Hello my fellow Ludum Dare compatriots! As I promised myself I would, I finally sat down and wrote an After Action Report for Robogenesis. I talk about LibGDX, the triumphs and pitfalls of Scala, and how to Bfxr button-mash your way to success!

Thanks to all of you for the continued inspiration and all the great feedback I’ve seen so far!

The end of rating is ‘nigh and I feel the urge to put together my thoughts on the last ludum dare.

Play the game.

The theme

As usual I tried to stay away from the obvious interpretations of the theme. I had the strong desire to make something in the platformer/action area and decided on the theme ‘you only get juan': a mexican princess gets married against her will – everytime you try to break out of this arranged marriage your father says: “you only get juan” with juan being you future husband.

The story was cut out in the end and during development I found out that all the underlying Ideas were centered around the mario games. Inversed roles of the princess and mario, a corrupted mario, a redux version of mario: all of this has been done before. I looked at pictures of the first mario level  from super mario bros on vgmaps and really wondered how a world could be expanded. Especially if there was some kind of underworld beneath 1-1. In the end I decided to expand on that idea and turned the game into what it is now: A deeper and darker exploration of the first super mario bros level and the life and death of game characters. “You only get 1-1″.

What went right

As complicated as the design process was, I think in the end it turned out all right. Level design was my major concern and level design in this case involved a lot of testing. Luckily I had some local people who helped and made some great suggestions. People are great
I am at a point right now that I can really work fast with Lua and the Löve framework. I have some good workflows and patterns in place. My code in (generally) structured and stays readible for me.
Implementing plattforming physics is always ‘fun’ and a bit tedious but this time I think I nailed it: no major bugs like in some former LDs.

What went wrong

There is some code that I really want to tidy up and I think I still have some design issues.

First of all there is a coingate which only lets you through to the last part of the level, which is the replay of the first part. You have to have a specified amount of coins so that the gate opens. I played around with different values but decided to reduce the coins in the end. The gate was built because I wanted to encourage exploration and discourage speed runs. But for LD game it you also should be able to play through most of the game in 10-15 minutes, so I lowered that. In the end the value was a bit too low, as most players didn’t felt that there was a barrier here.

The code had some major delta time issues, especially on slower machines, so that in the end I decided to give upper values to delta time to still get predictable and expected behaviour of the collision detection. I’m really tired of things falling through grounds

Media

I made a walkthrough of the game which covers most (but I think not all) of it.

You can also find the music track from the title screen on soundcloud:

I appreciate everyone who has taken the time to try my game.

This time, my game is like Harvest Moon, which is mainly because I played SNES Harvest Moon some days before Ludum Dare and I really wanted to do something with the farming gameplay. As the theme was announced, I considered at first the “you only get one day”, because days (and time in general) plays a major role in the Harvest Moon games. Later then, I focused more on the “you only get one tool at once”. I also tried to change the setting to something fresh and in the end, it’s a Harvest Moon on a space station where you farm vegetables for producing biofuel. It sounds a bit awkward, and of course, it is.

Biofuel

What Went Right

It’s really awesome to have a weekend making games with buddies, because I always get very useful feedback. I’m also satisfied with XNA and my little framework on top. I can do a lot of things very fast and can concentrate on making the visuals or tinkering around with the gameplay. The game got what I wanted it to be, so I’m happy with that.

It was also the first time I made a walking animation, which doesn’t look like…. it’s still strange, but it looks somehow funny.

Walking Animation

I also tried to make a holo-like effect for choosing the current tool at the computer.

Holographic

Since last Ludum Dare, I fleshed out my particle emitter system, allowing me to define particle emitters fast and easy.

Dirt Particles

(ffffzzzzzuuunnn… ffffzuuuunnnnn… looks like a dirt-digger going mad)

What Went Wrong

While XNA and my framework allow me to do things fast, there are a lot of stuff which I didn’t made accessible yet, like proper interfaces management (menus out of the box) and easy handling of tile-based games. But what I really miss are shaders. For the next Ludum Dare, I want to get more familiar with shaders and perhaps I have some money to buy a laptop, which is not that weak like my current one.

I’m also not sure if I make games which are too complicated, given the time everyone can and wants to spend for playing. But then, I don’t want to make minimalistic games all the time and I see Ludum Dare primary as a way to learn and to improve (and to have fun).

If you want to dig some dirt, plant vegetables, water them through their different states and then harvest them…

…sell your computer and buy some seeds!

And if you don’t know in which direction a shovel must point for digging dirt, you can get some practical tips in my game, which you can play here.

Hem…
Can Someone explain to me how the rating system works? D:
I can’t understand how the Default works… >_>”

Hey guys, I had a great Ludum Dare. I really enjoyed making my game, as well as playing others. I just thought I’d make a final post to see if anyone might want to try my game out.

Have you ever wondered what Santa does to the people on his naughty list? Apparently he sends elves to kill them! Defend yourself from the waves of elves, but remember, you only get one arrow!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=9841

So this was my first Ludum Dare and it’s been great to participate in and great to play everyone else’s games here. I’ve seen some genuinely amazing creations and it’s been so inspiring I’m looking forward to taking part in mini-LD this weekend!

I wrote a post-mortem for my Ludum Dare game (‘Shades of One‘)and posted in on my website at tommakesgames.com. It’s a game featuring one wheel, one colour per level (in different shades), physics platforming and is about the homogeneity of the video games industry.

Have fun, and don’t forget to rate widely and give constructive feedback!

This was my fourth LD and usually I’d write a bit more about what I made and the design process behind it. But this time around, I’m…disappointed? Embarrassed? I made my entry, “Christmas Cookies” in the final 62 minutes of the Jam and while I’m impressed with my ability to make something–anything!–in such a short amount of time, the game is obviously thrown together. It doesn’t have sound, a title screen or a game over screen. There was almost no testing and no balancing to speak of. I wish I could have made the game I wanted to make.

The game I wanted to make, as soon as the theme was announced, was The Legend of Gas-stache and His Fragile Propulsion Device. What a title! What a concept! What level design! A puzzle-platformer where the player could only jump once…in the entire game. I sketched out the concept while at work: a famous jumping hero named Mr. Mustache is cursed and turns semi-corporeal. He can no longer jump by his own power, except by using a propulsion device his kidnapped brother left behind. He must use other techniques, including his newfound ability to turn into liquid or gas and melt through floors, to navigate through a castle and rescue his brother. I sketched the first ten levels at work and made sure that every level included spots that would try to trick the player into using his only jump, or convenient shortcuts. As soon as I got home, I rushed to start coding gravity and collision detection.

And then something I couldn’t have imagined happened: a national TV station contacted me about appearing in their New Years TV special, and they’ve already received a permit to film at my workplace, could I come in early on Monday?

To say that this turned my life upside down was an understatement. That week I was filmed for 40 hours, and 15 of those were during Ludum Dare 28. There simply wasn’t time to sit down and work on a game. As soon as I heard the schedule, I shelved The Legend of Gas-stache, and any plans for any other game, immediately. But Tuesday morning rolled around, and as I was biking home from an early-morning shoot, I realized that I’d arrive home with an hour to spare before the Jam ended! I plotted out the simplest idea I could think of during the ride, walked in the door and plunked down to code as fast as I could. Christmas Cookies was born.

I hated the idea of using the theme to create a game where you only get one life or hit point or whatever, but I had to run with the simplest concept possible. Your spouse is baking Christmas Cookies for a party, and you’re allowed to have one. You try to work, but the smell and thoughts of delicious cookies keep getting in the way of your work…literally, in this case.

As soon as the game was submitted, I jotted down a list of stuff I wanted to improve upon in a post-compo version: title and game over screens, more cookies in different shapes and sizes, better graphics, sound, and maybe a little background tune, like a chiptune Jingle Bells, ANYTHING. But the filming schedule swamped me and I spent the time after recovering and fielding phone calls about more details. Then it was Christmas, and New Years, and the rest is history. I hardly even had time or energy to rate games this time around. I became that person who barely rates anything–a person I never wanted to be.

Though it won’t be seasonal anymore, I do want to touch up Christmas Cookies, if only because I hate submitting something in that state. Assuming more TV shenanigans don’t happen, though, I’ll be back to regular form for LD 29!

Hi! I’m Steve, and this was my first participation in Ludum Dare.  I have created the game :

  I have decided to create a post mortem, to collect my thoughts and figure out what went wrong and right with the development of my game.

What went right?

• Working with the theme: I notice now that every idea I had before this game jam involved working a theme into the mechanics, instead of using it as a context. It luckily did not take very long before I came up with the concept of the player only getting one key that they have to switch for a different action. Soon after that the idea came to integrate the cube, that gives the player the possibility to make a part easier, but at the cost of losing the cube for the rest of the game.
• Finishing the mechanics: A lot of things did not get done that I still wanted to do. But by getting some basic things in I was still able just in time to get a finished game. If I would have spend time on things like audio or animation I probably would not be able to create an ending.
• Using Unity: I absolutely love Unity. It is accessible while not being restrictive and allowed me to easily put up a web version. I also already had some experience with Unity. I did make the mistake of not checking out the 2D tools well-enough beforehand though.

What went wrong?

• The small things: I should have probably made native versions, the reason I did not do that was because I did not want to people to remap controls, as the game would not support that. That is a bad reason. I should have included credits. I should have not accidentally start the name of my game with “You only have one” instead of “You only get one”. I should have kept the tutorial message until the correct action is done and I should have decided before I started how to do background music. All kinds of things that I am bothered with, but should be easily taken care of in a next game jam.
• No playtesting: I really had to rush things to get my game finished. As a result of this, when I initially uploaded the game, the ending could not even be triggered without me noticing it! It took a day before my friend pointed that out, but I don’t think anyone has noticed since I haven’t had a other comment about it. As a result of feedback I probably would also have lowered the difficulty a whole lot, since I got used to the mechanics and played through it very easily. I need to keep in mind that the average player in this case is going to take very little time to learn the game.
• The controls: If you read the comments one things really sticks out, and that is that most people seem to be bothered by the controls. Now, this was kind of expected. My goal was to have fairly simple puzzles made harder by the controls. I am doubting the game was much too hard, as there are constantly checkpoints and not a whole lot of danger, nor where the puzzles too difficult. I should have made dexterity based solutions way easier.  I wish I could see the playthroughs, but I am assuming that most people stopped because they got too frustrated with the controls. Part of the problem is that you have to switch too often if you fail something as simple as a jump. If the controls would have been more precise and would require less switches, I am sure people would be less frustrated. Instead of mapping movement to A and D, I should have mapped it to a mouse button where the character walks toward. This way the player would need much less switches and the controls would be more precise. I underestimated the difficulty of the controls as I had a lot more practice and was easily able to get through the game fast.
• Plan for artists: Initially I did not ask somebody to help me with the art, as I enjoy making horrendous Paint art, but I did get two people that were willing to contribute. However, since it was spontaneous we did not have a schedule and at the last day I ended up having no artists at all. I should have asked people beforehand so I know what to expect.

Overall I am still happy with the output. There is a lot of stuff I still wanted to do, but I am glad the main stuff was done and working. Although it was disappointing that only a very limited number of people have finished the game.

Hard Point puts you in a small archipelago in control of a tank to battle 3 super vehicles with upgrades acquired from smaller enemy vehicles.

Only one upgrade can be used at a time at the tank’s hardpoint and the player must choose wisely in order to beat the game.
These upgrades are weapons (machine gun and cruise missile) or devices that extends the tank capabilities (rotors to fly, boat to cross water and armor to protection).
Each enemy vehicle drops one or two kind of upgrades only (helicopters drops only rotors for example)

The compo version features 5 types of enemy vehicles and 3 “boss” super vehicles

This is a hard game (an unintended constant in my LD entries) but IS winnable.

Went right

Modularization as a design principle. Vehicles and devices are assembled from independent parts. There are no special cases for the player or AI controlling things for both uses the same input interfaces over many controllers. This yields lot of work at start but begins to unfold advantages at latter stages as some features comes “for free”.
AI is working nice. Land vehicles knows how to keep themselves dry in solid land and water vehicles knows how to keep themselves wet in water. Enemy vehicles knows how to hit things at distance but it is designed to miss at random.

Went bad

Hard Point was very very close to miss the Jam deadline and even that I managed to deliver it in time its overall incomplete.
From ballistics to buoyancy, AI aim, AI navigation, I guess that every single function in Unity Quaternion and Vector3 was used in this game.
Sadly, a problem with AI aiming took me 6 hours to solve (with an unforeseen trivial solution). This turned the project from “going well” to “emergency mode” and choices had to be made – no sound, no music, no texture at models, no cool effects, too few instructions of how to play and no time to polish some hard corners.

Post compo version

Post compo version is almost ready with sounds, music and visual effects, bug fixes and a new vehicle (submarine) with a new power up that allows the tank to submerge and fire torpedoes.

I’ll write a post when it is ready.

Thank you all for another great LD.

See you at LD 29.

We know rating time is almost up and we know we didn’t rate much ourselves, but we keep on rating now and would like you to do so, too! Look out for games that have less then 20 ratings and give them a go (if you can)! One such game is ours: Space Adventures!

Thanks in advance, Rialgar and Xeno42alpha.

Here are my personal favorites that I think were successful in being weird, different, interesting, and/or experimental in nature. All hail absurdity!

These are in no particular order! Play and rate them all before the time runs out!

X. Da’ Face – Snail_Man

A short experimental game with amazingly eerie music that literally falls apart as the game progresses. The dialogue is great and the sprite “trailing” effect is icing on the cake in terms of presenting the game as fantastically jenky. It’s short and it’s weird, just play it! You don’t have much time!

X. Give Me A Hand – Sink

This game had a really clever use of the theme: you only get one hand! The game can be played in many different ways depending on which hand you choose each time. The music is simple and to the point, it works well with the short length of the game. In addition to that, your health meter moves around a bit, it’s almost like your hearts are gettin’ jiggy to the beat! Super fun and silly! Also something about the color palette really jives with me. Play it now!

X. CUOP DO SACI – leparlon

It’s like QWOP but with one leg and hand-made art! Also based on Brazilian folklore (if the first sentence wasn’t convincing enough). I think that’s all that needs to be said, this is awesome so play it!

X. superfrozenkittengetsonlyonesecretbottleforyou – evilindiegames

Wow, I probably played this game longer than I should have, but my eyes feel fine so I think I’ll be okay! Fisheye + sweet color palette + kitty people seems like a good formula to me. You have to collect secret bottles so you don’t freeze! This game is pretty surreal, after playing it for a bit I realized that I am the only kitten moving around collecting these bottles: am I the last surviving kitty in a world of frozen cats that weren’t fast enough to keep collecting the bottles? Kinda depressing and creep. The music is catchy as well (I didn’t get bored of it after it looped a lot). I would also like to give  special kudos to the creator for for one upping our 1GAM idea of using all three themes: not only did they use the LD theme, they incorporated all three themes from the other gamejam! Awesome! Play it!

X. You Only Get 1! – Danman9914

A “game show-like” game where you must choose one item to use in several different scenarios. This game gets better the more you play it because you slowly learn which items work well with what scenarios! I Love all the pink! A fun and goofy game, you should play before it’s all over!

X. Cat Gentlemans Play: Insult Spinner 10 Cents – RobotLovesKitty

A two-player game (that is also fun as a one-player game)! Slap each other, trade insults, and duel! You better go play it, time is running out!

I am sure that there are a plethora of fantastic games that I either forgot to mention or didn’t get around to playing, so I apologize for all of the great absurdity that I missed and failed to mention! For those I did manage to play, I will be awarding them with my “Keepin’ it Weird” trophy!

Wayyy overdue, but we’ve both been super busy over the holidays and with work, so we haven’t been able to make any updates since then. But before the clock ticks down and LD is over, come on over and rate our game, “Darkest Friday“! It’s a snarky typing game Zeik and I made for this LD. I also have a timelapse you guys might enjoy? 😛

Check out our game here!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=10976

Tags: LD28, timelapse, video

It’s maybe too late but I feel like I’m missing something if I don’t write a post mortem for my first LD entry – Tough. Post mortem is a kind of new term for me when I join this community, hope that I can make it correctly. I will prepare timelapse for my next LD entry too.

Joining this LD was an awesome experience for me. I didn’t like this theme. I think it’s too wide because most games can be explained that they fit the theme. But in the end, I think this theme worked out pretty well. A lot of games did take on this theme with their very innovative ways.

What went well:
– Finished the game in time. It’s the best thing since making this game was a new challenge for me.
– Picked a simple idea and built a game around it: a platformer with unexpected ending. Everything was in a reasonable scope for my first game jam.
– Did follow the theme and made a good twist: You only get one life, but the goal is not to keep it.
– Had a fun first day making the game. Even though I were working on the game until 6am of the next day, I felt no stress.
– Learned the first game framework engine (Phaser). I’m just a web developer and a gamer. This was a very motivative way to help me become a game maker too :).

What went wrong:
– Too much time lost on making assets. But in the end, it’s still completely not as I imagined on my head. I intended to make a Franstenken-like character and some brutal wolves.
– Did not use the remaining time to polish up the game.
– The fun was hidden because of the vague gameplay.
– No sounds or music either.
– Did not pay enough attention to the rules. I were using assets of Phaser framework for some background of the game. I felt really bad about this and replaced them all one week later.
– With the lack of experience with basic game design and game framework usage, I got some troubles with the camera, didn’t know how to use tile map, failed to make an endless map generation and made a lot of hacky things.
– The source code of the game was really bad base on my own standards.

What is next:
I’m satisfied with this game. I hope it will be a good starting point for me. I will stay with this idea and make it a clearer goal and a smaller map. The mechanic will be the simplest one for platformer so I can try to create a same game with a lot of game frameworks quickly. And of course, this game is an open source project.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=30146

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

Which you can play here

• Titel-, Intro-, Levelselection- and Final-Screen ( which is never triggered 😉 )
• Hud (In game)
• Popups for Intro-, Levelselection- and Final-Screen
• Music
• Playerprogress
• Posteffect(s)
• Integrate Background tiles for levels

• Don’t drink too much in the day before Ludumdare
• Planning saves so much time
• Prefabs rock, when you know how to use them 😉
• Unity has problems with custom 2d collider polygons (we were not able to add nodes to the polygon), we used 2d box colliders instead

• Plan also Screen flows
• Make less and make it better 😉
• Find a way to work with several people on one unity project
• And finally the most important one. Stay cool.

Been working on the project a bit.

Certain obstacles hindered my progress (holidays, games, overall winter laziness), but I’m relatively ok with the current state of things. It’s not feature complete and not even winnable at the moment, basically a prototype of sorts.

The interesting challenge for me in this project is implementing a data driven system, I’ve been working on for many a month, to a real game for the first time.

That also ate some time from adding game features, as I had to create additional functionality for said system and rewire existing code around.

Lot’s of fun, as always, and once again LD further cements my jamming philosophy.

It’s not about adhering to a terrible theme, but rather starting an interesting project for future development.

Play – Golden Hamster

We are glad and proud to finally post our game here.
We had a hard work on this game, but it was enjoyable and worthy.

What we’ve learned
So we’ve learned quite a lot since it is our first ludum dare game.
The quite obvious thing is that we learned to manage our time much better,
since we had much less time than we normally do.
and we certainly didn’t manage it well, but next time we sure will, or at least better than this time.

Also, we learned to make music(mostly with the software sunvox and bfxr),
it was quite fun, and I hope that you like the results.

About the game

It took us way more time than what it should to come up with the idea.
But at the end we have compromised about something that both of us
liked enough.

As we saw in the comments, some haven’t understood how the idea
is related to the theme, in short the theme is
“You Only Get One”
So we tohught about “You only get one wish”,
and the first thing that pop up in our mind,
is golden fish, but it was too banaly, so the best replacemt for
fish is obviously an hamster.
And as you would see in the game, every end of wave
the golden hamster will give only one wish.

The progress and the team
We are a team of three people who worked quite a lot together, but one of us couldn’t practicate(the designer) so we
practicated without him. It made us change the structure of the team and how we worked,
because Rom is usually the main programmer, and now he did relatively
less programming so he would have time to design.
By the end, it was a fun experiement, and we are proud of the results.

Rom – did all the painting and the design, and part of the programming.
You can see his blog here:
http://trasoside.blogspot.co.il/
Tom – did most of the programming, and most of the sounds.

After rating 30+ games I found a couple of them interpreted the theme like you have one bullet/arrow/bomb that you throw to kill enemies and you have to pick up to use again…

and I honestly believe that it is a better interpretation than mine (one minute to complete the level)…

everything OK so far, until I remembered that I made a game like this three years ago.. and that I forgot about it when thinking about the theme.

This is the game: The Mayan Ball

This is my entry if you want to compare:

… or rate: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=2085

Best luck to all!!!

This is a very late post-mortem for our game. This was our first game jam together and my personal first too. In fact only one of four of us had done a game jam before. It took us the best part of a day to come up with the idea. We’ve explained it before but will do so again here for completeness. It’s basically a 3D first-person memory game where you only have one chance to view the maze and then it’s lights out. You start in the yellow area and in this area you can “view” the maze via a pulse beacon. You can also zoom the camera out and look around from a top down view to get a better idea too. Then as soon as you leave this starting location the beacon goes out and you have to make your way to the green finish in the dark. All this while avoiding various obstacles and traps.

Pros:

• The 3D first-person nature of the game made it quite unique for a game jam in this time frame. We honestly thought we weren’t going to finish at one point.
• The pulse beacon meant that people couldn’t just screenshot the maze and be done with it.
• The music and sounds add a lot of atmosphere and even gameplay to the game.
• We discovered we could work very effectively as a whole team as we did so during this.
• The balance in difficulty is quite good for beginners and experts.
• We even got in a tutorial which explains it really good.
• Voice acting really added to the game, even though it was totally dodgy.
• The beacon shows proof of concept for a future project 😉

Cons:

• We did spent a lot of time sleeping and messing about doing other stuff. Then stressed when it got to crunch time.
• We had to rush a couple things as we seriously thought we weren’t going to finish it at one point.
• Lack of foresight meant people could just run around the edge of the maze resulting in the excessive collisions.
• Being a working company we literally had no time afterwards to play, comment or rate on other games.
• Could have maybe been better to work the tutorial into the gameplay directly?
• If we had more time we’d make the generation algorithm more sturdy.
• Bigger levels? More levels? Joining levels?
• We wish we’d made it like The Cube (film) now.

It was a shame that after the effort we put in we didn’t have time to give other people’s efforts a go. I’m sure we’ll get around to playing a few of them eventually. But it still sucks to know there’s no way we can possibly come anywhere close to winning because of this.

Either way we definitely had fun and will be back for the next one for sure! We just hope we’ll have more time available after to do it properly.

Made a post compo version. Just because. Fun and stuff 😉

Added some more sounds, a visual and sfx feedback if a typo was made, and some kind of 3 stages / difficult levels.

One of the funniest parts for me in developing interactive stuff are unpredictable outcomes of the coded behaviors. As there are often times I would like to kill the next human being entering my room (getting rid of bugs until one realizes, that a fresh start of the engine did the trick -.- ), there are moments like this that keep me working on things:

Duckdoken?

iPod Version with directions instead of text. Bottle hell shooter with wrong booleans O_o

With a few hours left to rate some more games I realized that I have missed out on some very outstanding ones, which I have to catch up with now. At this point thanks to the guys posting their personal favorite games lists

If you have the time, you can play the post compo and original version here

Fuck ratings, if you don’t have the time for that skip the star-o-mania with my entry –  I’d rather love to hear some honest opinions about that chaotic thingy I made.

Cheers,

.d

Tags: Fighter, Misfight, NoKenDoCan, Street

“… And why should I care?”

Good question. Let me tell you a short story to give it to you.

Spark: De Sacrificio is a little project that stemmed from an old ludum dare entry I created for LD27. I was very excited with it back then, and had it all planned in my mind: a puzzle/platformer with exploration components. It felt like a cool thing to play, so I did a smallish implementation for the compo. I wanted to develop a complete game from the small prototype I created back then, but because of a few personal problems and my inability to focus on one thing for more than 48 hours, I dropped it.

It would have been the end of it if I didn’t get a hold of a copy of GameMaker back in November. I was curious to test this platform, and decided to brush some dust off Spark to recreate it in this bright new engine. I was really excited, and got a lot of work done in a short time. It started to look really amazing for what I was expecting. The game felt just as I wanted and it was interesting to play and explore.

But for some reason I felt reluctant to wrap the game up and send it on its journey through the Internet.

It took me a couple of weeks to pin down what was this dark feeling I was having towards releasing this small game. In the meanwhile, development got very slow. Staring at the game, replaying the same parts over and over started to feel painful. I caressed the possibility of leaving it in a drawer and forgetting about it more than once. The reason wasn’t that I didn’t like the project, but that I loved it way too much.

I was scared of what people would say about it. I’m not new about getting feedback on stuff, and I have a thick skin for hrash comments. But the reality is that I had put a lot more of myself in this game than I would have ever expected. It’s no use to have a thick skin if you have your most vulnerable parts of yourself out in the open. Spark isn’t just a game for me but more of a piece of myself I digitalized and put in a form that others can experience and live. As someone who is extremely reserved, this is terrifying: it’s like living an open door on my soul.

I knew that I had to push though it. On December the 30th, Spark: De Sacrificio was finished. I knew it wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t matter: I knew I had to close this loop and go on. So, here it is. Spark.

So, going back to the original question: why should you care about Spark: De Sacrificio?

Because it’s sincere.

I put all my passion and knowledge in this game. It’s not a great game, I know it. But I know it is unique, in its own weird way. As I said, even if you won’t notice, there is a lot of me in it.

Oh, and it’s free. But that was a given. See it as a present to other developers who really love this medium as much as I do.

If you are in for something different, challenging and (hopefully) touching, you may want to download it here. If you check it out, feel free to pour some feedback on my blog or my twitter account.

Thanks for reading these ramblings.

Tags: gamemaker, LD27, postmortem, spark