If you were to go back through my posts you would see that not long ago I was making a completely different game. There were a lot of problems with that game. First, it wasn’t fun to make it. Second, it probably wasn’t going to be fun to play. And third it required too much art, and seeing as I’m not an artist that was a bad thing. But I’m glad that happened, because I’m really happy with the game I have now. Luckily I’d always planned on entering the jam so losing a dayish of work wasn’t too bad.

So here’s a screenshot of “Artificial Incompetence”. You have to control a race of incompetent AI beings to try and stop the Good Guy Alliance from destroying you. It’s really simple but also really fast paced, which I tend to like. Now I’m off to sleep, then polish polish polish tomorrow.

What went Right?

• I enjoyed building the game, I did this LD because I wanted to have fun with a small game and I did have a lot of fun dropping cows and watching big waves of zombies run into machine guns.
• Focused on design, not graphics. Because I did not pay as much attention to the graphics as usual I could spend more time on adding a tutorial and some extra gameplay.
• I like the design, I think it has familiar elements, but it is different, maybe I can port it to tablet or something.
• It is a complete game, every feature I planned is in.

What went Wrong?

• Was busy until 3am,  that was not how I planned it :).
• Underestimated how long it would take to build the levels.
• Need to work on my Sound Fx/Music skills, the game really needed some zombie sounds and fun music.
• It needed more levels, probably about 10 levels or so. This way I would have been able to have a better difficulty curve. The game has enough content to build 10 levels.

So what I will do different next time? I will start earlier on the levels. So the first day is just implementation of ideas and features and the biggest part of the second day is building levels.

If you want to play my game, here is the link:

Play it !

This, is what we’ve got so far… maybe we won’t finish it on time :(, good luck to all and good night

Fighting Safari in the jungle:

And the Mozilla boss:

Damn Unity.

For some reason, whenever we make a build (no matter what platform), old scripts are used. So we keep building the same build, and none of the changes are added.

Due to this, we’re pulling out of LD25

Geko

1. Added a bonus system, which works pretty nicely.

Tags: Bad Puppy, Chris Sanyk, csanyk, enhancement, post-compo

Kitten fo’ life!

Also, check out some footage of our  jam entry here:

Or wait less than a day to play it 😉

Each Ludum Dare usually has different things that go badly and things that go well, but there is one dilemma that’s always the same for me.

Do I make something simple that I can polish and test properly? Or do I challenge myself to do the impossible?

Each option has its own pro’s and cons:

Something simple that I can polish and test properly

• I can make a finished product that works, looks good and sounds good, almost guaranteed.
• It’s more fun to read comments after LD has ended.
• Will likely end up higher in the rankings.

Challenge myself to do the impossible.

• More fun during ludum dare, more exciting.
• Less limiting
• It would be awesome if I actually managed to finish the game.
• Likely results in something incomplete/ buggy.

The first 2 times I entered I tried to make something ambitious, the last two times I tried to make something simpler. This time, I tried doing the impossible again.

I guess what it comes down to is who you think you are competing against. Am I competing against everyone who is also entering LD, then I should probably go for option one. Am I competing against myself, then I should go for option two.

Anyway, what I ended up with is more than I actually expected. My game is playable and I find it fun to experiment with it. But while there is a lot to try out, the game does not feel complete.

My game: Critter Criminal

In critter criminal you fight, catch, breed and butcher friendly critters for your own personal gain. In the ludum dare version fighting, catching, breeding and butchering all works, but once you’ve caught or bred the ultimate critter, there is not a whole lot to do with it.

If you’re into breeding type games, I think you can have fun with this entry but you’ll mostly have to set your own challenges.

You can play my entry here

Sleepy time.

Almost all the gameplay is working. After that, polish!

Here’s a new screenshot. The environment needs work still to make the characters stand out etc.

And here are some sprites :

With just over 19 hours left until the Jam ends, we’ve been frantically getting all our heroes in a row, so that our villain gave vaporize them in one fell swoop.

Here’s the effect for the disintegration ray:

And here is what you look like after you have been hit by the disintegration ray (our in-game term for this is “puddle of goo”):

And here’s the level design mock-up for the final level—Dear Leader’s palace.

Tags: ReturnDearLeader

I had to see my mother to the emergency department. I spent the whole day there, so I couldn’t work on my game for the Compo, and I don’t have the time to finish it for the Jam.
Guess there won’t be an entry from me again!

I previously thought I would not be able to participate in LD25 because I wanted to spend time with my girlfriend before she flew off for the holidays. However, I now have found some extra time and realized that there are still 19 hours left in the compo. Yay!

I’m going to attempt to learn and make a game with Quest, which is an interactive fiction engine. See you guys at the finish line!

Tags: interactive fiction, last minute, quest

Due to being away and stuff I was highly limited in my actual working time. I only found out the theme 7 hours after it had been annouced, and didn’t have time to work on it. BUT I STILL MADE AN AWESOME GAME!!

PLUS GOATS!!

Click to play!

It has goats!

My only regret is not including enough exclamation marks in the title.

The basic premise is to rebound lasers from other ships in order to get massive combos

Cool things about this game:

• I used as3sfxr and generated the sound in-game for the first time.
• I used box2d for the reflection angles, making this the first game I’ve used box2d in.
• This is the first game I’ve used a restricted colour palette for, and the graphics went well.
• Didn’t use any silly flash engines like flash punk because I’m cool like that.
• GOATS

Tags: as3, firin ma laser, flash, goat, goat thief, goats, goats in space, king goat, screenshot, space, space goats, thief of goats

Super excited to have completed my first LD. A lot of things went right, and several went quite wrong but I managed to get a game out that I can be proud of.

In the interest of improving, I’ll do a quick self-review.

Concept:

While the idea of a mad scientist who’s been overthrown by his robots initially seemed clever, I may have inadvertently come up with something that has a portal-like atmosphere. A little more originality next time is in order I think, but I do really like the atmosphere of this game.

Controls:

This will probably stop a few people from being able to play my game. I forgot to include IN the game that the “Q” key closes menus. :\

Mechanics:

I wish I had added more uses for the shrink-ray. The idea of having alternate cartridges for the raygun turned out to be pretty cool. If I could do it again with a bit better time management, I think adding other gadgets would have been fantastic.

Mood/Lighting:

This game is kind of dark. While intentional, I’m not sure whether it adds or detracts from the game.

Graphics:

I’m not a very good 3D artist, so the choice to go 3D for this one may have been a little ambitious. I scraped by with some square-paneled lab-like environment, but I’ll be going a different route in the (hopefully more practiced) future.

Humour:

While I happen to think that your chipper, sarcastic AI tour guide is funny…The dialogue can be really hard to hear. That was a bad choice of filter.

Overall:

It was a cool experience. Definitely worth the sleep deprivation! I’ll definitely be trying to participate in the next LD.

So it looks like on-top of not having a great start or finish to the competition, now the lack of web entries makes it impossible for me to gain any ‘coolness’. What can a guy do?

I’ve been trying since the end of the competition to play and rate entries, but so far I have only found 2 web entries. Perhaps there should be a way to sort entries by platform.

Just had to upload this little turntable of our lumberjack character!

OK! Back to work..

Guess a post-mortem is in order.

So I didn’t finish. This was my first LD, and in general I don’t have a good track record of finishing things. I was using tools that I’m not very familiar with, but that wasn’t the main problem. My idea wasn’t, perhaps, as self-contained and unambitious as it should have been, but I should have been able to get something playable out of it given where things were when I gave up.

I’m going to drop most of the blame for this one on a lack of sleep. There’s really no good reason to stay up all night on the first day, but I worked from 11am-4:45am. It was pretty productive work – even towards the end, while things had slowed considerably, progress was still plodding along.

I got to bed at 5:30 and woke up around 11:30. Made a todo list and then failed to get through a quarter of it. The way the code fit together was fine in my head when I went to sleep, but the next day getting a grip on how the various things related and communicated to each other was far too much to cope with after not enough sleep on a disrupted sleep schedule.

And, of course, my game architecture deserves some of the blame for that. Lots of the blame actually, but it’s not so bad. I tried something I hadn’t done much before (components) – it was a good learning experience, certainly. The main idea was pretty good, but the glue holding it all together wasn’t. I’m planning to start a new game and scavenge this game for code – it should hopefully amount to something more stable and useful.

Anyway, that’s that. No grand reason for failure, just far too much enthusiasm for being hardcore on the first day. Being hardcore is for the day it’s due and not before – anything before that is wasted effort.

Tags: post-mortem

Ludum Dare 25

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=3040

What went right:

Simple reference game:  Friday at 6pm, Dave Alleca showed me Spike: A Love Story.  Press a space bar to drop a spiked ceiling onto a passerby.  It was simple to play, and the animation, sound, and writing was polished.   I managed my scope.

Simple reference art:  There’s many illustrations of dragons, peasants and knights to borrow from.  I enjoyed referring to these and composing some cartoon characters.  Cartoons are easy to make in Flash.  Most everything was morphed from an oval.  I felt relaxed on Saturday evening as I illustrated and animated.

Pace:  Almost every hour I committed to git.  I logged each hour.  I was aware of the time left and the goal for the hour.  The log motivated me and balanced my perspective for the next time I make a game quickly.  I took a break most hours; that was part of the rhythm.  I slept eight hours each night.  I was never exhausted, even though I did work 10 hours on Friday before starting the Ludum Dare at 6pm.

What went wrong:

Over invested in infrastructure.  I used Flixel.  For such a simple game, next time I might go with native Flash.  I was concerned about performance, yet the walking animations still had a little bit of stutter in them in Flixel.  I used a scene movieclip to compose the elements and to sync the sound with the visuals, and to dynamically generate sprite sheets from the animations.

Nice to have polishing before essential requirements.  I had planned to add fireball since the beginning, but I did not start programming it until about 2 or 3 hours before the end.  Until that moment I could not consider the difficulty.  Afterward, I made the fire and bite more deadly, but enabled a dominant strategy to pace fireballs.

Indecision.  I over-invested and polished because I was not sure about how much time I would need and wanted to have a well-rounded game.  I put off adding more features because I wanted to polish what was already there.  I was not too clear about my goals.  I was not sure about blitting or vector art, about using particles or custom animation.  So I made both.

Altogether I enjoyed the experience and have been encouraged by the positive comments that imagine a potential follow-up for Sleeping Dragon.

Somethings went right, some things went wrong, but they came together in the end to make my entry. For example, in the middle of the dare (Saturday at 7pm GMT) the game I was working on glitched and the tiles loaded from the TMX level file were incorrect – in this case it was a good idea to restart the game with a different concept.

Concept:

Whilst the idea of running over cats is an original one, it needs a story.

Controls:

Shown at the main menu, but some other keys like ‘p’ and ‘enter’ for pause and ‘space’ for jump exist.

Mechanics:

I wish I had added in a few more kinds of cats and animals, but I probably would have ran out of time.

Mood/Lighting:

The game itself, is very upbeat, but I suppose it’s got a dark undertone considering you just run over cats.

Graphics:

I did the lazy thing and used mtPaint to make pixel art, but they turned out alright.

Humour:

Did pretty well here considering the game consists of running over cats.

Overall:

It was a good experience that benefited me in management of time etc in game developing. I look forward to the next Ludum Dare.

Tags: haXe, haxenme, haxepunk

Ended up running out of time. But here is the build for Dragon flight a 3D based flight shooter.
+

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/41198125/Dragon_webbuild/Web_build.html

I’ll update this post with more details after I catch up on some rest. Happy jamming!