomancy/WebPlayer/WebPlayer.html

The lolicopocalypse have been ported to two wi? platforms.

The Wii version: http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Lolicopocalypse (Thanks to Rikku2000)

The Wiz version: http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/wiz.cgi?0,0,0,0,37,598 (Thanks to Zear)

Tags: no tags

MuTaTrIs:

Everyone knows the world-famous Tetris. What if blocks could change over time? What if those blocks were… mutating?
Be careful while making lines, now the rules are changing!

About:

Hey everyone!

First of all, I’d like to apologize for all of those who’d have tried to play my game and got loading errors.

I have now something which should be functional for most recent web browsers.

You can check out my game over here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=6851

Enjoy and feel free to comment

ok, BELLS© the video editing program, will come out much sooner than expected. this is thanks to the idea of extensions on gamemaker, allowing MUCH MUCH MUCH more functionality than EVER before. also, i will be linking my bank account to google checkout, or something like that, so that i can get money like never before. also, ill be seeing to publication and releases of demos of my program VERY soon! im not however, going to use steam greenlight, because thats for games, and who cares about programs.

but NOTE! until i find the right extension, it seems like recording the video and saving it as one will require something like hypercam or camstudio or debut or something to record your video and save it to a file. sorry   .

ps: if this annoyed you, im sorry, this is just bells© and ill be releasing it sooner than i can.

oh and by the way, BELLS© was put to work a few posts ago when the prices for adobe® after effects seemed out of reach for those who really needed it, so i came up with the development of BELLS©, a cheap video editor that can be ran as a .EXE while running GML scripts into it for optimized performance. made for the community of any kind, i just feel that programs that provide cool functions, but at an expensive cost, is ridiculous, so i want to show adobe® that money isn’t required to be talented.

because you cant sue somewon for the same concept.

What I did in 16h

I made my game for Ludum Dare #24 in less than a day. It caught me by surprise, I read the news that the contest had begun the second day and sat at my computer and started drawing textures for models, Run the Game Engine Shiva3D and then I composed a simple scenario and I remember that I was very clear about what I wanted to do, a kind of evolution of planets, something dark with a touch of Mario Galaxy

What went right

I built up the scene, get some free sounds modified and a simple music (atmosphere) and wrote the AI’s, behaviours and HUD scripts in the speed of light, but something bothered me and totally stucked me , a common math problem with free rotations in 3d axis.

What went wrong

The final hour arrived and I had to post the game with 2 bugs: camera and control, users started to test the game and all they said was good things but complied about the bugs, so I kept working on the game until I got a version with less bugs, without the gimbal lock in the control and a better camera, still to be improved…

What a lovely community

I was very surprised with so many comments, when I started to rate the games, I found there was lot of fun games, mine is more like a weird experience said some guy 😀 ,I love the touch of humor the users distillate here in the Ludum Dare, I was so used to getting bad reviews of my games in other networks, that this experience of have opinions of people with such passion and professionalism really left me overwhelmed and makes me think all this has a really good purpose to work and deploy a good game for the people, and I love to create new experiences, emotions and travels to other world, those kind of stuff, thank you !

The game evolves too

After reading and talking with other users I found that my game need a whole new point of view, so, one of them said me that it needed another player, I liked the idea and I turned the game into a multiplayer conquer for evolve experience in Space, dark matter is waiting!

Play and rate this game

Tags: darkness, evolution, evolve, game, internet, multiplayer, multiplayer game, netsphere, xixgames

First i want to thanks for all comments and plays! Really apprieciate it!

So here goes post mortem.

1. What went right

I’m really happy with sum of all worktime put into the game.  I’ve managed time well and sleep just about right amount to
be aware of the surrounding and work. And I lost  some weight which was a big suprise for me, who would’ve thought

2. What went wrong

In short, planing. I’ve lost too much time doing graphics. Big mistake was creating whole scene instead of preparing reusable assets to create bigger locations. I also didn’t focused on puzzles so in the end game feels shallow. I should focus more on interesting gameplay and longevity.

3.What’s next ? 

I’m currently working on finishing game and want to create something bigger and fun. I’ve learnt a lesson and I try to setup  better workflow to manage longer game. I don’t have to much to show as i’m developing tool which will automate lightmap baking and asset management within blender. I hope it will speed up location creation and allows me to spend more time on creating puzzles and story.

Little post ld shot:

Link to the entry

Hello everyone! Hope you’ve all been having fun playing games; I know I have! 😀 I would just like to announce that my entry, Static, is now online in applet form thanks to Thotep and his awesome tutorial. So, if you’ve ever wanted to turn your browser into a old-fashioned static-filled tv-screen etch-a-sketch-inspired sandbox, then come on down and play Static. Create, evolve, enjoy!

At the ungodly hour of 7am on Saturday 25th August we found out the theme, and had a bit of a brainstorm whereby we arrived at fighting, in space, in a cage. Obvious really. 

To play Cage Flight: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=10313

For a more technical post-mortem see http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/08/30/cage-flight-autopsy/

We started a bit behind due to time zones, and we had a bit shorter anyway as although the deadline for jam entries is not until Monday evening, Monday is a work day for both of the team. But that’s no excuse, we still had plenty of time to build a game. Our team this time were:

Concept: Joint between Will (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/author/william_edwards/) and me, with him having final vote

Coding: Will

Art & Audio: Me

Special thanks: A guy called Philip (Dev in 0AD) for timely advice, Glest community for play-testing and gameplay videos

Start

Not a bad start. For a moment our hearts sunk as going in we’d assessed Evolution as one of the more challenging themes as it implies characters having to evolve. But despite the initial glumness we suddenly made the association to Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest and saw that that can be misinterpreted to me conflict, combat and generally fun/cool things. We put aside our ideas of simulated deer populations and focused on the essence of conflict, one against all combat to the death. Um, in a cage, in space. In parody of MMA/UFC, we called it Cage Flight. It’s a multi-player in-browser flight-combat game, quite arcade and really basic in the sense it’s just you against everybody.

Graphics

This wasn’t really a challenging graphics assignment for me. Unlike the LD23 entry which was two days of solid drawing (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=10313). Overall we are quite pleased with the graphics; they give it the feel we wanted and look decent enough. Of course we’d do more and better if we had more time.

2D graphics

I did the game intro flash within the first couple of hours. I had a brainwave to pay homage to the Streetfighter logo:

It’s not a straight copy of course, but by-eye that’s the feel I wanted to give it. A bit comic/pop-art, a bit retro and not taking itself too seriously. To balance the Streetfighter bias at the beginning, I made the death splash a Mortal Kombat reference. We also had a splash for winning but it isn’t used as the player just plays until they are either killed or close the browser window.

At the end we also had the idea of combining the intro flash with the help menu, so we added a graphic to show the keyboard controls. Except that we kept changing the controls as we play tested so I kept having to re-do it.

Models

We opted for G3D models created in Blender. This is the format Glest RTS uses so we are familiar with it. It’s not the best format in some respects but completely adequate. A few tricks I employed to speed up the mass-production of models:

a) All models use the same base texture. It’s a 256×256 PNG with no transparency or team color etc. I don’t do the typical way of skinning models, I can’t explain it but an ex[erienced blender artist would think it’s quite basic what I do, but it’s quick.

b) Each model is an evolution of one of the previous ones. Not starting from scratch. I manipulate base meshes like cubes and cylinders, and never use sculpting. Everything is by eye.

c) Little re-work; generally I make it up as I go along and live with the results.

We intended to have 8 ships – I wanted to have a pre-game lobby where you pick your ship and maybe even your camouflage scheme. Each ship would have different stats, so you would chose firepower against armor etc.  Will didn’t think it added anything so we just made the player have a random ship. All the ships perform equally. Also, firepower and armor became irrelevant – due to time we went for 1 hit 1 kill which played better anyway.

Early iteration of ‘Rhino’ space fighter, and in-game version. Every time I tweaked the texture it was applied to all ships.

The design of this ship is influenced by helicopter gunships and mechs

Audio

Not my thing but I’d found Audacity and Bfxr. Great for sound effects. I made masses of sound effects for power-ups, explosions and collecting coins. The only one we ended up needing was the lasing zap (yep, we know lasers don’t make sounds).

We had planned to record human voice for intro and narrative. We tried but my microphone wasn’t up to it and I couldn’t figure out how to remove background static. So frantically I searched for text to speech programs and found an online version of Mary text to speech engine. Great, very pleased with the results!

Things we dropped

• Client-side slerping
• Coins, credits and scoring. Health points, power-ups
• Ships having distinct flight/combat charactristics
• Explosion effects
• Winning criteria and flash, high-scores board
• Cockpit-view

Good and bad

Well the graphics were a success, and well within the time limits. We didn’t have time to add explosions, particles or better laser effects (currently draws a line programmatically).

During the build our main pains was around Quaternions. See Will’s autopsy for details of that. Due to that we ditched some features but actually simple is better anyway.

In the final play our main problem is simply server FPS. Our server was running at 8 FPS and now 12 FPS. From feedback people are expecting more.

Another problem is that it’s multi-player. That was what we set out to build, but it means that if you join the game and no one else is in, there’s not much for you to do. A third problem may be the flight controls. They are configured for things like speed and turn rates to be cumulative, and I think some people may mistake this as lag or general unresponsiveness.

Evolved version

Are we going to continue building the game with credits, health points, player personalisation, high-score keeping, client side drawing… no. We are deep in playing and rating other people’s LD submissions and already we are inspired to build completely different games.

BRING ON LUDUM DARE 25!!!! 

Of all the feedback I have gotten so far on the game.

Obviously many people thought the invisibility was annoying or frustrating (spelled it wrong on my chart), it is the game, its the entire story and removing it would make the game really bad.

After that, gameplay being simple, basic, good enough in close second, then the most positive of comments the ‘Interesting Concept’s.

This made me feel proud of my game, and all the time I spent on it.

Originally the game was going to be like the part of Heavy Rain, where you are in the mall and your son goes missing, but alas my graphics and programming knowledge are not up to that level yet, maybe next time.

Link to Submission

Keep playing,

Gabe

Well overall I was more pleased with this one than I have been with any LD previously. I started with this design document:

The original idea was that you had been sent to an infant world, which was under threat from space baddies – intent on removing every trace of life from the planet.

As part of the galactic wildlife conservation society you feel this just isn’t fair on the potentially intelligent species that is currently evolving on the planet. So you set down to give nature a helping hand.

The original idea was that you had to find primordial ooze and drop it onto the creatures to mutate them, then get them to breed. They would become more powerful and intelligent until, by invasion time, they would able to defend themselves.

Well the final game turned out a bit (but not a lot) different You’ll have to play to see what I mean!

My biggest mistake was doing my own terrain system for this game. I ended up with terrain that has visible seams. I should have just used Unity’s terrain. (please don’t fly off the edge of the world!) Hopefully somebody will appreciate the fact that I tried to roll my own

The screenshot above, illustrates this – but it also shows the system I’m most pleased with. The floating billboards around your ship show in which direction to find the nearest creatures.

I left in a silly bug that stopped the invasion mechanics from working, most of the time. Most people who played never got to see this situation:

I’ve since uploaded a bugfixed version, please do check that out if you decide to play the game. thanks to everyone who has played and commented so far. I probably won’t do a full post-compo version but will probably do one more LD with the same base code – as I did with  the HTML5 MMO games I made for the last two.

Play and rate Unnatural Selection here

TOWER of Evolution

I just added an Post Compo Version with Title screen, updated Soundtrack, Pause Menu, Highscore and lots of bugfixes!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=10298

Download Soundtrack: Mp3 | Ogg

I hope you feel the groove. This soundtrack is now my Ludum Dare hymn.

cheers
SiENcE

Tags: html5, javascript, MelonJS, schattenkind.net

WHEN I LOG IN TO RATE GAMES IT SENDS ME TO WORD PRESS AND WHEN I RETURURN TO LUDUM IT ASKS ME TO SING IN! HHHHEEELLLPPP

Video of me playing games (Thank you Jorjon!):

Games roughly in order:

3 Little Pigs by brita_
Alpha by fatality674
B M S darkstarmatryx
A Conglomerate of Pixels by creative630
Detective Darwin by jarnik
Dissolution by Sergey Mohov
Dragonkin by EVObobiniki
Egocell by jam Adbook
EVO-00 by 1kyyrma
Experiment X by XmmmX
Game Console Story by Eldaryze
Homo Vermes by madflame991
Lab Experiment Demo by Threef
Lepton’s Quest by rustybroomhandle
Adventures of Hermanni by samoojamies
Monster Mash by MadcoreTom
The SuperBugs by Josh @ Dreamland
Warspace by TaslemGuy

Please rate my game!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=5150

Leave a comment if you want me to rate your game and if you want to be in the next video. Be warned! If you can’t tell from this video, I SUCK at platformers.

Susan

Tags: video

Thanks for the banner, tidbit!

Creating our Jam entry, Out of the Sea, was a balanced melange of fun, frustration, and reward. Let’s take a look at where all our time went.

We have 4 days, because in our time zone, EST, the theme was announced at 9pm, and we consider the time between 9pm to 12pm to be the first day.

Day 1: Brainstorming. Plus the intro screen was created. By this point we know that it’s going to be a sidescroller, it’s going to be sea-themed, but not really much else. Also looked around for a few public domain resources. We couldn’t have done it without ReusableArt.com and FreeSound.org.

Day 2: Programming. We had a physics engine lying around, so why not build something with awesome physics? I found that a lot of LD entries have poor physical interactions and often suffer from a lot of glitches for this reason. At this point I’m quite glad I took the time to create a physics engine before hand. By the end of the day, we have a general visual style, the hand-drawn, misplaced vintage look, as well as a general gameplay style, the slightly out of control salmon that has some pretty strange evolution issues. This hasn’t been implemented fully yet by this point, though.

Day 3: More programming! But after the core parts were done, it’s time to add some better graphics to replace these placeholder images. Lots of graphics work done that day. Of course, some time was also spent integrating these into the game itself, so programming sessions were sprinkled around.

Day 4: Polish. End screens, control responsiveness, color coding, different obstacles, and physics tweaks. It actually somewhat resembles a game now! Time to write up the posts, take screenshots, compile the timelapse, etc. Finishing 6 hours before the deadline, we submitted it to catch bugs before we ran out of time. Good thing, too, I had a frustrating time locating and fixing a bug in the graphics libraries that just made a grey screen appear. Fixing is an understatement, really, I’m glad that part of the graphics library could be rewritten within the time limit. Everything’s good!

Afterwards: Time to play some other games! Wow, so much creativity! So much fun! A great way to unwind after a busy weekend. Of course, another issue would rear its head after release, but it turns out there’s a simple workaround. All’s good. After a game of Ace of Spades, it’s back to work. Post-competition, it’s time to release the game elsewhere! There’s a lot left to do, but it can wait for now.

Advice? I haven’t got any. This is just our first time. I think we did pretty well, though, so something must be going right.

Timelapse:

And of course, I’ve recorded the entire thing in a timelapse here. You might prefer this if reading a wall of text isn’t your cup of tea.

Ludum Dare 24 was a blast,  here’s a look and what went right/wrong along the way for Red Planet.

***Spoiler Alert***  Enjoyment of playing Red Planet comes from the ‘Twilight Zone’  ending;  If you haven’t played it yet, don’t read on, it will ruin that bit by doing so.

RIGHT!

I visualized the end first-  an astronaut stepping out onto the newly green Martian surface, no space suit,  slowly fades away into the green waves of the new life form… An ode to the feel of an old EC Comic book.  From there I just went backward.  The AI came from needing dialogue, eating and showering simply connect you, as a player, to the life of your little pixel friend.  I put it all out on paper in the form of thumbnail sketches and a timeline.

I think I may have had some tea and dimmed the lights before I recorded.  I pictured myself on Mars and hit record. I recorded 2 “songs”,  one, a atmospheric bland track, the second a more upbeat “chase” track with heart-beat type sounds.  When implemented,  the first atmospheric track plays constantly, the second fades in over it when triggered by “scare” events.  I think this bit was the most successful of the project, and also the fastest to complete, weighing in at only an hour at the most.

I did sprites and animation directly into Photoshop with my Wacom.  Freehand with a Wacom is not my first choice, but the alternative would not have allowed for half as many assets.  I kept things simple and easy to read.  I avoided adding too many frames and too much mechanical detail in the station. Some pieces are ugly, but all serve the purpose of furthering the story.

WRONG!

The number one complaint of Red Planet has been, “Bro, this is an interactive story.” or “Dude, where is my freedom?”.  Initially I had written in a few item puzzles, (the taser gun remains as an example) but wrote them out due to being a little tough.  I felt the strongest point of this game was the story, and if some folks didn’t complete the story, they won’t be seeing the full picture. I grew up playing old Sierra adventures, and I only remember the stories of Roger and Graham, certainly not the illogical value-stretching ‘put this in this and press this’ puzzles.  It raises an interesting point as to where the line is between telling a story and interacting a story…  I don’t think Red Planet was entirely successful at walking that line.

The text scrolls way too fast for some folks.  This could have been corrected by a “Space when read” function, although that would raise the spacebar-mashing count considerably.  Again, this points out the major flaw with the linear progression.

Death as an official ending.  I think some people were confused by being killed as a reward to completion.  I still like the idea, but perhaps could have clarified that this is the ONLY ending you can get.

Thanks for playing, and if you haven’t, try the game here:  http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=8563.

-Buffalo Phil

Whew. With that out of the way, let’s get on to the Post-Mortem.

But first, for the obligatory action picture!

Despite what the Professor may think, 48 hours to develop a game may be one of the best ideas I’ve ever encountered. I learn more in those 48 hours than I do in whole months.

What went well:

• My dialog writing. It was Saturday night, I hadn’t slept well the previous day but I was feeling full of energy because I had a ton of coffee a bit earlier. In this weird hazy sleepy/alert state I got on a roll and wrote pretty much ALL of my game’s dialog in the space of an hour or two. It started from a little seed where the professor made fun of the protagonist because he couldn’t even jump. I realized that the mechanics of a pretty dumb protagonist + annoyed professor could be hilarious, and I ran with it.
• My graphics. Finally. I’ve churned out a lot of crap graphics in past Ludum Dares. I’d always tell myself “I’ll come back and finish it later…” and we all know how that turns out I am very satisfied with these graphics, with the exception of the clouds on the upper background. I obsessed over almost every tile that I drew, going through many iterations and tries until they looked good.
• Prioritization.  I’ve had big issues prioritizing what needs to get done in the past, especially LD23. I came up with a really great solution about halfway through. The way that I prioritized was that I kept a huge list of things that I needed to fix in order of priority. Top was most important, bottom had crazy stuff like “KILL INNOCENT CREATURES”  (don’t ask).  Whenever I had a new idea or something that I should fix, I added it into the list at the correct priority. On the final day, I went as fast through the list as I could, from top to bottom. This REALLY helped – it probably saved the game from disaster.
• The level design. That was a surprise. I’ll get back to this.

What went poorly:

• My sleep. I slept a total of 11 hours during LD: 7 on the first day, 4 on the second. I just can’t function without sleep, and I’m sure that I could have done better with more sleep. I’m not sure how to fix this though. I woke up going “OH MY GOD IT’S LUDUM DARE!!!!!!!!!!!” and was unable to get back to sleep. Too excited.
• Scope creep. Holy crap, you should see all the stuff I had planned. Lava, monsters, death, multiple soundtracks, different areas… what was I smoking?
• Scope creep. I know I just said this. It was that bad. At the 24 hour mark I was seriously considering giving up. I knew that I had absolutely no hope of completing my game. Instead, I totally changed my game, trashing TONS of features that I had planned. (A good example of this is how, when you switch to Ice, you make grass icy. This used to have a gameplay effect, but then I decided it was too much work and tossed it out. I kept the ice because I thought it was cool.) I tossed all my crazy and epic level plans, and instead made levels incredibly simple. I decided to toss any hope of making this a serious game and wrote tons of silly dialog… which was actually a huge success.
• Music. This is depressing, because my production skills have really improved since LD23, and I wanted to know what people thought. But I forgot to schedule some time to do it on the first day or early second day, and we all know what happens to things that we put off in LD.
• Sound effects. I tossed these in last minute, and it shows. Pretty much everyone hates them.
• Animations. These are really important for a game to appear polished. I totally forgot to do them.
• UI. My God, EVERYONE hates the card selection screen. I remember thinking to myself while writing the game, “wow, this screen is annoying to use.” Why didn’t I fix it? I think what happened is I designed it before I had my priority system in place, and then after that I had a learned blindness to how annoying it was to use.

What I learned:

• Levels you make to be hard are impossible. Levels you make to be medium are impossible. Levels you make to be easy are perfect. In LD23, I made some really hard final levels. I don’t know how many people beat them. I think most people just gave up. This time, I made tons of REALLY simple level designs… and most people are saying “wow, the level design was just right!” That’s truly eye opening.
• Have a very high sensitivity to things that seem wrong. If something ever seems wrong, immediately jot it down so you can fix it later. If you notice the controls are slippery at one point and don’t fix it, you’re going to get used to it. But people who play your game wont – they’re not going to play your game long enough to get used to it. Fix it ASAP!
• Your first test of a gameplay element is the one that matters. The first time I tested my card selection UI, I was like “Wow, this blows!” But after dealing with it 50 times I was like “Huh, this isn’t so bad.” Of course, no one other than me is going to deal with that screen 50 times.
• Get at least one beta tester. If you can’t see the problems from the upper two points, this is the 2nd best solution. One guy who tested my game afterwards immediately suggested a fix to the card selection UI – put arrows below to mark which ones were used. It was so obvious that I facepalmed. That is the power of a second pair of eyes.
• Implement the biggest stuff ASAP. Later  you’re going to be bogged down in minor bugs, and you won’t have time.

If you read all that, I am truly impressed! If you just skimmed the bold parts, well, that’s pretty good too. Thank you for reading. Here’s the game!

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 2nd, 2012 at 9:29 pm and is filed under LD #24. 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.