I wrote up an after action report for my Ludum Dare entry “It Came from Beneath the Surface of the Sea!” — a game about a monster who loves nap time.

I hope you’ll check it out! Inside I talk about doing character animation and AI for the first time, and the pre-deadline despair that I’ve seen others admit to.

In the end of course, Asiatic clam farmers know the secret: Never Give Up!

Hello,

We’ve just post a fixed version ( no new features ) of our entry for the LD 29

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=10263

A new version (post-jam) is on the way with smooth level transition, an end game and probably more features !

Preparation

For this Ludum Dare 29 I teamed up for the first time with my brother, with whom I have collaborated in game development since I am ten years old. But in the last eight years we only produced one game together, so it was a good opportunity to produce something together one more time!

I will discuss in this post the jam from my point of view, and he will do the same very soon.

A few hours before the theme announcement we discussed and thought it could be fun to do a tower-defence game, since we had not yet created such a game. It was also clear that if the theme was not fitting, we could find another genre of game to create.

For the jam he chose to go with Clickteam Fusion 2.5 Developer, since it allows a very rapid development (at least in the first stages of the game 😉 ). Therefore the game would most likely be 2D (and I have very few experience with 3D games), and I had the choice between pixels/vectors/pseudo-3d for the graphics. In already created some graphics for LD jams in Illustrator and also in Gimp, and both were satisfying in the overall aspect, but it takes a lot of time to create something that seems polished and original. So this time I went for 3D renderings that we could use in a 2D game. In fact, our last project was done this way, and looked really nice! It’s also a lot easier to make some artwork for the menus and titlescreen in 3D since it only needs a few change of camera and lighting.

I had not used Blender in years, so six hours before the theme announcement I decided to install the latest version of Blender, and quickly see how the particles system was working, and also the animation (which I never learned before) with bones and key frames. I quickly drew a low-poly pine-tree, and duplicated it using particles system in order to generate a quick procedural map.

It is the same technique that I used later for grass/rocks/crystals generation.

Saturday

After the theme announcement we quickly came on the idea of ants, since its the season where they are invading all the surroundings (and even the house from time to time).

My first objective was to design a good first character, a basic worker ant. It took me the until the middle of Saturday afternoon to achieve a good result:

I also did the following animations: idle/walk/attack/die. As the animation bones are separated from the mesh, I could use most of the animations with little modifications for the other type of ants.

The rest of the afternoon and beginning of the evening was spent on designing a first level.

All the particles (rocks and grass) where generated on the map using some weight maps of the base mesh. I learned a lot from this Blender tutorial: https://cgcookie.com/blender/2012/09/20/creating-realistic-grass-in-blender/ . In the next screenshot you can see the weight map corresponding to the density of small rocks. I had a weight map for the density of rocks, one for the size of rocks, and two similar maps for the grass.

Since our playground is underground I could not produce realistic grass, and by luck my grass was not generated realistic at all! It would have been a problem if I really wanted realistic grass, but in this cas it is producing a strange line effect which gives a small sense of strangeness to the overall mood, so I decided to keep it that way and not spend too much time tweaking the grass properties.

The next idea I had was to create some lava. This is the resulting work of my first day:

Sunday

I was not satisfied with the aspect of the lava, since it was more looking like a glowing ketchup. So on sunday I spent more than two hours just on producing better textures for the lava, and changing various settings (emit, raytracing, glow) which were not satisfying either. For the whole graphics creation I always compared the renderings to real photographies, to achieve a similar looking thing. And then I thought again of particles! Particles are the key to pretty things! And after half an hour I had this result:

The rest of Sunday was spent designing and animating the soldier units, the queens (red and black), and also some turrets (ant-lion, destructible rock, spider-web, a ground bug…). Every unit/turret was rendered in 8 directions for every animation, and later used by my brother in the actual game. End of second day screenshot:

Oups I forgot I designed the second map meanwhile too 😀

Monday

Monday was then the day for producing music, level design maps, testing, sounds effects, and some artwork for the titlescreen, menus, victory and defeat screens. Thanks to the quick map ornaments (using particles), it was very quick to produce a third map: create a base grid layout, deform the mesh a little, add particles, think of a new environment (purple mushrooms), add some lighting and it’s done! In fact most of the time was waiting on the rendering (7 minutes for the biggest map).

I took some hours in the afternoon (not enough for my own expectations) to produce a first music, and also the “defeat theme”, which is the best of the three tracks in my opinion, but since the game is too easy to play no one has heard it probably 😉

At that point its the end of Monday afternoon, and the game was not really working, some path-finding problems, and I tried to not put any more pressure on my brother. Therefore I took some time polishing the graphics, and doing the artwork screens. Two hours before the end of the deadline (1 AM here) I went in the garage to record some sounds effects: for the ants attack sounds I used various gardening tools, such as a machete, a saw, gardening shears, some secateurs… for the ants birth I wanted a popping sound, so I took an empty plastic box of medication which has a nice sound when opening quickly. For the sound recording I used a Zoom H2n which is very convenient for recording anything anywhere with a good sound quality. Then I took some time to polish the sounds in Cubase (add a small delay on the secateurs sound), and normalize all sounds.

That was almost the end of my work for the jam. The last half hour was dedicated to testing and preparing the submission post with nice screenshots.

Conclusion

I’m quite satisfied with the looks of the game, and with all I could learn about Blender, animation, rendering techniques (use of mask, composite renderings), particles, animations… The gameplay is overall satisfying, we were just a bit frustrated to remark that a small change in the last hours disabled the enemy queens to drop soldier ants, so the game was too easy. But the game was working, so it was not a too big deal.

Like almost every other Ludum Dare jam I entered, I think we (my team) spent too much time on thinking of (and implementing) difficult gameplay mechanisms, and not enough time actually playing or testing the game. But maybe this is how this short-time jams work. It’s also a good opportunity for experimentation, so I’m not saying it’s necessarily bad to think about different gameplay mechanisms than what we’re used to.

One more thing that I need to be careful about is how the game is presented to the player, and how to help him discover the mechanics quickly. For example in our game, we forgot to mention anywhere that the player controls the black ants and have to defend the black queen. We had no time to implement the units/turrets descriptions, and I even forgot to mention them in the description of the game during the first day.

To conclude, I think it was really nice, the sleep management was very good (although too much excitement prevented me from sleeping much), the work flow was also good, so I’m really looking forward for next the next jam! And maybe with a bigger team!

The jam game is available here http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=36462, and a new version with less bugs and 3 level difficulty will be released very soon (maybe even today!)

I waited to get some feedback on my game before doing a post-mortem, and now that I got some, here it is.

This Ludum Dare, I entered UnderTheLibrary, a little platformer in which you play as a robot trying to navigate the basement of a library to get back to the surface. You can play/vote for the game here.

Making title screens out of the ingame tileset is becoming a habit…

The genesis

Last time, I struggled a lot with the collision code for my platformer, so this time, I decided to try and use a game engine so as to be able to focus more on the content and actual gameplay. I ended up going with Phaser, a HTML5/JavaScript game framework, because it meant that I would be able to play the result on my Surface RT (I will NOT justify myself for that one…); plus, I learned JavaScript last summer for fun and I wanted to do at least one significant project with it.

Where I live, the theme was revealed at 3 A.M. … which obviously means I went straight up to bed after seeing it. I would have prefered ‘Break the Rules’, but I thought I could manage to do something with it.

Fastforward to 9 A.M., I have been at it for an hour, and could not think of an original intrepretation of the theme. I supposed the most common ones were going to be underground/underwater/under the looks of something (it seems I was right, at least), and I wanted to do something else. Problem was, I could not think of anything I felt like coding; so I chose the most obvious one, the underground setting, and went with it. Same with the platformer: I realized that this is the only kind of game I am sure of being able to code (almost) ‘right’, and since my goal was to learn/use the Phaser game engine, it went right with it.

The whole library thing started as a basement with books. And where do you find books, lots and lots of books? BAM.

What went right

• Phaser is a nice engine, and thanks to some training during the previous two weeks I was able to set up something playable really quick.
• I made some graphics which I think are good; I especially like the wood texture of the shelf (yes, there are books protuding on the sides of it :p).
• While fiddling with the MIDI instruments available, I stumbled on one called ‘Rock Organ’, which I liked from the first note it played. In the end, the ingame music sounds really good and fitting (at least, I think so).
• Looking back,one of the thing I wished I had done better in my previous Ludum Dare (#27) was storytelling. Even if I raced against the clock in the end, I managed to do a little bit of it this time.
• Almost no bugs in the dialogBox thingy, which is somewhat cool, I guess. I liked it!

The tileset I made for UnderTheLibrary

What went wrong

• Content! I spent a good amount of time on each level, and could only do two of them within the time limit (the third one took some time, but was not a level as much as an ending/credit screen). I also cut two ideas I had for others enemies, a second environment based on the sewers (the original idea was to travel far away while still staying just below the surface), powerups, et cetera.
• Browser compatibility! I had to ‘port’ the game to IE/Safari/Opera because the Math.sign() function I used (once) was not available, thus crashing the entire game. I knew it was a risk with JavaScript, but as I only playtested with Firefox/Chrome, I did not see that one coming.
• Although it is nice to have a game engine at hand, it is not as flexible as doing all your code from the ground up.
• I am not very satisfied of the player’s sprite. I actually had no idea what the player could be, so I ended up going for some generic (again) robot.
• The title screen music is bad. I started to do it, but could not get enough inspiration to do something pleasing to the ear. At least, I got something out of it for the ingame music.

Will anyone get to this area (without cheating)? I hope so.

As a conclusion…

I am not as satisfied with this game as I was with my LD27 entry. While I feel UnderTheLibrary is more complete (which I think is because it actually told a story), I must admit that I prefer Ephemeral‘s setting, ‘characters’, gameplay, et cetera. That is something I felt while making the game, and maybe that is why I could not get as inspired as I was last time.

I will try to do my best next time though!

Bonus: Game Highlights

I rated 30 or so games so far, and some of them were really good. Here are the ones I think are worth a shot:

Compo

• Scratch (bentosmile): the first game I played, I actually tried it before rating was available. A bit partial, but I love visual novels, so…
• Beneath The Surface Of Scratch Ticket (dejant): try to win at scratching ticket by scratching it a little to see what is under the surface of the ticket. A nice concept, and very well executed.
• Lights (Seyroth): the description says ‘meticulous level design’. Try to get the three endings and you will understand why.
• Frictionless (Matthew Brown): a well-designed puzzle game, which may remind you of Pokémon’s ice-sliding puzzles.

Jam

• Ghostlord Depths (HelixFox): you are a floating skeleton fighting flaming and giant skulls. Very pleasant game, with polished graphics and audio.
• Necronomicon (lowcade): as a hipster cat, you have to collect four rings to gain more abilities and try to defeat the ultimate evil overlord.

I will be writing a post-mortem very shortly, but in the mean time you can still vote on my game 😉

Vote on Flesh Hunter here!

Tags: Game Maker Studio, timelapse

Reggid entry is now available on android.

Play Store

LD Entry

Figured it was about time for a postmortem of the game, talk about what worked well, what worked not-so-well, the ending (or lack thereof)…

First thing’s first: if you haven’t played it already, give it a go here: http://bit.ly/1rAlWhZ

Inspirations:

I drew from a number of inspirations for this: The first, was from an old Star Wars game (Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy or something like that). In one of the levels, you crash your ship like an idiot, and have to hop across parts of broken ship to get to the end, but if you stand on the sand for too long, a big ol’ worm will burst out and eat you. This was the initial ‘Beneath the Surface’ concept that occured to me.

I’d also been playing a tonne of Shadow of the Colossus, of which there are 3 or so Colossi that spend most of their time underground (or underwater). I wanted to do something similar, but also didn’t want to deal with fighting them; ‘Survival > Defeating’ for this concept, in terms of both gameplay, and what I could realistically accomplish in <30 hours.

SO: I decided on underground stone snake-worm creatures, Guardians, that would become aggressive if you stood on their sand.

What worked:

The visual aspects all worked! This was something I was pretty proud of, since I’m neither a modeller, nor a texturer. Because of that, the models aren’t actually textured properly – I just applied a sort-of-tileable texture to them, that I made from inside of Paint.NET (32×32 – 64×64 pixels = great visual consistency, because there isn’t enough detail for inconsistency)!

The Guardian’s AI (mostly) worked! It was a very simple “AI system” – if player is on the sand, go to him. If we’re above x height, dive below, otherwise surface. If player is on a platform, dive, and just wonder around for a bit. To make it much more ‘robust’, I actually raycast above the Guardians head to check for terrain, and create a ‘Relative Y’ value; the terrain’s face’s position becomes y, instead of y= World Space 0. This means it’ll behave the same on hills or mountains as it would on ground level, rather than just take a WS value of 0 and find mountains unconquerable.

For some reason, the AI goes weird in the WebPlayer build, and will often just wind up going around in circles for eternity. Some kind of surface-timer could probably fix this.

What didn’t work:

Skybox was atrocious. I have no idea how to do them properly at all, so I just made a circular shape, distorted it, added a bunch of effects, and called it the sky. The other 5 textures of the skybox are just a 4x4p (I think) black texture.

Ending was… Bad. So bad that I actually removed it. Not bad as in, “Wow, what a bad ending; that wasn’t satisfying at all,” bad as in glitch-bad (not even good glitches, either!). If I weren’t for work starting 4 hours after I submitted it, I’d have definitely either fixed it or replaced it (since there was still ~12 hours left of comp at that point).

Sounds were bad. By the end of the comp, I was so sick and tired of the sounds that I just wanted to go soundless again (They were actually about 800% louder originally). People seemed to like the sounds for the most part, which I guess is good, but I hate the sounds now. Next time I’ll use placeholder sounds until I’m ready to submit it…

Overall:

A lot of it all came together nicely, so overall I’m pretty happy with it! I learned a lot about how to cheat AI and keep it natural-looking, which is something I’ll be keen to exploit again in the future!

Unity3D is still, by far, my favourite engine to use. I was able to prototype a lot of this stuff (after scrapping previous prototypes, too!) in such a short time, and achieve most of what I set out to do.

Shadow of the Colossus was one of the greatest games of the PS2, and remains one of my biggest inspirations as a developer and pretend-designer.

We made a small, quick update for our game Hell Hole.

Version 1.1.1

Fixes

• Rebalanced the game: now it takes 3,000 points to reach the boss instead of 5,000.

Go play the game here, if you haven’t… please? ‘Aight, see y’all soon!

A Bigger Fish

Hey everybody! Last weekend, @gavinpinkney, @fenixtao and myself (@jhrrsn) made a game about piloting a sub and exploring alien seas. It’s pretty cool! You should check it out… We’re getting into gear and playing your ace games, let us know how we’ve done and how we could improve!

Hi there, I fixed a few bugs on my game. Thank you all for your feedback!

Splitscreen Action!

If you haven’t played it yet, check it out now! Thanks! <3

Next: Starting to work on a Post-Compo Version!

Here a short time lapse over the three days.

Tags: time lapse

I uploaded another for Let’s Play Videos of LD29 games, which makes a total of seven videos:

See the Playlist here.

Want yours played, too? comment on my game with feedback!

So I have been in six Ludum Dares so far. LD has beaten me three times, and I have completed a game three times, so we are tied. Next LD I will finally take back my pride!

This LD was a lot of fun. I had no idea what to do when the theme came out. At first I was thinking of doing some type of underwater game, but then I thought of the movie Tremors. I really wanted to do something where you control a creature underground that eats people on the surface.

This is what I came up with:

Sand Shark

I may have made it a little to hard and the rocks to close together. I feel like people usually either die right away, or they don’t die until they stop being careful.

Try it out here!

This was our 3rd Ludum Dare and we went with somewhat of a platformer again. Feel free to give it a go, it’s rather short

We decided weeks before LD to focus on action and fun more than anything else, yet we placed the least amount of energy into that area. We ended up making a metaphorical game about a hobo and his inner fantasy world removed from the viciousness of society.

The Good

Visuals were mostly good
I have poor experience with animating and characters so I’m really happy with all of the animations.

The switch mechanic was great
Ended up exactly as imagined, I definitely plan to do something larger with it at some point.

The Mood
Again, we made a moody game, that’s some consolation…

The Bad

It’s not Fun
We spent Saturday working on everything but. Then we spent most of Sunday brainstorming on gameplay elements, just to go with some very simple; and homing projectiles. These ended up being implemented poorly, unpolished and overall really redundant as there was no longer any time to work on level design and action (and their purpose).

Forest area background graphics are horrid
Even though people seem to like them I can’t look at them. I’m quite please with the city though.

Poorly implemented mobs, no ending, It’s too short
Or rather, it’s too long for what it offers, and in terms of gameplay it doesn’t offer much as most comments have stated.

That coin…
The coin was this big symbolic thing that barely made it in, and it made no sense as it was unfinished.

Massive burnout
I’m still recuperating, I barely slept and were hugging my laptop for 16-17 hours a day

Conclusion

Really need to focus on gameplay elements more, or might as well make a movie next time…

Everyone who rated my game please play it again and rate it.

Isue is fixed please if you rated this game before play and rate again.

Do you think it’s game about fishes?
It’s not!!!(play game if you want to know about is this game)

Controles: Up arrow – jump
Down arrow – change direction
Space – go forward
Ctrl – fire(you ‘ll see what)

Play Carnival Warfare here:

We’ve squeezed in a little extra time to prod and tweak our jam entry Lair M.D.

There was plenty of feedback about how difficult the original build was, being both somewhat confusing and giving the player very little time to diagnose the patients. With our post-compo build, we’ve added a much longer timer, and added highlighting on the tools when the player hovers over them. We also added a few more interesting patient files, made the tools easier to put down, and added a visual goodie or two.

You can play the new version by following the Post Compo version link on the LD page, or play and download the newer build here. If you’re going to rate the game however, please do so based on the original jam version.

Let us know if these improvements help, and any more feedback is totally welcome, and awesome!

How it all started in a hot day of summer on Gilese 581 g

– “Commander, we are approaching Earth.”

– “Good, good. Prepare the attack. I want it to be fierce, but subtle. Cruel, but gentle. Gruesome, but somewhat happy.”

– “Of course, great commander, of course. I have prepared a devious attack plan. We’ll send our invisible interceptor ships first, taking out all human aerial force. We’ll then focus on…

– “Wait, what?”

– “…I said we’ll use the invisible interceptors, the pilots are eager to start! May I send the order, may I?”

– “What are you  talking about? Invisible interceptors? You idiot! Do you know how much they cost?”

– “Well, commander… yes, but the humans…”

– “Are you stupid or what? Aerial force? Don’t you know how to conduct a successful invasion? We’ll attack from the sewers!”

–  “Excuse me, commander, but I do not see how…”

–  “Of course you don’t. You couldn’t possibly understand my genius plans! Do as I say: attack from the sewers!”

–  “Err…. very well, commander, we’ll do as you wish.”

–  “Oh, also…”

–  “Yes, commander?”

–  “Kill the girls. All of them. And nothing else. It’s part of my grand scheme.”

–  “…fine.”

So, this is roughly how the aliens’ latest Council for Earth Invasion (CEI) went. Ok, maybe these weren’t the exact words (they do speak alien after all, not english), but I think you’ve got the point. An invasion through the sewer, directly from outer space: here is where our game starts!

The game

I hereby present to you It Came From The Sewer! This is the result of my first LD 48h competition after two jams with friends, so I was a little worried about it, with all that doing everything by myself and not using any piece of previous code.

It came from the sewer. A.k.a. what happens when you leave little girls playing with fountains and WCs in the backyard.

I am more on the ‘engineer & code’ side of development (and design, too), so I was especially worried about the graphics, although I had practiced a bit with pixel art before. Still, I’m no artist.

However, I am satisfied with the result, and you can even watch the process I went thru in my timelapse here (although in a twitchy, multi-tasking and somewhat OCD-ish way) .
Without further ado, let’s get to the usual post-mortem quartet*: the good, the bad and the ugly!

CONTINUES DOWN HERE!

The good

“Nanananan abracadabra bububu!” – a girl oblivious to the alien menace

The graphics

As I said, I am no artist, but I always wanted to try out pixel art. I have been following a few tutorials, and I am really satisfied with the results so far, and also with the speed. This was also the first time I tried doing actual sprite animations, and it was really fun. Creating those sprites was so fun that I added animations I could have probably left out just for the sake of it!

To further go with the B-movie alien style, I decided to use a lot of green, orange and purple: colors that gave me that alien feeling.

The alien goes in, the alien goes out. Ahah.

For this project, I used DawnBringer’s 16 color palette. It is cool, if not even awesome, and works like a charm. You’ve got only 16 colors, but they are so wisely chosen that you can actually use a single color for many different sprites in your game and you won’t miss having more choice! Use that yellow for shading skin, or foliage, or sand, or even water… Choosing this palette was surely a good idea.

DawnBringer’s 16 color palette in all its splendor

Unity, with its new 2D options, was a great asset in helping me to create the game. Just dragging and dropping the sprites in the level was enough to get started, and that really helped in speeding up the graphics pipeline. Making animations is also really fast and easy: you just drop multiple sprites in the scene and an animation is created for you! It is more problematic to switch between animations through code, however, especially with the new mecanim animation system which does not really help for doing simple animations, but I’m sure the Unity developers will improve that as well.

The first level of ICFTS, easy as pie.

As a nice touch, I made sure the particle systems used a pixelated material as well, so that the particles coming out of the fountain (or of the aliens’ innards) blend well with the rest of the graphics.

A note of caution, when doing pixel art: making good drawings is just not enough, you also need to correctly import, display and animate them in the game engine, otherwise you’ll lose the pixelated aspect! I’ve seen many games using pixelated images paired with bilinear filters to enlarge them, creating a bad effect. Keep that in mind!

The sleeping
At game jams I usually try to stay awake and do as much as I can in the first day, going to bed at 4 a.m. and waking up three hours later. This is fun when there are other people around, but it is not quite so fun when I am alone. I figured that all the benefits I’d get from having more work-hours would be wasted if I was tired, so I tried a different approach.

The first day, I woke up at a good 8 A.M (due to being nervous for the jam, or I would have slept more :D), and I worked all day till around midnight. As the clock ticked the midnight, I went to bed straight away. I woke up the next day at 9.30, and I took another hour of relax before starting.

It turned out that I was quite more productive in the fewer hours I had to work, and made up for the lack of hours with that. Scrap crunching, sleeping is the way!

Plus, I really LOVE sleeping, so yeah.

The sound effects
It was my first time using BFXR, and I was a little bit worried that it would be useful only for actual 8-bit games. After all, the games of the SNES era used pre-sampled sounds, and BFXR generates instead them on the fly, similar to what NES era games had. Instead, I was pleasently surprised, as I think the resulting sounds are good and appropriate.

In this case, my automation engineering knowledge really helped.

What? Automation engineering? What does that have to do with sound effects? It turns out that generating sound effects is just a matter of working with wave frequency responses, which is incidentally the same thing you do when engineering the control system of a robotic arm. Cut-off filters, amplifications, phasers, oscillations… these are concepts that are shared by both fields, and if you understand them in one, you can re-use that knowledge in the other. Knowing what happens when you change a slider in BFXR really speeds up the process and lets you achieve effects that would have been very hard with just randomly pressing buttons.An example could be the laughter of the girls when they are happy.

So, if you have studied a bit of control systems, get a shot with BFXR and see what you can do!

Look at all these robotic arms! Don’t they look cool? They sound like noisy musical instruments, if you try to listen. Like a badly tuned distorted guitar!

The code highlights

I rushed the coding part, since I had already experience with it. The mechanics were not hard to implement at all (no physics nor collisions made me happy) and the bulk of the effort was on figuring out how to implement the new design aspects. Code organization was straightforward, with a main game controller handling everything else, a grid code to handle the pipes and the aliens and girls having their own controllers.

Since I didn’t have enough time to do them by hand, I made all the levels random and just changed the seed, stopping and saving the seed when I found something cool. This was a good approach and easy to code, and I think I’ll use it again in the future.

The bad

“They’re coming outta the fucking WC!” – a girl that shouldn’t use those bad words

The rushed design

As much as I love inventing and designing (surely) weird and (hopefully) innovative games, this time I didn’t spend a lot of hours thinking about the concept.
Instead of focusing on finding a concept that would really click with me, I told to myself: “Michele (no, I’m not a woman. It’s an Italian name), I have an idea: you’ll take one of the first funny ideas that will come to mind and focus on its presentation, this time!”.

I followed my own advice, looking for the first funny, stupid idea: aliens from the sewers.

Needless to say, I didn’t resist the urge to take a few well known mechanics and mix and match them (I cannot seem to be able to limit to one mechanic :P). I chose two: tile-rotating and zerg-rushing (if you can call that a mechanic!).
However, this was not the best course of action, especially since I had decided to not allocated a lot of time to the design.

This. This is fun. Watching aliens eat people is fun. I’m on the right track!

Well, it didn’t turn out to be a really good idea. I didn’t spend enough time to refine the game design concept, and mixing tile-rotating and zerg-rushing was not so straightforward.

Remember, people: if you want to do an original design, you need a lot of time to perfect it. If you don’t have time for that, just make a random runner, people always love those. 😉 If you are in any way similar to me,  you will probably disregard this advice and try something original. After all, we are full of runners! Screw runners! Let’s try some weird mix of strategy, platforming and puzzle!!! I know I will repeat this error the next time. Life is too short to not try out weird mechanics synergies.

Ahhhh… a white, clean, porcelain WC in the open, it’s a dream come true!

The design was larger than expected and I found myself having to find solutions to many problems. How would the aliens move? At what speed? Where would they go when stopping? Do they idle? Can they go back? What if two aliens meet? What if an alien gets into a spawner (ehehehhe)? What if you rotate a tile with an alien it (for this one I did find a good solution, killing the aliens that were moving)? How would they attack? When? How many hits to kill? How do you win? How do you lose? Too many questions for so little time!

The funny thing is: I didn’t think it would be an original design and so I thought I’d have an easier time: I just took two random mechanic and added them together. I guess it’s not that simple, if you don’t have a reference game that already solved the small design issues. You know what they say, ‘the sum is greater than the parts’. That works also for complexity!

The problem appears already in level 2, as the spawner on the right is outright useless, and would be even if it wasn’t blocked!

Should I have dedicated more time to the design? Probably, yes. But I still had a blast with pixelating and sound and music making, so I’m happy anyway. I’ll surely try to better the design now, however, and many ideas have already come to mind. What if the multiple spawners must be used together, creating merged giga-rat aliens? What if the girls counterattacked? What if the pipes changed during the level? What if… you were the last alien on the planet and you made friends with a girl (disney drama, always works)?

The ugly

“Please, mr. doggy alien, don’t hurt me!” – a girl that is starting to learn what pain is.

The level design
I spent the last two hours of development making levels and testing them, using the randomization code I’ve written earlier about. The result is somewhat okaish, but it doesn’t keep up with hand-made level design. Also, the spamming really made it hard to create interesting levels. Note to self: next time spend more time to perfect the design, so the levels will be easier to create!

The timelapse
First time doing it…. and I took a shot every minute. I thought the result would be great. The result was CRAP. It looks like I have OCD (and I do, but that’s another story) and that I cannot focus on a single task (which I do too). Note to self: next time take a damn screenshot every second or so.

Bonus: the tidbits

Did I write ‘quartet’ in the introduction? Yeah, I did. Since I’m in a good mood right now, I decided to write a bit more for the knowledge-thirsty, letter-chewing readers (I know there must be at least a couple of you out there).
So, here are some random tidbits about the development of the game:

– I wanted to make the music sound alien, while also being funny and good for this kind of puzzle game. I did that by adding those semi-random notes played using a bottle flute with a phaser effect: my goal was to recreate something akin to what you hear in XCOM when aliens appear, and thus achieve that B-movie effect! I hope it turned out fine.

– Can you guess from which old game I took inspiration for creating the title? Here is a hint:

I live in colonies, but not in space. I love my queen, and know my place. Who am I?

 – “Killing small girls with aliens? That’s so cruel!” is one of the feedbacks I got about the game. But how did it turn out to be little girls? This is a funny story.

You see, at the beginning it should have been random people being killed (and indeed the girls’ sprite filename is Dude.xfc), but then, on Saturday, some parents decided to come by, bringing with them a shrieking small nephew. Needless to say, that killed my workflow focus for a few hours, and it seems the shrieks quietly (or not so quietly) made their way into the game itself!

In addition, I didn’t want to draw the whole clothes of the girl (drawing aliens is funnier!), so I left her with that long robe, which makes her look more like a small girl.

So, this is why there are small girls instead of dudes. Have fun eating them!

Closing words

Well, it was a good weekend of creative work, and good to take my mind off of the usual work. Also, I now have another small game to add to my portfolio, which is always good, isn’t it?

I hope my words were useful to you, in some way. If you have any feedback, feel free to comment!

See you next time! And also…

Play and rate!

I’ve had some really helpful feedback on my entry, so I decided to make some updates and put up a post-compo version. It reworks the economy and tones down the difficulty quite a bit, so hopefully should be a bit more fun to play.

Play Tokelau

I still have a few ideas I’d like to implement, so I’ll be making a few more updates before I’m done on this one.