Hello all fellow devs and happy holidays!

I’m writting my first post-mortem, let’s hope I’ll not get only this one ahead

This is my third submission in Ludum Dare, and the game is somewhat connected with my first LD26 game Atrakt. Both using sliding puzzle mechanics and both telling story about the hostile alien race Litoxydes. (see image below)

Litoxyde. (example of richening a solid color vector animation with a few filters)

What went right:

Game Concept: As always I didn’t struggled with a game concept much and in one hour had the basics laid on paper, even the title (that i’m not quite proud of) was figured out.

Theme: I had some doubts about the theme implementation, moreover I tried to incorporate two themes at the same time. There was a Flash Game License competition in parallel to Ludum Dare with theme “Freezing”. So I decided to go Sci-Fi and use the cold space and the ultimate urgency needed in a spacecraft disaster to implement both themes. In my oppinion I used the theme well, as the player have only one chance to survive each stage, but it was not so obvious to others.

(Next time I’ll name my submission by taking the theme string + some potatoe appending and voila : “You only get one … “, just kidding : )

Engine: I assembled a tiled display engine pretty fast and created almost all the tiles.  At the end of the first day I had a moving character and an animated enemy.

Enemy AI: Not that it went so right, but at least without much efforts, there was alot of randomness in the early builts thought.

Presentation: Even in the current advanced post-compo version I’m still holding the ALERT screen and the spaceship that I drew for less that a minute with my mouse : D In the post-compo timeframe I decided to backup my storytelling with some 3d renders exported with swift3d but at the end left that screen intact. The spaceship renders became fairly good, with a ship composed of just one duplicated and stretched in different ways object – I leaved that for the level complete screen, but that’s not something that went right haha:) Anyway here is a full rotation gif for you:

360 rotation of the infiltrated spaceship

What went the other direction:

Prototype: Being proficient in design/graphics aspect is a double edged sword. And it was difficult for me to postpone the art stuff for after the creation of the fully working prototype. So, instead of using some placeholder squares and figuring out the more important things of the gameplay in time, I spent too much efforts on the graphics the first day, which led to derailed rush at the end and not a complete game after all.

Level Design: started to think of levels too late and didn’t managed to create something interesting in time. My submission game is reeking of “this is just a demo with placeholder levels” notes.

Intuitiveness: The game is well handled by fans of Sokoban, but I observed that players which ware not familiar with Sokoban mechanics ware struggling to understand the objective. And obviously I failed to explain the game goal well enought. Will have to think of a better way for the tutorial.

Sound: Althought prepared a sound library prior to beginning I ran out of time even for the jam deadline to add sounds. I ended up using previously created sounds (from the Atrakt game) that I added just in the latest built (v0.6)  But as I hear it now the sound became harsh in general. PS also in the latest built I added an awesome sci-fi-electro track called Shapeshifter by Clearside (CREDITS), to backup the atmosphere of the game.

Score System: Besides being still incomplete with 8 levels from 12 previsional, the game is lacking a proper level complete screen and a leaderboard. The player is not aware of how well he is doing.

Community: This post-mortem is my first community impact in this edition of Ludum Dare. I definitely need to expand in this section and will have to define some time to spend for that next compo. I’ll try either joining forces with others or trying a simpler game in the upcoming competition.

And what is hurting your eyes now?

Icon including one minute art

A Burning Fridges game link ofcourse : ) I hope you enjoy my game : ) See you in April : )

Tags: alien, litoxyde, puzzle, sci-fi, sliding, sokoban

PirateFrasers game (has no name yet) has been updated, and now runs on pc, mac and lunix (i hope) be sure to cheak out the timelapse of me making the still unfinished game enjoy your voting and have  a nice day http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK2tg3_3gXg&feature=c4-overview&list=UU9uSa2-E_duHQxBi2HtGFUA

Here we go. Just a little post to explain what happened to me since I made my entry for the 28th Ludum Dare.

I’ve sent some e-mails to Game Studios, saying them I’m looking for an internship of six months, and joining this little game as my Curriculum Vitae. I already have one answer, from a studio who really enjoyed playing the game, even if they don’t need anyone yet.

I also sent TGQoI to a french website who make a list of original CVs, and the webmaster sent me an email back, telling me that he’ll make a post about it on the front page !

I want to thank again all the participants of Ludum Dare 28th who took the time to comment my game !

Thank you all, and have a Merry Xmas and a Happy New year ! :p

Here’s the link to play the game (and rate it :p) => http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=29137

So a friend told me that I was too much of an engineer and too little of a game designer; that I made things that I found fun to make and/or that I would enjoy rather than what was marketable or common people would find fun. After much thought about this, I feel like; focusing only on what is currently in ‘vogue’ or appears marketable is a bit of a common flaw. As an Indie, I can see that say, Pokemon is popular and make something similar, but I can’t expect that to make it; I just don’t have the budget to do it, well enough to compete with the big guys. The two principles of making a game that I’d actually like to market that I’ve used before and still wish to use are the following:

1. Something that has never been done before. Trying to come up with a completely new genre would be (a) hard and (b) probably too confusing to the player. What I mean by this is finding an established genre and cranking out a new specific mechanic that hasn’t been seen before at all; or hasn’t been managed well before. Or taking an established genre and simply spinning it in a radically different artstyle/story or towards a different group than before. See ‘Portal’, ‘Fez’, ‘Braid’, ‘Shift’ etc.
2. Something that hasn’t been done well in a long enough time that the big companies don’t do it anymore; but there’s still a nostalgia crowd for. Especially if you also apply (1) or use features that wouldn’t have been possible at the time of the original. ‘Super Meat Boy’ is a great example of this.

I think within the Ludum Dare; I started on this (2) and was also going to apply (1), though I never got the chance to, due to time-limits. Just getting the basic mechanics of a Lemmings-Like was a bit of a stretch for 48-hours so the more unique ideas I had never got applied. On top of this, I didn’t properly add an in-game tutorial which gives the feeling that only people that have played a game in the Lemmings series can manage to play this at all. Because, within the 48-hours, I didn’t really have  time to ask anyone else to playtest it; I didn’t really realize how foreign a concept it was to people, because of that. I never really had had a full working prototype before playtesters before, because of this hard focus on getting everything ironed out before showing people. I think in the future I need to show people earlier; and/or focus on one mechanic and shoot off a playable alpha before doing anything else at all. I need a website and/or followers to manage to do that kind of thing though. In general though, I need to find a balance between assuming  the player knows nothing about the mechanics at all and providing sufficient in-game tutorials and not having someone who knows the game and/or has played games of similar genre before feel like they are being patronized. Also, on the other end, after the player is aware of all the mechanics, there has to be enough sufficiently difficult levels to keep the game interesting. Though I know how to make hard puzzles; this steady difficulty ramping and introduction of elements is something that I agree I don’t have practice with.

Thinking about the other some of model he implied with the statement; I end up seeing both the lucky successes of games like Angry Birds, which copied the semi-popular Crush the Castle with surprisingly good results; and the hundreds of cookie-cutter copies of things that don’t do so well. I feel like this path; puts more of a paramount on quality than the other; unless there is something truly unique about a game, be it a simple as its theme (Psychedelic/Drug influenced Pot Farm got some press against more mainstream Farmville) or as complex as a new mechanic; just something that sets your game apart. That said; this advice does tell me that choosing a popular genre or something that once was popular (again nostalgia points) is a more solid model to mutate from than something that saw very limited popularity.

All of that said; for myself, I hope that everything that I design that’s major to sell either has ‘new mechanic’ or ‘new artstyle’ going for it and either is a currently popular or formerly popular genre AND something that I personally enjoy as unless I am part of a much larger team; I feel like my own perspective on a game is very important and I don’t have the insight on games that I don’t enjoy from the player’s perspective that I do on ones that I know from both sides and cold analysis of ‘player should like this’ so we will do this is why traditional communications corporations that buy game companies don’t tend to do very well with them.

I also feel like a post-compo version of my LD entry from this round could expand to fit those criteria; grow from something that has strong ‘nostalgia’ roots; have unique mechanics; teach new players how to play it from scratch and perhaps even pull in current trends like ‘micropurchases’ (though I personally hate these) and cute mascots that appeal to women closer to my mother’s age than my own.

Greetings Daredevils!

I’ve updated my Jam entry – youGOO!

Its a webcam game to test your fist reflexes.

Now with:

– Better fist detection

– Improved edge collision (number used to go off-screen)

– High Score (displays your maximum score for current session)

– Sound FX!

– Faster gameplay

Check it out at

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=24501

Please do leave suggestions/ideas/death threats in the comments.

Enjoy!

PS:

Has anybody had success with looping music in HTML5 or JS? Please let me know…

Really want to put in a looping theme, but it stalls after the first playback…

Tags: html5, jam, javascript, ld48, Ludum Dare, progress, video, webcam

It feels like a lot of what I’ve learned from Ludum Dare; I learned from the people after the experience, rather than during the actual event.  In this part I share some of those gems.

1. Consider the player at all parts of the design process. If a piece of art is barely visible, don’t waste time on it; if the player isn’t going to understand how to do something, make sure it is explained etc. Do this before implementing more features, because it is pointless if they can’t follow you.
2. Get an alpha out to test as soon as possible. People can’t tell you how it works on their device or about glitches on all devices unless it is out there; they also can’t tell you how much they like/hate a particular feature.
3. Just because the frame-rate is excellent on your device doesn’t mean it will be for everyone it is deployed to. Consider quality settings, etc. in order to address this problem.
4. Newgrounds -does- accept Unity games; they just have to be embedded in HTML5.
5. If intending to release online-only HTML5 and Three.JS is a better way to go than Unity. If planning for phones and console development though; Unity’s ability to be multiplatform easily is desirable. For this reason I’ve decided to learn HTML5 and may attempt a 3D Java Online-only application for next LD. At very least I am going to offer a version of my art portfolio coded in this language.
6. Press is important for any project to succeed; try to make anything you want to be your focus an interesting story for the press as well as a good game. Also try to communicate with them if you are trying to run a Steam Greenlight, or crowdfunding campaign or trying to self-publish.
7. There is no feeling quite like watching someone livestream your game. 😀
8. Release as many places as you can; something negatively reviewed and garnering no attention one place can be loved in another.
9. Even if a game was perfect for you some people will hate it for relatively stupid reasons. Do not try to cater to everyone.
10. Both what you want to make and what others want to play is important. Any game project you put your efforts into should be both.

Overall; I’ve never really had the feeling of belonging to a group quite as much as I have with this online community. It helps my feelings for making a post-compo version of this game and in general, creating and promoting my own projects. There’s so much that this relatively short experience has brought to the table with me that my formal training in college did not.

INTRODUCTION

This was my first Ludum Dare. I have dabbled in making games off and on for a while, and I wanted to give this a shot. It was fun, but very demanding at the same time.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

I knew my tool set. That could have been a negative too as I kept pushing myself further and felt like I was giving in to feature creep.

I got the right balance of nutrition/sleep/caffeine and alcohol. That always helps in a create endeavor and at crunch time!

I came up with an idea pretty quickly, and it was an idea that would let me really carry the theme throughout the game. I had a protagonist who was the last one of his species, a pacifist who didn’t kill or want to kill. I even had the side challenge in there!

WHAT WENT WRONG

I think I spent most of my time on facets of the game that did not matter; Instead of completing something that had some true game mechanics. I think I was too focused on story.

I should have shown it off more. Solicited for feedback via the Ludum Dare site, Twitter and IRC. In my opinion the comradere, and sharing of ones passion is what really makes these competitions fun. It also helps you gauge your progress, and gives you that last bit of motivation when you need to finish.

CONCLUSION

In the end I was not entirely happy with what I came up with. However I did get a sense of satisfaction from submitting, and sharing my game with others. The feedback I have received thus far has been incredible!

One thing that I struggled with though was version control on images. As I worked on art assests, I versioned them by tacking the date on to the old file. If anyone has any advice for versioning of images, and/or binary assests in general would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks. When you get a chance, play my game: The Last One. Your comments would be greatly appreciated!

Hey all. I’ve rated a lot of games up to this point (though “a lot” may mean different things to different people around here, lol), and I wanted to quickly share some of my picks, all of which I feel deserve a play and have at least some good gameplay value to them:

Best Overall
Titan Souls

Runner-Up Overall
Jump Chip

Honorable Mention for Innovation
YOGO RocketFist

Honorable Mention for Mood
GAEA

Honorable Mention for Humor
Golden Bomb

Special Mention for being Retro-Styled Goodness
CROSSBORE

Special Mention for Interesting Gameplay Mechanic
One Ninja

Special Mention for Favorite Stencyl-Made Game
The Last Flight

There you go! As for the final one, I’m a Stencyl user myself, so I wanted to give a shout-out to my favorite Stencyl game (not made by myself, of course).

And if you haven’t played mine yet, give Batteries Not Included a go while you are at it too! Thanks!

Finally posted my postmortem for my entry. http://blazinggames.blogspot.com/2013/12/schrodingers-kitten-postmortem.html For those who just want a quick summary:

What Went Right: One Game a Month Kittens.

Mixed Blessings: Recording Sounds.

What Went Wrong: Time Management.

In my compo-entry, “Toy Soldiers”, though everything that would be expected of a Lemming-like worked; it was too much like the original Lemmings and too inaccessible to players that aren’t familiar with the Lemmings series. This was because of a combination of poor time-management and being overly ambitious for the time-limit. I still feel that what I did get done was quite a bit of technical output for the limits, but its still, even to me, a shitty game, though I didn’t realize this until reviews I got after the release. This is where we come to the possibility of a post-compo version. I still haven’t decided on if I am going to do this, but if and when I am; the following are the primary features and changes.

1. Switch physics from Unity default physics (using Box Colliders and Rigidbodies) to pixel crunching (using a new scratch system based off of pure numbers). This is to tighten up the physics and make it more efficient, if more obviously cubic/voxel. It should repair many of the glitches and prevent lag.
2. Ditch the Christmas-Themed “Toy Soldiers” in name and in main character(s) art. I only used the Christmas theme because the release was so close to Christmas and toy soldiers and nutcrackers to base the art on were everywhere. New game will use less seasonal robotic troops; perhaps keeping to cutesy kids toys or perhaps switching to a science-fiction theme. Toy soldier art MAY be updated for a special Christmas edition, but series will not remain completely that style.
3. Action Log and Time Travel-All actions taken by each soldier will be recorded by the soldier, allowing for the level to be backed up (may not be enabled on all levels) and for some of the soldiers to use time travel to their advantage. If a unit travels back in time, everything in the scene moves in reverse for one minute (this was originally intended to be used in the compo version, but wasn’t even started because of time); except the unit, which remains where it is. This forces all units to need reversed versions of their commands and the ability of the scene to straight up reset itself.
4. Strict framecount enforcement. Because timelimits in the game are very exact, demanding and the speed of a game as whole can lag (or glitch) if the frameRate is too low/high. The new version will use multiple automatic quality reductions to fix the frame rate if it is too low and the Unity default ‘targetFrameRate’ to slow the frameRate if it is too high.
5. Built-in level-editing application. Levels are already little more than .png images as it is. In new version they will be completely so and the player will have access to a basic Paint-like image editor with placeable objects for special tiles (entrance, exit, traps, etc.) in order to paint their custom levels. They will also be able to specify which kind of level it is and which skills are available.
6. Multiple play modes; set (like in compo-version), puzzle focus (allows time to be reversed so really exact solutions are possible), two VS modes (a group of robots VS another, either AI or networked [a] get yours to the goal first and [b] kill all opponents), perhaps more…
7. Dynamic fluids; water and lava that pour correctly (similar style to Minecraft (in original Lemmings they were fixed blocks that couldn’t move)).
8. More skills available.
9. More levels; including easier levels and relative tutorial levels that introduce the new skills one at a time.
10. Touchscreen support (new target platforms iPad, Windows Tablet and phones).

Minor fixes:

1. Width of the grappling hook will be fixed.
2. Walking speed will be slowed.
3. Camera will be able to move while paused.

This Ludum was chiefly a social experiment:

Could I bully some of my friends to come here to our house and have them make a game with me?

Given that some would show up, most of them not programmers and those that are… they code in different languages and are hard to coax into new platforms.
I had decided, though I put if forward as something that could be discussed, that we’d use Unity’s new 2D mode.

The art-style was sort of set on the Friday. In an attempt at harvesting everyone’s talent the most, we decided that all content be made IRL and no CGI trickery allowed. I also expected this would make our game stand out, which is extremely important when there are so many entries.

So we went to sleep and woke up to the worst theme we could have imagined.
We had a meeting, but I can’t say we ever got to a clear “You only get one”, so instead we had many weaker “one friend”, “one direction” (camera was not supposed to allow backtracking as in old Mario games), “one inventory”.

We never got around to formulating any strong connection with the theme, that’s the first thing that went wrong.

The IRL department sat out taking photos of things and tediously magic wanding and lassoing away their backgrounds:

The moss sprite

In parallel I was coding behaviors with colored blocks feeling very professional:

Development scene

I had a novice Unity assistant working on animating the main character (his first experience of Unity) which saved me several hours.

How did it all work out?

A design for a friend.

What went wrong

• Character controller is a bit funky, we’ll try to fix that soon.
• Time ran out for me, so all animations and effects were not included
• There’s a bug: If some items are picked up and dropped they become very very small
• There’s another bug making the hearts not affected by gravity (one could also miss the meat-heart and right now there’s only one crane-flight)

What went right

• The graphics! The atmosphere!
• The characters way of movement
• Some of the puzzles were quite awesome

But most of all, I proved to my friends that we’re a game making team. I got several of them hooked, and some that missed this time I’m expecting will join next.

Finally, we set out to make a game with no violence and no sexism in it. We stayed pretty much true to the no violence, though one ending can be interpreted as such, the game itself is very non-violent. As for sexism, there should be absolutely none in this game.

Try our game, many find it scary. We’re just proud that we did it: The Turmeric Jam Jar’s No-Name Game

Tags: #NoSexism, #NoViolence, post-mortem, turmeric

My entry: The most beautiful day of her life

Goals before the jam

As usual with a game jam, the main goal is to release a complete (playable) game in the time allowed.
For this peculiar Ludum Dare (#28) I was hoping to enter/release my game in time for the compo (48h) for the first time. At worst, I was OK to enter the jam (72h) the main goal being to release.
I was also aiming at having fun, as much as possible.
I was also considering entering @McFunkypants usual side challenge. This time #NoKill.
There shouldn’t be death in my game.

A bride has to slap and purse her way out of bimbos to get to the church

Theme revealed

And as usual (especialy for the LD) on the theme reveal, it’s the time to freak out, be at first angry with the votes results, cursing all the people and their voting ways and considering not being a part of this LD/not making a game.
“You only get one”.
As I twitted at some point, at least it wasn’t “Justin Bieber <3” which happened to be one of the possible themes and just shows, in my opinion, how broken the theming choice system is.
Then after a few reflection and discussion with my lady friend Nyx, I was able to have a global idea of the game I was going for.
A kind of beat them all around the theme “you only have one chance to save your wedding” where the player would control a woman that needs to slap her way out of bimbos to get to the man of her dreams.
From this theme, very cartoony and over-the-top stereotypical I was aiming to make a fun game that wouldn’t take itself seriously.

Jumping over cars, a healthy practice before getting married, isn’t it ?

Read the rest of the post-mortem

You can play the entry here

Tags: bride, LD28, postmortem, wedding

It sucks but I had fun and I didn’t break my streak.

This first Ludum Dare was for me was a great experiment, and I’m proud of the final result although it is basic.

What went right

– Not to try to do a game too complicate, for the begin I think it’s better 😀

– The graphics, first time I try the pixel art and I find the result is not bad, without spending lot of time.

– Have a precise Idea of what the game must look like since the begin.

– The use of javascript, it’s the language I know the more, so I don’t have problems when I code this game (except a bug for the Array.sort function in google chrome)

Graphics during development

What went wrong

– THE CHECKBOX OF THE FORM, when I edit my entry to correct a error, I’m not see than that change my compo-entry to a JAM-entry

– No spend more time to add sound, after some try of doing the duck sound with a microphone and audacity I throw up the idea…

– Not doing my homework before the start of the game, and some other error in my organization.

So if you want to play the game, it’s here, and sorry for the many errors in this text, I’m a young french 😀

Hi all,

I have updated my game ”You only get one chance to save your ass” using your comments:

1. Sounds added

2. Menu added

3. Three different difficulty levels

4. Heights are now more recognizable

(Play the game after submit)

Enjoy!

Read part one here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2013/12/20/road-to-zion-part-01/

I woke up early, about 6:30AM. In the shower my mind wandered. Other game ideas tempted me with throwing everything away and starting again. I reminded myself I wasn’t trying to make something good I was just trying to make something.

So I decided to go for it and got back to work. The issue I was having trying to get the flag looking how I wanted took about an hour. Now fully rested my mind could think through things more competently without getting confused.

I worked throughout the day without a plan, just adding things as I thought of them. The game had no point so I added some crowns to collect which did nothing but give an appealing chime sound. I added some events that occur as you wander through the game to add a bit of interest and the game was shaping up to be a kind of trippy dream sequence.

I knew the only thing that would make this worth playing would be if it had some music to create atmosphere so I knew I needed to get onto that asap. I’d never created a music track before so I looked up a free browser based music creator and found AudioSauna. It did the job but with some frustration due to the lack of an undo function. It is easy to accidentally delete whole sequences and then have to completely remake them.

I did the best that I could in the time and I was pretty happy with the result. One reason I’m excited about game development is it gives me the chance to make music to go with my visuals. I can’t wait to do more.

Check out the track I came up with on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/czepta-gold/road-to-zion-theme

As soon as the music went in there was life to the game. I think audio is probably the most important thing in a game for creating a breathing atmosphere and world. You can have the most basic graphics eg. Thomas Was Alone – but as soon as you add quality sound to them they immediately expand into a whole new dimension. I think by mastering sound it would be possible to save alot of work on the visuals for a project.

So I spent the rest of the day finishing up some details and working around some other things I had on during the weekend. I managed to complete the game on time with a few seconds to spare before learning about the one hour upload period. In total I spent around 20 hours on the game and can see in the future when my skills are more developed that it would be possible to make something a bit more substantial if I was to use more of the 48 hours.

All in all Ludum Dare was an amazing experience and really forced me to face reality. The energy on the website of thousands of developers constantly updating with their progress was something unlike I have been involved with before. Ludum Dare is truly something special and I cannot wait to get back into it in April and try to make an actual game next time.

Road To Zion turned out to be more of a brief atmospheric art piece than a game and had little to do with the theme although I had it in mind at the beginning.

Game Jams are amazing things and I’m glad Ludum Dare #28 was my initiation. I’m planning to participate in Global Game Jam at the end of the month and then the next Ludum Dare also.

You can check out Road To Zion here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=29051

I think the whole point of Ludum dare is to produce a game that is “fun” too play or interact with. Sadly to say i failed hard…..very hard. The fact that i had so much time annoyed me as well. So its time to break down what went wrong and why.

1. I didnt plan very well.

The idea was simple. Random waves of enemys that attack your base and get progressively harder. The “only get one” theme tying in with the fact that you only get one base.With multiple upgrades further along the way.

This is where it went wrong. Firstly i ignored the basic rule of programming. prototype to playable to finished. I skipped prototyping all together and tried to throw the game together in matters of minutes. Then working on the framework that was half broken as it was because i rushed and i didnt plan it.

2. I used a stupid system/framework

Basically i over used if and bool statements instead of enums and states. The fact that this happened meant the game was slow as every frame the script was checking for ifs and bools causing frame issues. I got stressed and just programmed the easy shortcut shit and tbh i deleted it all after ludum dare out of disgust.

What went right/well.

– Music was good

– Finally learnt how to do gui resolutions.

– Learnt from my mistakes so that i can make an amazing 3rd entry.

– Learnt how to use z sculpt.

-Graphics werent too shabby this time.

If anybody would like to test my crummy game then please do.

I noticed that many Unity users are now exporting a standalone version for Linux. This  is great news, because otherwise I coulndn’t try their games, as there is no Unity Web player for Linux

However I’m not being able to run most of these standalone executables, and I was wondering if other Linux LDers are having  similar issues. The most common symptom is that the game just fails to start without any error messages, or displays the screen size/depth selection window and exits right after that.

I guess this could be related to the target architecture – I have a 64bit version of Fedora 19, and the exported games seem to be for 32bit, but I don’t know if there’s a log file somewhere that might give some insight about what’s going on.

Tags: linux, unity

So it’s been more than a week since Ludum Dare Jam #28 ended, but what with the holiday period I’ve not had much chance to really sit down and write about LITH; my first Ludum Dare and first games jam. I had a huge amount of fun doing this game! As an archetype of the Perfectionist, it was cathartic to just plough on with things and it meant I got a huge amount done in a very short space of time.

What Went Right

• Mood/Theme – The game quickly snowballed from a concept I’d had in my mind in an embryonic form for quite some time, although it was the “You Only Get One” theme that gave it the characteristic bank-your-points twist. And I’ve had a lot of encouraging feedback about how genuinely creepy it is, which is just what I had in mind at the start. So big success there!
• Music & Sound – So often this is an element that gets overlooked even in professional games, but thanks to the musically talented Rich Webb, I feel LITH does well here. The feedback on this has been hugely positive, also!
• Engine – Not that I had any hesitation about using Unity, but I doubt I could have gotten this level of graphical sheen, immersion and usability; on both PC and Mac; using anything else. Well done, you guys! You should drink a smoothie or something.

What Went Wrong

• Coder Down! – Unfortunately, we lost a team member fairly early on, so I had to quickly re-arrange plans as I’d not intended to be coding. As a result, the code has committed more crimes than a recurring cartoon supervillain.
• Rushed Art – Sort of related to the above. Most of the art was draft quality or thrown together very hastily (I’d planned to make the Liths look more like stone monoliths with glyphs and all that; as it is, they actually just have their lighting map over flat grey and look too much like Daleks). Most of the time I simply didn’t get around to replacing it.
• Daft AI – The AI was mostly worked on last minute. To begin with, the Liths were like psychics and far too hard to evade. They also ping-ponged off walls very erratically. In my attempts to make them smoother and more believable, they’ve also become rather stupid and get stuck in rooms sometimes. AI is one of those things that can easily go backwards, especially with such tight timescales!

So there you have it! I aim to continue working on LITH after the Jam and see what we can make of it. Overall, I’m happy with how the game turned out, and look forward to the next…

About Novodantis:

Alexander Webb is a writer and professional game designer living in the UK. He currently works on strategy games for mobile.

Tags: LITH

After so long since the compo, I’ve finally got some time to sit down and write a postmortem about One Strike.

What went right:

• Art Style: For some while I’ve been wanting to try this art style. I mean, something made only of strokes, as a sumi-e of sorts. Well, it worked quite well, if you ask me. It was fast to produce the illustrations and it worked really nice.
• Gameplay: The gameplay was in my mind since the very beginning and wasn’t supposed to be complicated, not at all. Just a game of patience/timing. I could add more depth and make it more fun, like, adding a chance for the enemy to feign his move. But nah, wanted to focus more on a game with good art and solid and really simple gameplay.
• Coding: Using Stencyl on my full time job made the coding a breeze. Seriously, it barely took me 2 hours.
• Feedback: You guys are amazing. No, seriously, your feedback is really, really great and really appreciated. That being said, this game might spawn something longer with deeper gameplay since many people got hooked by the art style.

What went wrong:

• Animations: First I was like “Yeah, I think I can animate that on Photoshop”. Then I was like “No way I can animate that, frame by frame, on Photoshop, I need something where I can use bones or whatever”. Then I moved to learn After Effects. Bad move. It took me too much time to figure how to properly work on AE, I’ve hopped for something simpler, like Flash, but nope. After I’ve got done with the third samurai I’ve figured out how to make everything as fast as possible, but it was too late to improve any animation at all. Maybe If I’ve had learned it properly, I could make a single great samurai animation, make a script out of it and automate the process, since all of the are broke down in the same body pieces/layers.
• Music: First I was like “Yeah, better learn how to use some cookie cutter tool some days before the compo, I’m no composer.”. So, I’ve proceeded and taught myself how to use MusicShake. I even ‘composed’ some great stuff (imho). But then, once the theme came and once I’ve got my game concept on my mind I was like “Yeah, I can’t use MusicShake for that”.
• SFX: Just nope. I really can’t make SFX. Maybe if I got a decent mic I could beatbox some stuff. But I don’t have a decent mic and didn’t had time to properly learn SFXR. I think if I had actually did my homework BEFORE the compo, I could have done some good stuff there.

What went kinda right/wrong:

• Music: Gladly, Rezoner made Chirp and it was more than enough to make something ‘japanese-duels-like’ (and I’m really sorry if I’ve ofended someone’s culture by using that stereotyped song).