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So… we didn’t finish. But that’s only slightly disappointing. Personally, I learned a lot. Specially how easily scope creeps up. Our original idea was even bigger than the one we attempted. Imagine that.
Idea(Kevin): We spent the first 4-5 hours of jam trying to come up with a good idea. My girlfriend, Brooke, helped concept stuff and do some of the visual HUD/Menu elements. We really didn’t want to trivialize the 10 second theme. So I didn’t want to make a mini-game game, or anything that added the 10 second element to an existing game. We ended up deciding that every 10 seconds there should be a change to the rules of how you play the game, and I thought a sidescrolling brawler with weapon/character changing and enemies would be a fun way of incorporating that.
In the end I feel like it’s still just a tacked on mechanic, but what led to the idea were better ideas that were unfeasible for the amount of time.
Art (Kevin): I didn’t have very much difficulty with the character art/animation, that is, once I finally figured out what the character was going to be. That did take a while. I knew it had to be someone adventurous. I drew buff dudes, and that was sorta neat. I’m very comfortable with Flash, so it was a pretty standard work experience. In the end it all sort of came down to Nick, our programmer, saying, “Just make it a pirate.” After that I just drew a little pirate guy and that was that.
The background was the most experimental part for me. I don’t usually work in photoshop for background stuff, and I’m not the best painter by any stretch of the imagination. Took a lot of noodling and guesswork. I had to build it for parallax scrolling (which didn’t end up in the game) and that made it much more difficult. Had to make sure to keep all my layers separate, and it was just a jarring change to my usual workflow that I sort of enjoyed.
Music (Steph as told by Kevin): Steph used reason to make all the music. She made 2 songs, one which she decided wasn’t good enough. She did a really fantastic job and ended up having the best part of the game I think, which is almost always the case anyway. I give her huge props for staying up until 4am only to go to her job at like 6-7am with like an hour of sleep. The entirety of the music was done in I think one day, not including the first tune she scrapped.
Programming (Nick): So my goal was to make an HTML5 platformer that was entirely physics driven, without resorting to moving around static bodies and using Box2d for collisions only. This turned out to be our biggest pitfall. Unfortunately the JS ports of both Box2d and Chipmunk are still relatively new and untested. I switched over from Box2dWeb to Chipmunk.js late Saturday, after battling with it all day. Box2dWeb is a direct (automatic?) port of Box2dFlash, and many of the problems that crop up there show up in the port.
Things went much faster with Chipmunk.js, but it’s not perfect. For example, setting a velocity limit on a body in Chipmunk.js will error out. Oops, guess nobody has ever used that feature before.
Thankfully, both Box2DWeb and Chipmunk.js are open source and I’ll be able to contribute the fixes I made. I also ported over a parser for Physics Editor (codeandweb.com) and I’ll throw it up on GitHub in case anybody needs it in the future.
Cocos2d-x-html5 turned out to be fantastic, and the promise of easy porting is a reality. I was able to compile and run my JS untouched in an Xcode project targeting OS X.
I’m really grateful for all the work that’s been put into these libraries. Without them, I’m not sure the awesomeness we’re seeing this weekend would be possible.
Libraries: cocos2d-x-html5, chipmunk.js
Tools: Brackets, Sublime Text 2, TexturePacker, PhysicsEditor, Chrome + Dev Tools, Tern.js, and Git
Anyway, heres where the game ended up. It’s very unfinished, and lacks the 10 second mechanic or any sort of polish. It was however a very good learning experience.
And heres what we wanted to do.
I almost forgot! HUGE applause for everyone that finished their game on time. It really is a feat, and anyone who participated should be really proud of themselves. It was an awesome first time for us, and I’m already excited for the next one. Ludum Dare rocks.
