Isles of Solara is a little RTS / exploration style game with quite unique controls that I made for this LD48. Try it out here!

This is the timelapse of my entire time working on it. It actually adds up to about 30 hours which can be seen from the clock at the far right. The other 18 hours I was having a break, sleeping and eating.

The video is very widescreen as I was capturing two monitors, so you may need to zoom out to see the clock and my comments (No music, sorry).

It’s probably of most interest only to me, but at least everyone can see my setup in action and the time and effort involved.

So I’ve played over 50 games so far, time to make a post about the most awesome ones I played! Found loads of great entries this time around, so choosing isn’t easy, but here goes!

1. ORBITALIS

Gravity defying game, quite literally! Wonderful visuals with an equally impressive gravity based mechanic, this is an ideal Compo entry!

2. Ballkeeper

Easy to pick up and play, graphically minimalistic and employing a simple mechanic, this game is loads of fun! The only downside will be the use of theme is rather weak.

3. blomster

Beautiful and atmospheric, this game will leave you awestruck at how this was achieved in 48 hours. This is as good as a puzzle platformer can get in 48 hours!

4. YOGO PATH

Randomly generated paths, clever platformer mechanics – having to coordinate movement, pleasing visuals. What more do you need?

5. COR

I’m a sucker for atmospheric platformers, so here’s one that fits with the theme perfectly. It’s about life in general, and I’d rather not spoil anything else – just give it a try!

6. One Touch Of Music

A wonderful mechanic based on tunes, accompanied by soothing visuals – this is a must try!

I will continue posting about more great stuff I’ve found, but that’s it for now! Great to see so many good games, keep up the good work everyone!
Oh, and a shameless plug: do try out our game – Uno Terra!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 18th, 2013 at 12:04 pm and is filed under LD #28. 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.

Phew, another awesome Ludum Dare has ended, I slept for a bit, and means that I can finally catch my breath & write a few words about “what went right/wrong”. If you haven’t played my entry – What The Sock – yet, I strongly recommend doing that since I’ll be referring to certain parts of the game throughout the post (just click on the images, these are also a tutorial for the game):

What went right:

• Working in a semi-familiar environment: this one’s a no brainer, but having ~8 months of prior experience with Unity and several years of practice in Photoshop helped me immensely. It was the first time I’ve played around with Unity2D though, so while I encountered some issues along the way (especially ones related to the 2D physics) I also learned some stuff – which is always good.
• Unity editor: seriously, it makes a lot of tweaking around much easier.
• Simple idea for the game: even though it took me some time before I got to the prototyping/tweaking stage, the concept was simple enough that I was able to deliver most of the planned content. I had to cut one mechanic and a bunch of assets, but the final result is satisfying, IMO.
• The soundtrack took me 15 minutes to create and implement: I kid you not, Soundation Studio is really great for that. You can’t make A-class music with it, but it’s a good-enough tool for compos.
• Unity animation curves were much better than expected: I used them for my intro/outro and a couple of other things

What went wrong:

• Unity2D is not yet ready for primetime: while great folks at Unity have delivered a bunch of great 2D tools that make creating two-dimensional games waaaay easier than before, they’ve also failed to implement some of the more no-brainer features found in other software. For example, there’s no easy way of doing tiled graphics or infinitely stretching 2D backgrounds in Unity – the easiest way to do that is applying a Repeat Texture on a 3D Quad, but this comes with a bunch of other problems. Another thing is the aforementioned 2D physics implementation – it’s not easy to work with, and a couple of things (like OnTriggerExit2D, which would’ve saved my ass a couple of times) doesn’t work at all.
• Too much time lost on fixing assets: alright, this is entirely my fault. I was semi-obsessed with delivering good animation (especially the walk cycle, which looks kinda crappy) and spent a lot of time on fixing that – when instead I could’ve created some new assets like different background buildings, or, I don’t know, hydrants to stand behind.
• Too much time lost on coming up with a game idea: Ludum Dare started at 3AM (CET), I woke up at 7AM, but it was 2PM before I really started working on the game. I had a couple of ideas, but it took me a lot of time before I had an “Aha!” moment. I need to somehow make this process fasterin the upcoming LD’s
• Unity Mecanim state machines are not so okay: seriously, it would be easier to switch animations from code if it wasn’t bugging me about having to change animation types to “Legacy”.

TL;DR:

• simple jam game = (quite possibly) better jam game
• don’t learn your tools during the compo! (although I did that with Greyspace and it turned out okay)
• make sure to include music in your game!
• gif-based tutorials are the best thing

Stuff to do before the next LD:

• learning how to do better pixel art and animations
• learning to “how do I music”
• ???
• finding peoples for a jam (maybe?)

Tags: LD28, postmortem, spierek, what the sock

So I have made some changes to my game, make sure to play and rate my game! Also, don’t hesitate to report even the TINIEST bug to me, I like to have my game as best as I can.

CHANGE LOG:

• Better Graphics
• Code Optimized
• The Game gets harder as you get a better score (Score is based on time)
• Changed Selection Method
• Updated Screenshots

Please enjoy my game,
Have fun,
Love you all,
Luke

There is some negative feedback about the mouse sensitivity, and controllability and it was truly not without reason. I wanted to fix it, and I think it succeeded in some level, if not don’t hesitate to tell me. I also added an ingame menu where you can change difficulty level, so if unconfortable for you holding keys for about 3 mintutes down it can help you. There were a huge bug  just before the end, and it freezed you, it is also fixed.  If you tired and frustated by the controllability give it a second chance, if you not, you can try it now, here. And a screenshot of the menu:

I made a puzzle game where you have to kill every bots on the level with a single bullet while avoiding lasers and ending on the right side of the lasers to reach the goal. This is my third LD entry, all of them in Javascript, and I’m pretty happy with the result

The tools

• Code: WebStorm
• Art: Inkscape and in-game code
• Sound: Bfxr

What went right

The code

Well, I did like everyone said you should and worked only with tools I know well, hence vanilla Javascript and a really really great IDE. No big surprise on the code side,  Javascript engines are impressively fast now, I only wrote simple brute force algorithms and the CPU is still sleeping most of the time. I use a quite specific coding style during LD games, I avoid OOP and completely separate code from data, and the data is in a huge global variable, it’s not standard and probably not a good idea for long term maintenance, but it helps live editing the level in the console without having to write a level editor and makes it easy to group draw calls and reduce state change when painting on the canvas (the ‘right’ solution would be a component oriented system, with sorting and batching before rendering, no time for that :p). The other important thing was to avoid having many entry points for modifying the game state, specifically for events from keyboard or mouse, I found it much less bug prone to write only the key/mouse state in a part of the game state, then handling the key at the right moment when ticking the game state, it also makes it easy to record/replay an input sequence deterministically (something I used to make the gif above, play normally while recording the keys then replay the game with a fixed rendering time step and save all canvas frames as png, which is way too slow to do while playing).

The art

I suck at pixel art (and art in general), so I mocked up a few thinks in Inkscape, the visual primitives of Inkscape and the canvas are the same so it’s pretty easy to translate each stuff into code, and once it’s in code, you can animate it without manually drawing many images. For instance, the wiggly electric pulses are just a big mix of sin and cos mashed together, and most drawing parameters are in the game state, it makes it easy to iterate and refine. The art is not awesome, but it’s clean and this style doesn’t take long to make, that’s good for LDs.

The sound

I suck even more at sound, but I had enough time to make them, they help understand what is happening and don’t make you ears bleed (my previous entry was really painful to hear…), job done. The next big step in my LD progress will be real music, it looks really hard to learn though (and very time consuming during LDs).

What went wrong

The canvas

It’s getting  faster each month, I can do much more than my previous LD without killing the CPU and hardware acceleration is getting better, but a few things are still slow, and when they are slow they are really slow. I wanted to have a blur behind my text boxes, but the roundtrip using getImageData/putImageData kills the framerate, it’s not even the javascript iteration on all pixels which is the worse, as I said before the performance of Javascript is amazing now (in recent, non-mobile, browsers of course), it’s exactly the same problem as in OpenGL if you want to get your rendering back to the main memory, everything have to block and wait. Maybe next time I’ll try WebGL, but then you lose the sweet vector drawing functions and many people can’t play your game. There’s probably some nice tricks to play with CSS blur and stacked canvases, next LD 😉

The level design

I only managed to make 7 non-tutorial levels, and most of them took me about an hour to design, puzzles are hard to build and  since I was pretty tired I was afraid of leaving a big easy solution in the middle of a supposedly hard level.

The sleep

I didn’t notice (and was stupid) and drank way too much coffee late in the night when I wanted to sleep a bit. I spent 5 hours in my bed, mentally exhausted, trying to sleep without success. The next “morning” was really unpleasant, stressful and I think it killed a bit of my efficiency, I could have done a better job with less coffee. The really weird part is that I still couldn’t sleep after submission hour…

Final notes

It’s a real pleasure to design, code, and present something in 48 hours. Finishing stuff is satisfying when you have so many unfinished projects lying in your hard drive. I know I still have to progress a lot, but I see my entries getting better and more complex each time, it’s worth the effort. People were really nice in the comments and on IRC and it’s really cool to find a community with so many motivated people, so many games and ideas to try. See you next LD

Tags: compo, html5, LD28, postmortem

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=27375 (if you didn’t play it so far)

So I’m really happy to get ratings from people! But now I got that I need a post-compo version of the game for better explain the gameplay-idea. The appearing of scary shapes must be much more sudden because I’m sure that now player doesn’t feel enough. Isn’t it too simple to walk through? Your opinion should be really useful!

https://twitter.com/IvanNetk – you can also follow me on twitter to let you not pass  through post-compo!

Firstly, I’d like to say, the feedback from the community has been great. It’s made me really happy to see people enjoying a game I made (which didn’t happen in my last submission). Loads of great comments, which have really made my week better.  So I thank you all for that.

Secondly, if you haven’t played it (but want to), you can play it here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=14720

If you haven’t played it, don’t want to play it (but want to see the main mechanic), you can watch some gameplay here (notice how pro I am):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8c7DNfhfSc

What went well

• Weapon controls (main mechanic)
• ‘Juice’ when killing enemies (and levelling up)
• Amount of weapons
• Most comments say the game is addicting and fun

Based on the comments, the best thing about the game is the weapon controls and the satisfaction of killing the enemies. This is especially good for me because the worst thing about my last submission was the controls (and the difficulty). I think people like the weapon controls because they’re a more intuitive take on a stereotypical melee combat game’s weapon controls. There is more of a ‘feeling’ when handling the weapon in the game. Instead of clicking a button and letting the computer control the weapon, the player has to control weapon using the motion of their mouse. I thought that players would control the weapon in the same kind of way but I’ve noticed (on people’s Twitch streams) that they all have different styles, even though there are only 2 kinds of base attacks you can use.

The satisfaction of killing enemies is another thing people like.  I think is because of a mixture of 4 different things: The screen shake, the sound, the death graphic and the blood particles.  In the past, I would’ve assumed that XP points alone are satisfying enough for the player but it actually isn’t. I think the thing that makes killing the enemies satisfying is basically the feedback from the game. The screen shake makes you feel like your weapon has actually done something, the sound fits nicely with the death graphic (the hole in the enemy’s head) and the blood particles make the death seem more violent (realistic). I added these things after watching a talk about adding ‘juice’ to your game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg

What went wrong

• When detecting a collision, the game would sometimes skip enemies (for a reason I’ll detail below).
• There wasn’t enough juice in terms of just hitting an enemy and not killing him (sometimes audio is played but only past a certain damage rating).
• Game begins to get boring past a certain point (repetitiveness).

I’m pretty happy that most things people suggested could be improved are mainly bugs. The missing collision detection, for example, is a small bug that could be fixed by adding a little section of code.  Repetitiveness, on the other hand, could be solved by adding different variations of enemies and giving them weapons to dual you with. I could have added this but by the time I had updated all of the art, I was so brain dead that I wouldn’t have been able to make any big changes to the game (like duals).

For the lack of juice when hitting an enemy, that was actually something I intentionally caused (which was a bad thing). When I first added the sounds and the camera shake, every time you even poked an enemy, the sound would play and the camera would shake a lot. So I added a threshold value to lower the amount of times the sound would play (the damage inflicted must be higher than the threshold) and I made it so the camera would shake at the amount of damage divided by another number. I made both the numbers too high, which caused the lack of juice. This is a problem I could fix by just changing the value but it’s too late now.

Further development

I won’t be developing the game further as itself, I’m going to steal the combat mechanic and put it into a project of mine. I’ve been trying to think of a way to incorporate combat into it and I think this method would be perfect if I added a few more features like shielding and duelling, including expanding other features such as weapon attributes and how they affect their behaviour. I’m planning to do duelling so that it’ll follow the same idea as the combat in The Colosseum. No clicking, only using swings and stabs. A way I’ve thought of doing this is by implementing weapon velocity and momentum. If the enemy swings his sword at you and you block it, the collision between the two weapons causes a transfer of momentum and causes your weapon to fly off balance, allowing the enemy to stab you when you’re weapon is out of the way (counteracted by a quick block with a shield). Although, this is only an early idea and I’ll prototype a few times before I decide.

Anyway, again, thank you guys for the great feedback. I think this LD has been a success. This game is probably my most fun game even though it’s not technically advanced, just a bit addicting. I’ll be definitely be taking part in LD 29. Can’t wait until the scores come out. My aim is to get a better place than my last game, which shouldn’t be hard because my last game was pretty terrible.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 18th, 2013 at 1:34 pm and is filed under LD #28. 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.

A Boolean Tale – Post-Mortem

The christmas Dragon.

We have at last took some time to rest, this was more than needed. We also took some time to play and rate few of your games, some are awesome and we really hope they will receive decent rates because they deserve it. This week-end has been a very good experience, and we’ve learned a lot from it. We’ll start with what went wrong and finish with what went good, because we are mostly happy with the game and only have few negative points?

What went wrong :

- The time gestion : This was a very rough experience. First of all, we received the theme at 4am here. We wanted to sleep being aware of the theme, so we planned to stay awake until the theme announcment, discuss about what we would do and take a seven-eightish hours night. We really expected the theme to be Corruption or Break the System. We had ideas for it. Good ideas. “You only get one”. At the start, it was like the worst theme EVER. We absolutely had no idea of what to do. We stayed awake for like one hour and a half before falling asleep on our keyboards. When we woke up at 10am, we had to discuss for one or two hours again to find the main idea, this interactive story thing. I had to make all the story map and elements in early afternoon because I couldn’t have been there in the afternoon, so Tobi could start doing stuff. W1nst0n and I barely did nothing concerning the code until first evening, LD had started about 24 hours already. The sunday day was supposed to be the last one, we were all working or having class on the monday, so it was totally out of question working this day. And this is where the nightmare began : on Sunday night, I went to bed at 5:30am and waking up at 6:30am, all the work was far from done, I didn’t have any ending nor all the routes. One hour sleep is really really short. I barely had some time to dream. Thinking about what I’d have to do all the day and actually starting working around 7pm : only eight hours to do it. Was short but doable. I really started to feel effects of sleep deprivation : almost on tears when coming across each and every bug, drinking lot of coffee, starting to call my variables some random names like “lol”.  But eventually we have submitted the game in time, so I was really happy, despite my nervous breakdown state. Next time I’ll really have to manage my time better, hopefully it was only 72 hours, but I have to take it easy and be careful with my health.

Calling your variables “lol” is never a good thing to do.

- The code optimization : The whole project have like 1500 lines of code. There’s a lot of text in it since the game is an interactive-story, but there’s also a lot of useless code, and I didn’t comment anything, and I’m pretty sure there was a lot of similar functions everywhere. I really lost a lot of time copy/pasting or writing again and again the same lines. The game is far from being optimized, and at the end, while I was really stressed, I felt like raping my own code when I’ve coded the last endings for example. I really have to be careful about that and I should take some time to comment things out, it took me like half an hour on monday evening to understand what I did the day before. W1nst0n really helped, and it was a good thing to have some support over here, this way I could focused on bugs and such. Thanks to her!

What went good :

- The story-making process : If it was really hard to know which type of game we would do, once we kew if were going on an interactive story, things were really really easy. I just asked Mario to give me some ideas, he suggested the stealing-cake thing and to include some poop as well as other stuff. From there, everything esacalated like crazy. In two hours or so, I had all endings and routes and choices. Everything was done and the story map was fully operationnal. I really really really enjoyed making this story, It feels a little childish but I really find it fresh and funny.

The whole story on a paper sheet. Watch out for spoilers.

- The gameplay : It is the first time I do a gamejam with some team members. If you take a look at Sharkinacho, my last Mini-LD entry, I did everything by myself and it was really hard to get everything done in 48 hours, from graphics to music. I used to do aim for hard-to-code gameplays , with several things not going as planned and such. Here, the theme was really helpful in order to find the gameplay. One choice. This choice-making gameplay is both simple and efficient. It was really easy to code, once we did one choice and one cinematic, it was really just copy/paste of coordinates and typing down choices and text. This way, it was really easy to take some time improving the way it looks.

- The graphics : We’ve found Tobi after asking a knowledge of mine. He’s German while the rest of us are French. At the beginning, we had some troubles understanding each other, but quickly, things got easier. When we’ve found this three colors per scene and only half an hour maximum to do each of them, things were way more easy and I really liked Tobi’s style. It was a great experience, and it would be a real pleasure to work with him again.

- The music : That was a real challenge. Monk’ did the two musics of the game in two hours. Indeed, he had a lot of work and still, we are quite happy with it, as always, he made good stuff, and I really hope he’ll have more time on the next jam, because it’s always a pleasure working with him, he is awesome.

A Boolean Tale

tl:dr : We love you,

Pulled Frop.

So, my little #CROSSBORE game (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=29702) was well received – I can’t express how grateful I am for your nice comments!

I won’t hide it – game is insanely hard. Really. Nobody (except me, but well, I created it – so…) beated it.

That’s why I made a specific, off-compo EASY VERSION (dubbed CROSSBOREEASY), available on http://www.palmentieri.it/somepx/crosseasy/ !

Please enjoy! 😀

SO i heard you like gifs?

You Only Get One Limb

And the timelapse:

Walkthrough LD48: “Stingtime for Hitler” – YouTube.

Jam Entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=784

This jam entry was probably the most complete project we made so far. We had a lot of fun coding this short puzzler over the weekend. If anyone is having trouble solving the levels – we have uploaded a quick walkthrough above. Note that there are multiple solutions to some of the levels.

Tags: compo, final, game, jam, LD28, ld48, Ludum Dare, video, walkthrough

Play the game here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=5496

I notice it’s getting harder to do post mortems, since things have stopped to go terribly wrong. I’m still pushing what I can do in 48 hours (as I think this game shows), but I have gotten a lot better at shrinking the game down when I notice it can’t be done within the time before it is too late. Here are some things from the original concept that didn’t end up making it.

*A world map and more than one village
The original plan was to have a worldmap with 5 different villages and 5 caves. You wern’t supposed to start with all 3 allies either

*Experience points and leveling (The light orbs ^ have taken its place, easier to implement and balance out)

*Magic points
You might have noticed that older screenshots had an MP stat where the Maximum HP stat is displayed now. To make up for the lack of MP points in the game, I gave characters with stronger spells lower HP instead. This has the same effect, characters with powerful spells should be used with a lot more caution.

*Smarter enemies
Enemies attack completely randomly. They both attack their own and heal their enemies. Because of this, I made the actual attacks more powerful, and made a lot of battles where the attack matches the elemental allignment of enemy parties, so that they always heal each other instead of hurt each other. It actually made it possible to add more variaty.

*16 types of enemies instead of 4

*equipment to change a character’s elemental alignment
This was supposed to be part of the storyline. The main quest was to collect three “dark rings” so that party members could absorb your attacks and you could function as a healer to your party, which would have been essential for the bossfight. Instead, the boss himself now turns your party members into dark aligned.

*You were supposed to be able to switch between party members between battles. You would have started with just one character and the other classes would have joined later. Some optional. This would have allowed me to ease the player into the mechanics more, with only light aligned heroes in the beginning of the game, and the fire and frostlings, which cause some confusion now, much later.

Instead, you get only four party members out of the 11 classes, all chosen at the beginning of the game, which makes choosing the right party a bit too important.

But none of that really takes away from the fact that I got A LOT done in 48 hours, and that the game is still very playable. A lot more so than the RPG I made for ludum dare 25. I’m still improving thankfully. In the post mortem of that game (critter criminal) I said the following:

Yes, I did end up choosing a concept that was way too ambitious. But in the end I did have fun trying to do the undoable. I’m proud of what I did manage to do, and I will probably try to do something insane like this again next time.
Some things you just never learn.

I know myself well.

I think there is only one thing I do regret:

What went wrong
What I regret most is that the size of the concept made it impossible for me to add a proper storyline, since that was such a strong point of my game last time. The storyline was supposed to be about accepting that everyone has a dark side, even yourself, and that it is better to aknowledge it than to pretend it isn’t there, since when you aknowledge it, you are able to control it. Pieces of that storyline are in the game, even bits in the gameplay, but not enough for any emotional impact. I guess that’s my one true “what went wrong”

Hi! I finally had some time to made some pretty video from screenshots of me creating the One Rogue. Because I didn’t have time to show anything during the compo here is “multi-screenshot” from the game:

One Rogue

It’s almost traditional roguelike rpg.. almost.. You wouldn’t find any items in the level! But what’s the point then? You have to kill at least N enemies to open the gate, where N is equal “how many times you went through the gate” + 1. Then you will receive three random items but you can pick only one. You enter the gate.. And again!

I’m planning to made post-compo version with more balanced game-play, better controls and few more locations and items during the upcoming weekend. I will also try to make version for Android..

http://youtu.be/nFHCmo0Habk

Enjoy the time-lapse!

Tags: screenshot, timelapse

Looks familiar?

I’ve made a game in 72 hours! Isn’t that awesome?

Oh boy! Now I feel SO motivated to make another game!

My game is called Round toe, and it’s basically tic-tac-toe, but you only get circles, forcing you to memorize where you placed stuff (you can play it here).

This was my third LD, and the first where I actually finished something.

Again, my main problem was getting confident  on an idea. I switched ideas and started from scratch two or three times during this 72h period.

I’ve had a lot of trouble trying to have an idea of a game that would fit the theme, be fun to play, fit the theme and at the same time wouldn’t require many art skills.

When I had an idea I was confident about, I hadn’t much problem implementing it.

Based on my experiences in this LD, I’ve made a list of things to keep in mind on future LDs and other game jams:

• Think about the themes in the final round when it pops up, so you can have some idea of what you’re going to do.
• Participate on the warmup weekend, even if you’re writing everything from scratch. Helps to keep your inner programmer happy.
• Dedicate more time to music. Music really helps in the mood, which really helps in the overall rating.
• Working on teams can be more productive. Even if it isn’t, it’s way more fun, for sure.
• Next time, use TweenJS (or some other tween library).  Tween movements looks cool, but they take a lot of time to implement, specially if you’re doing some DRY code.
• Next time, use PixiJS or Three.js. Even if you’re making a simple 2D game, they allow you to use shaders and materials, which make the game look way more interesting.
• Procedural level generation rules!
• Don’t be afraid of making a crappy game. Making a crappy on is way better than making no one.
• Rate other games soon as possible!
• Git can be kinda time expensive to setup, but it will save your life sometimes.
• Functional coding rules!
• Once you have an idea that sounds at least decent, stick to it! Even if it’s bad, it can almost look good if you still have time to polish it.
• Trig. Love it! Use it! Everywhere!
• Figure out what’s wrong with the way you’re getting mouse coordinates and why it doesn’t work on Firefox.
• Be more social. Post about progress in your game. Comment on people’s posts about their game’s progress.
• Have more fun!

I think that’s all! See ya in the next LD (or Mini LD, or whatever).

Tags: html5, javascript, motivation, postmortem

One Shot – LD28 By: Joel Van Eenwyk and Ryan Monday

Play Game: WINDOWS

This is a straightforward game where you only have one missile to destroy all the asteroids in the arena. The catch is the missile has a shell life based off bounces, so you have to aim your shot carefully. If you complete the mission then you will move on to the next round. See how many rounds you can complete!

The controls are:

ENTER- Start the Game

W,A,D- Move the player

R – Reset the game

SPACE- Shoot your one missile

What went well:

Graphics – we achieved the look, more ambience would have been nice

Sound – We were fairly happy with the simple results considering we had no sound guy

Controls – We were able to get the controls as we wanted

What didn’t go well:

Time- We basically 9am-5pm developed this so we lost a lot of time during the jam and unexpected work obligations affected our Monday time.

Gameplay- The gameplay ended up being a lot harder than expected and we didn’t have time to tweak.

Testing- We didn’t have a lot of time to test so bug state is unknown.

Well, I guess I should also recap my thoughts about the compo – Not everything turned out as expected. Still, I managed to pull off enough for a playable release.

What went well:

Enemy collisions. I still don’t know if it’s efficient to calculate the distance between each enemy on each frame, but… yeah it works flawlessy for about 20-30 at a time, before it starts to lag.

Sound effects. There’s a free VSTi plugin called “engine” – it produces nice sounds about all types of electric and gas-powered engines. I used it for the laser sound (with a lot of pitching) and for the explosion (with a lot of time-warping and cutting). I can’t say that it makes me a good sound designer, but I’m happy with what I made out of it

What I should have thought about a second time:

Graphics. I created all my assets (with the exception of the particles and guns) in Blender. I decided to use pre-rendered frames to make objects “rotate” in an isometric area. For the floating enemies, it were like 16 frames, the factory was only a single frame, the resource collecting tower had some light animation going on. However… I completely underestimated the fact of how tedious it can be to show an animated object (the player’s exosuit) from all these directions. It took me a lot of time to get it right, after all, the light needed to stay in the correct location, the render-size needed to be sufficient without cutting off the model or it’s shadows, etc. etc.

Content. I set my goals too high. I wanted to have a huge map, maybe even procedural generation, and ended up with… the regular 550×400 px area. I even got a second enemy rendered, but I never got to add it to the game…

GUI. Well, it’s a sci-fi themed game, so one would expect a shiny GUI. But as with most of the other things… I lacked the time, and ended up simply printing the stats down as plain text.

Intro. I wonder how many deductions I’ll get concerning the theme interpretation. I wanted to create a nice cinematic intro, showing the stripmined earth, and the humans looking for resources elsewhere – only the leader of the alien race faces them “You only get ONE planet to destroy”. In the end… I put it as a simple text behind the “About” button.

Music. Initially, I planned to compose a nice track for the game. I ended up with a few sound effects, but … no music at all. Not enough time.

All in all, I’m quite content how it turned out. I’ve also added a post-compo version, since people wanted to use the mouse for shooting (and while I was at it, I also added the shield to the RMB).

That’s about it. Now back to some more LD gaming =)

Now you can play Byte’s Socks in your web browser. This morning William created an applet of our games, I just put it in a web page and posted to our website. Check it out if you haven’t already.

the timelase of me making my game is up on my youtube here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK2tg3_3gXg

This was my first Ludum Dare, and it was absolutely amazing. I had tons of fun, and have enjoyed playing others’ games. My game is written using WebGL shaders and HTML5, and if you’re interested in the technical aspect behind the game, be sure to check out my technical blog post over here:

http://www.zolmeister.com/2013/12/nent.html

Any feedback is greatly appreciated, and thank you guys for being an awesome community.