Here’s the link to my entry : 10 seconds to save the day.

Before Ludum Dare begins
This Ludum Dare, I wanted to make an adventure game. Not one like Lucas’ Quest Backwards (LD 24) with platform sequences or This is not a minimalist game (LD 26) with puzzles. I wanted to make an adventure game where you only advance through dialogs. I like writing stories, and I thought that such a game wouldn’t be long to code and that it would give me plenty of time to polish the story, the graphics and add music.

Like many, I was convinced that the theme would be 10 seconds. This is the first time in a Ludum Dare that the theme is not a surprise for me. But I hadn’t given much thought to it. I didn’t like it, it felt exactly like “Minimalism” : more of an additional constraint than a theme, and I hoped it wouldn’t be chosen despite its very high score during the first round of votes.

The theme
But it was announced : 10 seconds.
I didn’t know what to do. I tried to find gameplay ideas with 10 seconds, but nothing very inspiring. All 10 seconds based gameplay seemed so frustrating. So I came back to my initial idea of making a story, and I let my mind wander in many directions. I wanted the 10 seconds to be an important part of the story, and not just be the equivalent of “a short moment”.

10 seconds… 10 seconds… 10 seconds event… Give 10 seconds… Stop ! The “Give 10 seconds” trail seemed interesting.
I wanted the characters to be able to give 10 seconds, but how ? Then came this idea of ghosts being able to give away the last 10 seconds of their lives to other dead people in order to prevent a tragedy, and I liked it a lot. I was just worried about not being able to write good enough characters and a good enough tragic event for the story to work.

Day 1
I slept on it (in France, the theme is announced at 3 a.m.). I was still worried when I woke up, so I started writing, finished writing… and I was so relieved I finally came up with something that seemed to work that it didn’t even occurred to me that I could take a few moments to see if the characters and the rhythm of the story could be improved. I wrote everything in one go and never touched it again.

Then I started to write the dialogs. It was kind of confusing because I wrote everything in a plain text file, and after a while it became really hard to distinguish what dialog unlocked what, what dialog was unlocked by what… I started to become very anxious.

Moreover, more than 1h30 had passed, and I had only written what corresponded to 1/25e of my story, not even coded it ! It didn’t look good at all.

So I rushed. When the code was satisfying enough, I started to code the story. Then I realised than a feature was missing : I wanted the player to be able to unlock a list of topics, and be able to ask any character about these topics. So I coded it, and it bugged a lot, and I fixed all the bugs. It took me several hours.

Then I rushed writing the dialogs and the story.

When the first day was over, I had only coded the first point of my to-do list. There were 18 points ! I realised I could never finish unless I cut a lot of the planned investigation sequences. So I did it with regret…

The game at the end of day 1

Day 2
The second day, the hours were flying and the game was only progressing slowly. So I made even more cuts. When I finally got to the end of the story, there were only 4 hours left.

While re-testing the game, it occurred to me that my “topics” features only served once… So I deleted it and added manually the topic where it was needed. Which caused many bugs and dead ends ! Arggg !!!

I only had time left to polish the graphics. I focused on the characters. Drawing them took me all the remaining time because there are a lot of NPC and playable characters and I drew 4 frames by animation.

Almost no time was left for the music unfortunately, so I used abundant-music.com.

What went right
– I never thought I could finish the story, but I did it. Even if I had to cut a lot of interactions with the player, I consider it a win. There’s still a lot of content.
– This was the first time I drew animated non-pixel-art characters for a game, I enjoyed it and I was happy with the result.
– I’m still happy with the story.

What went wrong
– The river of bugs caused by a feature that wasn’t even implemented in the game. I should have taken more time to plan what I was going to do and what I would need.
– I had planned a lot more interactions with the player that I had no time to implement.
– I could have improved the story, but I was already so uncomfortable writing it in the first place that it seemed impossible to me to change it even a little bit, it was like written in stone.

Explain everything or not ?
– I thought that I could leave some things to the interpretation of the player. It was a deliberate choice not to explain why things happen like this in the end. I could have explained it, but it didn’t seemed necessary. On the contrary, it would have seemed kind of clumsy to me.
Unfortunately, it looks like it was necessary. Some players on Kong decided that the unexplained ending made no sense, and therefore was weak.
But some understood, so I don’t know what was the right choice after all.

Testing… my own patience
– Testing was horrible. I had to test the game so many times to fix problems that I became sick of my own game and it wasn’t even released. Seeing the same dialogs for the 100th time, discovering that something is still wrong and things don’t unlock correctly, grrr !!! In the end, I didn’t even read the dialogs anymore, I just pressed the keys in the right order.
Even if I had ways to start testing at a given point of the story, I spent an awful lot of time on testing, I’d say more than 50%.

Plus, the code was very tricky to organize. I like clean, readable code, and it wasn’t. It was very hard to tell what unlocked what and where. It was like being lost in a labyrinth or trying to unlock a complex web. And with more interactions with the player like I wanted initially, it would have been even worse.

When I made a post-compo version for Kongregate, I thought that adding a short animation at the end would make it less brutal, and wouldn’t take a lot of time. But I really didn’t have the courage to work on the game anymore, so I didn’t do it.

Conclusion
Even if I’m satisfied with the game I made, I didn’t really enjoy making it after the “imagine-the-story” part. Long dialog based story are tricky to make (at least for me) and painful to test in such a short amount of time.
I’m not saying “never again”, I’m just saying “definitely not next time”

You can play my entry here. I hope you like it !

Hello peaple , I’m making this post to say what I think about the LD ! (This is my first time, and sorry for my english) some images:

The competion is very fun, I loved participate in Compo, 2000 games ! Oh my gosh , really people, you are incredible, all of our games are good, we are heroes, we are champions for make a lot of games in a little bit time, I earned experiencie in this LD, and I really had fun, in the LD28 I’ll be here again ! Thank you , and thank you too Brazilians makers !

This is my game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=26331

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 31st, 2013 at 8:26 am and is filed under LD #27. 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.

Aaaaaand I’ll try to make it readabe in ten seconds D:

What went right :
– Coding went incredibely well this time. I had just one stupid difficulty one time then it all went smooth, even for the art part.
– All the assets were maid under 2h in a 69 ko spritesheet. Never done it so fast.
– Making a fucking dynamic game coding all sorts of wiggly/sparkly things with game maker.
– coding my first AI

What went wrong :
– bad game design. As always,I try to improvise this game so much that it gets “not-as-good-as-wanted” to play and need tons of tweaking.
– stupidely overambitious as usual. Wanted to make procedurally generated levels just for the exercice. I finished about 1 or 2h before the end with a lot of game breaking bugs that I somehow managed to repair.
– epilepsy warning : People though I finished the game with a huge headache but I really didn’t think this game was so flashy, and I forgot to add a warning screen at the beginning.

Whattada next :
– now I’m really ready to make a fucking cool game.

PLAY THE GAME HERE :3

The first thing that came to mind when hearing “10 seconds” was “kill as many enemies as possible in 10 seconds”.  I started this LD with a laid back attitude.  I had other important things to do in the week-end, such as relaxing on the beach and visiting friends on my last vacation days.  And I just wanted to do something that I personally find fun and inspiring.  To hell with the ratings, which many people think suck anyway (I myself prefer constructive comments over numeric ratings).  So I stuck with this simple but fun idea.  The enemies were going to be totally stupid.  It’s the weapons that have interesting behaviour.

I spent little time coding on Saturday, just fiddling around with graphics and level layouts to see if I could find something that inspired me.  But when I created the bullet bouncing mechanic, I found that this simple mechanic can result in some interesting gameplay, so I stuck with it.  From Saturday night onwards I had a blast creating funny and interesting weapons, which took most of Sunday to implement and balance.

I decided to have the player play through all the levels without the need to “complete” any level before proceeding to the next.  I just wanted the game’s appeal not depend on anticipation of the reward to see the next level for a change, something I got fed up with after playing too much WOW.  The result is that the player is taken through a dazzling array of weapon mechanics and graphics in the span of two minutes.  And hopefully think, wow, let’s try that again!  Or maybe not, then at least the game has been entertaining for two minutes, which is not too far off from the recommended time to spend on a LD game review.

The graphics are mostly procedurally generated, using my sprite generator, and Evolvotron (a linux-only program). I spent a little over an hour on them, and it appears people like them, so I consider them a success.

Sound was added 30 minutes before the deadline.  I decided to have the game trigger lots of “rapid fire” sounds, resulting in a sort of “ambient” noise, which I thought sounded quite OK when I used multiple slightly different samples for each sound. Unfortunately the sound is a little too loud compared to most games, and when it’s on loud, it sounds rather grating and unpleasant, as sfxr sounds tend to do.  As is, the game is probably going to score lower on sound than a game without sound, which I believe scores about 2 stars on average.  So, please turn the volume way down to make the game sound better.  Reminder for next time: lower the volume by 6db for sfxr samples!

Which brings us to some other things that didn’t turn out so well.  First of all, the game is too random, you need luck to complete some levels, and just shooting in random directions is a reasonable strategy.  That’s the most important flaw I think, but it can be fixed.  I am a little surprised I still find it enjoyable despite of that, in fact it has the same kind of appeal as a coin drop machine.  Another is that the game probably lacks character. No cool intro or characters, no compelling or funny storyline.  I am very bad at this sort of thing.  I must admit, I personally don’t consider it important, but I know some other people do.

About the “kill as many enemies as possible in 10 seconds” concept, I wonder how many people though it up, but abandoned it because it was too obvious.  As yet, I have to find a game that follows the same concept.  I do hope to find some before rating ends!

Oh, I almost forgot… play the game here.

I’ve been playing the Ludum Dare games and I feel happy that the majority of the games was made with multiplatform tools.

I’m a Linux user and it’s horrible when the games have versions only to commercial OSs. Linux is the choice if you don’t like to be owned by some huge corporation. And under Linux you are free from the CIA spies

Many Unity developers are exporting the games to Linux and it’s working very well. And web/javascript games are naturally multiplatform.

I see a paradigm shift here. Now we have a world where monoplatform development is not acceptable anymore.

P.S. – Play my (multiplatform) puzzle game entry!

I would just like to inform that under LD 27 I encountered a bug with collision, I could not get it to work. So after 2 hours I asked in the Ludum dare IRC if I could search for information about it and someone replied that I could do any type of research. I knew a good source about collision and I used that information in the game, here is the video:

It’s from The Cherno, for those who don’t know who he is.

He is a great java game programming teacher on youtube.

Here is his Ludum dare entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=14133

Just finished porting to HTML5 and Android!
Sorry Apple users! I don’t have a mac to export with. Maybe I’ll get around to install a hackintosh for exporting to iOS and MacOS 😉

Game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=18514

Good news everyone! I might be making a full version of the game! But with a better storyline (pfft, what storyline?) and level designs!

Still streaming!

I’ll review games whose makers are in the chat with priority over others. Currently there are none, so if you login to twitch and let me know your games URL (either via the form or in chat) I’ll play your game right now!

If you like, add your game to the reviewing queue on:

http://ldgames.timtips.com

Hope to see you on stream 

http://www.twitch.tv/timtipgames

Firstly, I’d just like to share the notes I took for the entire weekend of the jam…
and you can play my game here: The Saddest Landscape.

What went well

Established an interesting link to the theme fairly quickly: “10 Seconds” made me think of old school films in which have a countdown such as: link. This then led me to think about old film projectors more specifically a film reel or film negative strip. I thought it would be interesting to create a world that lies within a filmstrip, and that players themselves are in turn telling themselves a story as they play it, this was how I interpreted the theme. I was surprised to find a number of people who thought I hadn’t considered the theme and were unable to see the connection.  There is no gameplay mechanic that directly links to the theme; my interpretation was purely visual and aesthetically which I felt could have been the reason for this misunderstanding.

Making artwork and animating: Creating art and animating are my stronger side so naturally this went relatively smoothly. I feel I do well in establishing a certain feeling or mood in the game and are happy with the results. I didn’t want to do a purely black and white game as my old LD26 game was all black and white; I wanted to have at least some hint of colour. So I went for an old sepia brownish tone which was intended to give an old fashioned kind of feel, that I hope it does.

Managed to submit something: Having almost scrapped the idea midday Saturday to do something that was easier for me to program (I was thinking of a point and click adventure perhaps) I was happy that I stuck at it and managed to submit something that ran relatively smoothly.

A lot of people have been asking me my influences; this is pretty much my main influence. – Link:

What went wrong

Learning AS3/Coding: I’m not much of a programmer but I love coming up with interesting design ideas for games which is why I participate (and to learn). But I got very frustrated throughout programming the game which is why this entry isn’t as substantial as it could have been.

The game mechanic I wanted to implement would have been that the characters could let go of each other’s hands and that when separated one can make it over further to reach gaps and aid the other character across, so basically hints of puzzle elements to the game.

Bugs (oops): I submitted the game with one silly bug I knew about but completely forgot to fix If players hold the ‘up arrow’ key the characters just fly up endlessly. There are also some minor collision issues which are beyond my knowledge of programming to fix so I just had to work around these issues throughout development.

Not Much of a Game/No Gameplay: I think I ever so slightly bit off more than I could chew as I know very little AS3. This meant that I was able to get a concept out but unable to implement a game mechanic and to design some intrigue levels with a nice curve around this mechanic. However I learnt a ton of new things because of this. What I submitted isn’t much of a game (yet) more of an interactive storytelling conceptual piece and proof of concept.

What is next

I’m fairly happy with the concept and I feel it has a lot of room for potential. I plan to continue working on this due to the nice feedback I have received from fellow devs. I have found myself a programmer and we’re currently working evenings and weekends to maybe make this little prototype into something hopefully substantial. All the artwork/characterisation will be further iterated and touched up for a more unique/established art style based on some very valuable feedback I have received. A solid game mechanic will be put in place which in turn will give some puzzle elements to the game, as well as adding some variety to the twitch skill mechanics currently in place for platforming.

Thank you to everyone who played and for your kind words.

You can play the game here.

Firstly, that was one heck of a competition. It was absolutely down the wire on this one. I finally got my game finished and uploaded with only about fifteen minutes to spare. Close call. I also got pretty sick during the competition so there was that to deal with. But all things considered I had a lot of fun. I pushed myself hard and I feel came out with a good product. I think The Lost Robos is a pretty stylish and fun game, competition notwithstanding. I’m glad I was a part of this and will probably take part in future competitions if I have the time and energy.

What Went Right

Quite a lot actually. I started with the characters and went from there. I wanted to nail the animation so it was pleasant to look at, since those were the assets that would be getting the most focus from the player. I think the tiles turned out quite nicely. The levels manage to look fairly attractive and balanced considering there are only maybe five different tiles in the game.  The gameplay itself seems to be the best attribute of The Lost Robos. We managed to achieve a nice old school, multi-character, puzzler feeling with it that I think makes it stand out a bit as an entry.

What Went Wrong

The biggest, most glaring flaw of the entire game is BAD CONVEYANCE . Many players think the game is glitched or broken, but this is not true. It just suffers from a bad case of me not explaining things in a clear enough fashion. Admittedly I started the game with a big, ugly Wall Of Text, which I’m sure most people just breeze right through. The problem is they miss important control functions and the game never prompts you about them again, which is very bad form. For example when you want to move a Robo you have to select him with his corresponding number. Nothing will move until you select a character. Also, when you die or want to restart the level you have to press R. The game never restarts itself. This was intentional because a level is not necessarily unbeatable just because a Robo is dead or out of juice. But people thought the game froze on death because I didn’t include a prompt reminding you to press R when you were dead. Since this is a competition and people have a lot of entries to wade through, I doubt they tried long to figure out how to progress the game and just shut it down and moved on to the next. That was unfortunate.

The music didn’t quite turn out how I wanted. While the one song in the game is decent enough, I didn’t have the time to add more voices and layers so it ended up sounded a bit thin. Also I really wanted a song to play for the levels, but I ran out of time before I could compose one.

The game does have some bugs as well. I tried to nail them all down, and I’m pretty sure I removed all the ones that broke the game or let you cheat your way through a level, but a few ugly ones still remain.  I won’t go into detail about all of them but let’s just say some weird things can happen when you switch characters in certain situations.

Closing Thoughts

All in all, I’m rather proud of this game and I would love to get more people to play it. I tried keeping up on reviews but it took me three days of constant reviewing to even hit 100. I have no idea how those guys on the most popular list are getting the numbers they are, but more power to them. I’ve seen a lot of good games out there and it’s been a blast playing them all. I’ve enjoyed seeing everyone’s take on the 10 Seconds theme, and I’ve really come across some serious gems. Good luck to all of you, and have fun!

Looks liked it turned into a fierce contest after all. Only two rank endings remain. That’s right folks, rank A and SS are still available. Beat the game and get the ranks and you will win a free in depth review!

Hurry up!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=13137

Tags: contest, review

Hey guys,

We released our game ‘Mr. Moore’s Last Seconds‘ here on Ludum Dare as our entry for the 72 hour jam. This game was made from scratch with no used or re-used assets. The interesting thing is, that we actually posted the game on NewGrounds, you know, just to see what the community over there would think. The creator of ‘Clockwork Cat’, ‘Captain Jack’, ‘Pull The Wire’ and more also did the same. They got the same result! I don’t know about those guys, but I’m overjoyed that our game got Front-Page on NewGrounds. Also, when we thought it couldn’t get any more awesome, Adobe decided to announce it as the ‘Gaming Rocks Pick of the Week’. The game has ~25,500 as of this post, and for us, that’s a huge achievement.

We created a small team called ‘Hexaton Games‘, and we would really appreciate it if you followed us on either Facebook(link) or Twitter(link)! If you have played the game, and you like it, the you would be doing us a huge favour by supporting us and getting the games OST for only $1 (link). We really do hope to make some more awesome games for you guys.

Anyway, I guess the main purpose of this post is to encourage the Ludum Dare developers to post the game on NewGrounds, try and get a little attention from it. I mean, you deserve it, you made a game in 72 hours, and you should all be damn proud of yourselves no matter how big or how small it was. You actually made a game. If you didn’t, or you didn’t finish in time, just try making your ideas a little smaller until you know you can develop them. We personally can not wait for the next Ludum Dare!

You can play the game at NewGrounds HERE!

Thanks,

Joey (Hexaton Games)

Tags: adobe, feature, flash, game, newgrounds

I didn’t finish in time for the main event, or even the jam – but, I will release a playable demo at some point in the future.

Hello people! Remember me and my Ludum Dare 27 game? Of course you don’t! But that’s okay, I didn’t expect you to. In fact, go away, I’m writing this post for myself, as an affirmation of sorts. What? You’re still here? Shoo!

Now, on a slightly more serious note, I am, in fact, working on a post-compo version of my latest Ludum Dare entry, Stator Chronicle, as I consider it to be a rather successful experiment indeed. Naturally, it has flaws, and the feedback that you guys have left is invaluable to me, so I will be grateful if you leave even more, as every new comment either gives me more motivation to continue working on the project or helps me improve the future full game (sometimes both, believe it or not).

This is the first post-compo improvement to the game, wind zones now work as intended, and their “glitchiness” is completely eliminated. Just something I didn’t have time to fix during the 48 hours of the compo.

Like I said, I’m just trying to be assertive here (and my own blog appears to be broken for some php-related reason), so I needed to write this post to make it official: Stator Chronicle is going post-compo. Be excited. Or not. I know I will be!

Tags: announcement, post-compo, stator chronicle

I am writing a C# Monogame 2D platformer game library called Ludum2D. It is going to be an extraction of my engine used in my Ludum Dare 27 game with additional and more refined features.

I am developing it specifically to be extremely fast to make games with.

Features:

Gravity
Collisions
Entity management
Artificial Intelligence
Tile based levels
Particle engine
Hit Scanning
Smart post processor (Effects like Blur, Bloom etc.)

These are just few of the many features it will have.

It is made open source under the GPL license which means if you make any improvements or additions to my engine, I would like if you would make it public so we could implement your patch into the engine.

A port to Java with LWJGL is planned once this version is complete.

Link: https://github.com/oxysoft/Ludum2D

I didn’t get my game finished.

What went right:

• My art. I barely got any done, but it turned out well.
• My second idea. I like the idea, and think it could be fun if it was actually a game.
• Early code. The week before the compo, I started working on a game library. I found that having a bit of base code really helped, and whenever I needed a fairly generic feature (sprites, A*, etc) I added it to the library instead of my main code.
• I can’t think of anything else :/

What went wrong:

• My first idea. After briefly brainstorming, I started implementing an impractical idea for an inexperienced dev like me. I threw it away on Saturday afternoon after bugs that I couldn’t fix got in the way and I realized how impractical it was.
• Distractions. I didn’t have any caffeine and I was exhausted and unmotivated, and even while streaming, my brain was constantly busy trying to figure out some way to distract itself from the task at hand.

tl;dr: No caffeine, impractical idea, distractions.

You can play my game in neverland.

Guruguru everybody !

I’m happy to share with you this  video witch represent the 3 crazy days of Ludum Dare from our artist point of view :

You like it ?
Play and rate GuruGuru

You really like it ?
Follow Aki Aoki on her twitter @Akican and check more of her works on her website : akiaoki.com

Have a nice day !

– Team GURUGURU

Download for Windows

Expanded from the 48 hour version made for Ludum Dare 27.

Patch notes:

-Eyefolk now talk to you.
-150% more crystal voices.
-Protagonist visually signifies pain by iris turning to throbbing exclamation mark with sweat drops pouring out.
-Added 3 more levels (for a total of 10).
-Added Mines (instant kill, big explosion).
-Added Breakable Walls (they break instantly with mines or gradually with projectiles).
-Level select by going to the golden altar and pressing 1-10.
-Changed grassfire spread to perfect (before it was slightly randomized).
-Friendly mode starts you out with 11 seconds and gives 1 extra second per crystal.
-Rebalanced/tweaked existing levels.
-Multishot turrets don’t slow the game down as much.
-WASD support if you’re into that sick shit.
-Fullscreen!!! (switch to windowed with F4)
-You can save/load with F5/F6.

Any feedback/bug reports/etc appreciated.

Shameless Project Link!

With a larger team than our first LD Jam, we decided to get a bit ambitious. Maybe a bit overambitious, if our frantic final hours of development are any indication. We used LWJGL and Slick-Util, and the engine and assets were all built during the 72 hours. However, due to our lead programmer undergoing Oral Surgery the day before the contest started, the assistant programmer losing his laptop charger and having a working weekend, and a heated controversy about mops as game cursors, we lost a lot of development time.

Battle of the Century

Out initial concept was actually very different than the finished product. We started talking about a Medieval Fantasy Village, where you played as a meddlesome local spirit, and had a 10-second window to freeze, rewind, and fast-forward in time, rearranging items in the town to make people fall in love, or catch on fire, or whatever your horrible heart desired. Though it would have been a fun sandbox, we figured the gameplay was lacking, so we instituted a crisis you had to avert in order to win. Then, the setting was revised to a Space Lab, both because Our First LD Project was fantasy-themed, and so we had more stuff to work with.

It’s far easier for things to explode and go horribly awry in Space than it is in Ye Olde Timey Village.

We struggled for a while on what kind of puzzles to introduce into the game. At first, we were going to go with just Adventure Game Style puzzles, which involved making the crew members do certain things. Puzzles like “the door is broken and needs to be repaired by the Engineer. The Engineer is busy being macked-on by the Lieutenant. You had to teleport the Captain there to shout at them both to get back to work, in order to progress.” We had no idea how to make that happen in 72 hours, much less convey it to players in a way that made sense… so we dropped that angle, and instead went for simple item-placement puzzles. We eventually added in another layer of Pipe Dream style puzzles, with the wall circuits that opened doors and allowed you to progress.

Speaking of the Circuit Puzzles, I have mixed feelings about the puzzle design on this project. I wanted to make them challenging, but I’m a little worried that the difficulty curve ended up as more of a difficulty cliff.  The first room made a great introduction; you could see what was happening, and with a bit of experimentation figure out the bit with the fuse, without any kind of tutorial. Teaching the game through gameplay, without tutorials, has always been one of my favorite parts of quality game design, which the Youtube series Sequelitis touches on in a bit more detail (great videos for prospective Game Designers, BTW). On the other hand, the second room was probably one of the hardest in the entire game… at the very least, one of the most complicated ones. I was hoping to introduce mechanics like the room hazards, circuit fuses, and having multiple solutions per room a little more gradually than that… but time constraints sorta tied our hands on that one.

In order to win, you had to revisit and resolve the 1st puzzle 4 times.

As far as graphics, music, and general presentation are concerned, I’m really happy with how the game turned out. The time dilation and time reversal effects are some of my favorites (especially since the particle explosions remember where they happened, and can accurately un-explode as time rewinds). The run cycle on the main character came out pretty well too; since one of the major effects used in the game was slowing down and reversing time, I wanted to make sure there were a lot of frames, so he’d keep moving even when significantly slowed down. Since he was mostly brown, I was able to just animate 1 leg, clone it, and reposition it. It actually came out looking pretty nice, if I may say so myself.

We were hoping to do a semi-animated intro as well, which did a better job of setting the stage; watching the Time Rift explode in a shower of glass shards from the Reactor Core, and then freeze, with the glass particles suspended in mid-air. We ran out of time for that, though… barely managed to even implement animated explosions. You can see the explosions we managed in one of the above screenshots, but my original concept actually looked something more like this:

The explosions are made of a cloud of particles which are generated over time, and each of which “age” through their animation separately. Each particle is colored so that the darker edges share colors with the inner part of the next frame in their animation; that way, when the newer particles overlap the old ones, they’ll look like a continuous sprite. The idea was to generate a large, closely-packed cloud of bright particles offset slightly from an origin point, and give them a random vector. As the first particles animate and fade toward red, slightly fewer new particles are generated on top of them. Then, as the first particles become a large cloud of smoke, and the later batches have become a cool cloud, only one or two bright new particles generate, until all of them fade into smoke.

Even if we couldn’t pull that off, I like the sprites well enough. I might use a similar effect on a commercial project I’m working on right now. Suppose the graphics could also make a decent Flamethrower or Rocket Trail too… hmm…

Anyway, this will be our second LD, as well as my second real game. Definitely going to be trying this again, hopefully next time this rolls around. Thanks to those of you who tried out our game. I hope it’s as fun to play as it was to make!

For several reasons we have some framerate problems because browser, OS and computer. So if you want to help us play the test version normally (and rate the game). Do not forget : you have to tap Ctrl or Alt to move faster (not keep this key in press).

• If the game seems slow, pressing F and copy the message that appears (FPS and CPU usage) and send us by email ([email protected] /* */) with the info of your setup configuration (Browser / OS / CPU / Ram).

• If everything seems to work correctly, please send us an email (iterative [email protected] /* */) with your configuration (Browser / OS / CPU / RAM).

Thank you very much for your help, any comment will be appreciated too.

Play It here !(new testing version)

Tags: game, help