yeah; lots of thanx for all the uplifting comments on Sewer Rat Racer.

keeping up the LD vibe with my post game…already some major improvements are being made in the sewer/rat gameplay experience: physics, esp: stunt jumping, water and camera movement..next up is some better AI for the others

here are some screenshots of ‘Whiskers McBiskit’ in the playground/lab area..

posing with the the shiny ratski

doing an actual salto

the underwater experience

Hi there, Daniel Snd here!

Alright, as promised the first tutorial for my new Video Tutorial Series on 3D Game Art is up It teaches how to make the dungeon floor. (The tutorial series will cover how to create all the assets for a simple/generic dungeon crawler game. Next up is the walls!)

I have recently made a small update to my game (post-compo). This update
fixes a bug on android related to putting the game in the background, and adds a much needed tutorial!
(Never underestimate how confusing your game can be, no matter how simple you make it)

Feel free to get it from this link.

And if you haven’t rated it yet, please play it from here.

My second game available to the public, all because of Ludum Dare. Love you guys

Tags: android, java, libgdx, play store, post-compo

I was interested in attempting to categorize how the games this round related to the theme.

You can take a look at my work in progress here: https://github.com/evilseanbot/ld29cat. If people want to suggest additions submitting a pull request would be the easiest way.

Some rough statistics about the games I played:

• 22% are set underneath the water or have an important element underneath the water.
• 49% are set underneath the ground or have an important element underneath the ground.
• 10% involve removal of dirt tiles via digging, explosions, lasers, etc.
• 5.3% involve being “Underneath skin” (Including my submission)
• 5.3% are platformers where there are characters on two sides of a mirrored surface that are controlled simultaneously.
• 4% you control submarines.
• 1.3% you control a scuba diving bear.

I quite enjoyed myself making my roguelike, Beneath the Town for my first Ludum Dare.  The entire energy of the coding was quite motivating, especially at 2AM running on caffeine from tons of Pepsi and Coffee.  I made my game in python and used the programs notepad++, and the library libtcod.

If there was anything I could change I would:

– Get more sleep on the day before the Ludum Dare so i can stay up later.

– do a bit more research and practice before the Ludum Dare

– Buy more coffee

– Actually listen to my alarm the first time

– Add/work on more sound

– make a nicer main menu

Some of my best experiences during this Ludum Dare were:

– Meeting all of the other game developers

– playing loads of fun games

– feeling accomplished at finishing my first game jam at the age of 14

All and all I had a lot of fun working on my game, even if I did get a little flustered with bug fixes and working on getting the .EXE set up, which I actually had to add the next day, submitting a batch file at the submission hour with my source files.  It was a great experience, and you can bet I’m in on the next Ludum Dare in august. See you guys then!

Hi guys!

I’ve been working on a new version for my game Within The Blue after the Ludum Dare 29.

If you’re interested you can play it here

Hope you like it!

A short list of “tricks” I used this jam to manage. I only had a couple of hours to work on something, but I still consider it my best LD (disclaimer: it’s my second).

Try it here!

1. If you think you will not finish, change the game around. Cut scope, you can always hack in some gameplay if you are really out of time. In Sub Bomber the player jumps through gates and scores points. This was only put in the game the last hour before submission.
2.  Programmer and no time/skill in art? Keep it simple and add particles, in the development of Sub Bomber I would say a good 1/4th of my time went to the particles and it was worth it.
3. Your game doesn’t need a menu if it means you won’t finish your game because of it.
4. Performance sometimes doesn’t matter, in Sub Bomber the bubble-particles still spawn above the sea, they hide the next frame (you can see this). To do this it has to iterate past hundreds of particles and check the position, but in a jam game it doesn’t matter, what does matter is your time.
5. Using different instruments for different tracks with the same melody is a nice way to save a lot of time and prevent repetitiveness. It allowed me to create the music for sub bomber in 20 minutes (6 tracks).
6.  Changing the pitch of your music to around 50% tends to make for some nice game over music.

Oh and by the way, the highscore is 58 ;).

Try Qp !

Will you be faster than Bp and fix the oil leak on the ocean floor ?

Some comments so far :

Tricky though, that swinging motion of the bucket got frustrating in a good way XD. 

Nice mechanics for the swinging, very innovative I love it ! Great work

Amazing Game! Almost a perfect score! I enjoyed it so, so very much.

It’s pretty easy to get down when you take your time, but when you try to get down faster it gets exponentially harder!

 

Try it ! and rate it !

Follow us on twitter : @_jpcote_ @sfleroux

Seen a few of these posts, good for any nifty ones that people might’ve missed!

Anyway, having played over 100 now, here’s some of the best I’ve played thus far!

5. Arctic Antics

Aww look at the cute little OrcaAAAARGH

If it’s not already obvious by the rest of these choices, I’m a sucker for lovely pixel art.  This simple game sees you skatin’ around collecting pages while a vicious killer whale noms away at the ice to get you.  Great example of the hard-to-control-em-up and generally adorable.

4. The Loudest Ballerina

Whatever was consumed when this was made, I’d quite like some

Your father’s given you some steel ballet shoes, and there’s a slumbering monster beneath the dance hall.  Can you balance the perfect performance with minimal noise?  Bonkers and original concept, simple gameplay and wonderfully presented.

3. Where Is My Bone?

Wif!

Fantastic little adventure game with a dark twist.  Find the right scents to dig in the right spots and uncover the greatest mystery of all: Where is your bone?

3. Deep Blue Home

Glub!

Nice little exploratory MetroidVania-esque game. Fish your way through a few puzzles ‘n obstacles, upgrading your abilities as you go.  A well contained little package, just the right length and lovingly presented too!

1. Beneath the City

Admittedly “Stealth” and “Roguelike” are enough to make my ears twitch…

Fantastic little Thief-esque Roguelike.  Guard movements and vision telegraphed expertly, controls simple, nice little bit of story on top.  Whole thing looks gorgeous too. (AND there’s no overlong animations of a window being opened.). Would gladly play a full game of this, with a bit of the ol’ lock-pickin’ and loot-stealin’ on top of it!

I’m still digging (*ahem*) through the (absurdly huge) list of games.  Loads of great work’s gone into ’em.  If you haven’t already, check out my game Hot Diggity

Solution? Use a laser. And if that don’t work, use more laser.

It’s a zany dig-ore-upgrade-self game but you’re piloting a barely controllable drilling machine that you gradually build-up as you go.  Lots of explosions, shiny ore and a great bit gaping death-maw thing chasing you.  My current record’s 1300m odd, but I think that’s been bested by a few people!

First Ludum Dare was TERRIFIC! Although I never felt like polishing up my game and adding new levels and so on… I did enjoy this game jam and look forward to the next Ludum Dare. Here’s a walkthrough/gameplay video of my game, Under Soul:

Well, that was a fun first Ludum Dare ! I would like to thanks first everybody who gave feedbacks and advice, it really helps and motivates to do better next time.

So first, things that didn’t go as planned :

• The music. Man, this was way harder than expected, and went so bad that the game has none. Will have to practice for the next or switch to the Jam category with someone better than me at it.
• The gameplay. Even if the game is playable, the fact that the difficulty is always the same prevents player from playing again
• The animation. Currently, the character isn’t animated but is “x reversed” when changing the direction. I also strongly believe that’s the reason why it is unclear if the miner is running towards the crates or they’re falling on him. It’s the second option by the way.

So these are the major flaws of the game/development, but some good still comes from it :

• It runs ! That’s the first step, but it’s important to point this out.
• The game engine : Phaser.js. I chose it 30 minutes before the beginning of the jam, and it has proven to be really well made and easy to use.
• Theme. To be honest at first I didn’t like the theme, but now I think this pushed me to work more on the game and its graphics. If I had more knowledge in design, I would have wanted to make one cool background rather than a rock texture.

For a jam where my goal was to make a gam which is playable and a little fun, I like to think I reached, even for 5 minutes, those objectives. I will do my best to participate in the next one !

Okay, here are some more games I’m really excited about. In the last two days I seem to have come across a handful of fabulous games that deserve all the praise they can get.

So, in no particular order:

The Loudest Ballerina — Really cute and well-executed game about ballet and giant monsters. Intrigued? You should be. Go play it — this is a five-star game in nearly every category.

Enderscope’s Game — A peculiarly wonderful idea that is a joy to explore. You are performing laparoscopic surgery to cut out a cancerous tumour from a patient. First person and 3D. And quite an experience.

Magma — Mechanically-simple game in which you set out to destroy a the inhabitants of planet who are “mired in sins, mortal sins”. Some killer, earth-shaking music just completes this impressive package.

Watch Your Step — A resource-gathering, sidescrolling, semi-survival game with fantastic art design and addictive gameplay.

Doomsday Bunker — This is most definitely the entry I played for the longest — probably way over an hour. And that’s a testiment to just how bloody good it is. The premise is simple: “Build your doomsday bunker! Survive the air raids! ” But the gameplay has a lot more complexity, and stuff like UI and graphics are so well polished.

A Happy Place — Slow and surreal death in an underground shelter. A memorable mood piece; evocative and beautifully minimal.

And the Moment is Gone — An introverted, experimental conversation game. It brilliantly depicts the pains and anxiety of such situations through an innovative game mechanic. I definitely feel like I can relate to this one.

The end of the list… That means it’s time for some self promotion! You can play my game here. Some of my favourite comments include “The perverse and nearly erotic descriptions are perfect”, “That was some dark shit… Well done”, “It’s hard to fight the urge to just stop playing and close the window”, ” I don’t think I’ll sleep well tonight knowing what I’ve done” and ” I feel like crap now… ” Who says games are fun?

I’ve noticed something: it appears that the later you rate games on the site, the less it affects your “default” rating, which affects how likely it is you’ll get precedence for rating games.

This seems kind of counter-intuitive; we don’t want people to game the system (the dreaded “L”, heh) but if you want to get the most exposure it would seem that you have to rate things pretty much as fast as you can. I’m not necessarily the kind of guy who wants to cruise through 50 games in the following 24 hours of the jam, especially if I’m burnt out from making my own game. I’d rather take the time to play through 5 or 10 games a day and actually enjoy them instead of feeling like I need to conduct a ratings blitzkrieg.

I’m just not sure “how fast” you rated games should apply as strongly as it does now, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who doesn’t necessarily have the time or energy immediately following LD to knuckle down and thoughtfully play through a couple dozen games before we start getting penalized for late judging.

Not trying to raise a stink, but I thought this was worth bringing up and considering.

This bot posted what seemed to be a legit post:

But then…

The bot goes by the name of 25juta.

And it shall be shot at dawn.

Thanks admins, for defending the city of Ludum day and night

LD29: Upper Crust

What went right:

• I typically scan through voting rounds 1-4 results before Friday to generate some ideas. I felt the “world-switching” idea for “beneath the surface” was the strongest one I had this time around. (Granted, the idea was a rip-off of A Link to the Past.)
• I’m happy with the art. I’ve learned to work (rather quickly) with my sketchy “hipster art” style. I feel I pushed myself a bit further than last time, especially with the tileable spirtes. It’s still a little flat and distorted compared to trained artists, but it’s definitely good enough.
• I didn’t create all the little mechanics that I’d initially brainstormed, but I was pleasantly surprised with what I did get in place and how it fit together. The comment that mentioned “unconventional combat” felt good. Up to that point, I didn’t consider this idea much more novel than the standard top-down action-adventure.

What could have gone better:

• There’s decent use of the world-swapping, but it could have been better. I wanted the overworld to feel “safe” (hence why there are no enemies and you heal there), but it never became anything more than a waypoint.
• As pointed out in the comments, the mana system was unnecessary. I still think there might be some use for it, to prevent you from just “teleporting” out of every sticky situation. It would need a lot of tweaking, though. Perhaps independent cooldowns on teleportation and lava burst would work better.
• I feel like I phoned in the music. A few more takes and I could have ironed out some of the rough bits. I didn’t stretch myself with the Underworld guitar–it was what came comfortably to me rather than what fit the mood. I did stretch myself on the Overworld, but that means gratuitous mandolin which can be a bit jarring (it’s not my forte).

What went wrong:

• Livestreaming. I assumed some of the glitches I was getting in Windows Saturday night was the result of livestreaming/recording (as my gamedev laptop is pretty mediocre). I didn’t have any viewers on my stream, so I shut it down. Now, I wish I’d at least recorded the full weekend to video so I could put together a timelapse.
• This concept uses a lot of colliders–camera boundaries, pickups, enemies, hazards, clickable areas, etc. I wasn’t prepared for how colliders from two separate overlapping worlds might (unintentionally) interact. I didn’t fully understand which items should cause triggers versus collisions until later in the development. I lost a lot of time to bugs that just “appeared” when I added a new feature, and patched them with the code equivalent of spit, gum, and duct tape. A bit more planning into my physics layering and hierarchy and a bit less premature optimization would have been helpful.
• PlayerController.cs is a hideous god object singleton that rules over the dystopian wasteland of game state with an iron fist. I started sticking player-related state there, and at some point just decided to put all my game state there, too.
• I hadn’t looked at UTiled in a while and I’m not an expert on optimizing graphics. Saturday night I first noticed the tile maps weren’t displaying pixel-perfect and panicked. Scaling down to 640×480 was a time-saving hackfix, but it was disappointing. ViNull pointed out that my problem was in Unity texture compression settings, so it was a quick, simple post-compo fix.
• I had an idea for a monster that would stand in place and hurl fireballs horizontally or vertically if you passed by. Since it wouldn’t be as easy to kill as rock monsters or avoid as lava, it would have added variety. Unfortunately, it was way down the list and didn’t make it in.
• I started level design way too late. Saturday night I sketched out the 4 levels, and by Sunday I was too stressed to keep going once I built them out. I could have used more of the breakable rocks and enemies to add some variety to those levels. After playing through the game a few times post-jam (plus Armanky’s Strawberry in the Underworld, which does “world-swapping” better than I did), the squandered potential was painfully obvious.

Tags: ld29, postmortem

 
Annoyingly long Time lapse:)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc70oYXsIf8

What went badly

As you can see in the time lapse that my original idea for the ending was a rap battle. I thought that this would be funny and a nice climax to the game. Turns out, yep you guessed it, I am not a pro rapper. It would have been helpful as I wasted a lot of time attempting to record and write a rap ahaha. Luckily I realized before it was too late and before I had done any art for that part.

Like everyone I hadn’t planned for so much fucking real life shit to get in my way and I spent so much time running errands and getting impatient waiting for busses. It was good to get out and clear my head though and I think it helped me to work harder later on.

After the rap battle thing didn’t work I was a little lost with what to do. Luckily it was all fine and the last room (The Temple one) was actually one of my favorites. But it shouldn’t have been. It shouldn’t have been okay but I got really lucky. This leads to my next point:

I should have planned more. My advice to others before it started was to plan and my plans weren’t as detailed as they should have been.

Player testing. Not one person had touched my game before I entered it. There could have been some game breaking bugs that I hadn’t seen or that occurred on different PC’s.

I had planned to add a section about how to help someone you know/yourself and I had already written it as a little extra thing that you could choose to read or not but I didn’t have time/energy in the end to implement. I do plan on adding this to all my games in future though.

There wasn’t as much gameplay as I would have liked. My first idea (which you can see in the time lapse) was to have a hugging game where two players were made to hug and sit on each other while playing. This was lots of game play unlike how it turned out. Maybe at least a few more quiz rooms would have helped the player learn more and have more fun.

What went good:

I leant a lot about animation. I discovered a style of animation I had never tried before but really enjoy. Along with this I found that I can make games that don’t use pixel art and can still very much enjoy making them.

Making a game about something I cared about. I still had drive to make the game when I woke up on the second day and that I am pleased about. Motivation is so important and I got lucky.

Getting lots of food and sleep. I wasted a lot of time eating and sleeping but worked harder from that with better energy that I think reflects into the game.

Wrote a Post mortem for the first time:)

According to the comments on the submission I had indeed helped people learn a bit and have a fun time being a snail and that is more than I could have possibly asked for when making it.

Cheers to everyone that played and commented on the game. I love the Ludum Dare community!

-SEN0RDIABL0

Yeah, it’s THIS cryptic game

Hello everybody! Here I am with my first postmortem to my first entry ever in Ludum Dare.

First of all, sorry for my bad use of english, I’m spanish.

Let’s start

What went right:

• The minimalistic art style seems to work pretty well with the whole game. So I’m happy with the idea
• Seems to be hard to get all secrets to most people, this is a right thing to me!

What went wrong:

• Maybe my entry was a little too cryptic, because nobody seems to understand the game. This maybe is a fine thing, and it’s good that some people enjoy the game with alternative interpretations or whatever
• Some bugs, like the background’s weird lines or some performance issues in old computers / computers with a lot CPU use.

And now, let’s explain the ten secrets. If you didn’t play the game, this is the moment to go and play it, and after that, you can read this and see what in hell you’ve been playing to. You can play Greys here

The secrets:

1. Oh… .    You just started to know a person, and one of the first things you see of it is the things that the person doesn’t tell you (Obviously, when you know somebody, “somebody” doesn’t tell you all his life, because this will be weird). Because you are not a friend yet, or the person isn’t confident enough with you, this things are in a jail.

   

   Yeah, only nine to go!

2. He… is dead? The person you started to know maybe have some relatives that are dead, if someone you know it’s parent-less you just don’t tell him a parent-related joke, because you don’t want to be a jerk, do you? (The symbolism here is that the “dead pixel” is a amount of greys, that are the same greys that the main character animation. So maybe you are the dead person? )

   Maybe this is a creepy one…

    

3. What…? Here the main character started to know the bad part of this person, but sometimes this person shows the main character his good part, making the character a little confuse.

   What what what?

    

4. Soul States: This maybe is a little too freak: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato’s_tripartite_theory_of_soul  I just add the grey one to show a mix of all the three. (Grey is a mix of white and black)

   Hi plato!

    

5. See something? Appetitive part of the soul. The part in charge of the love, because of this, this part is in a red colour. The black part of the map just represents the bet that you have to do to seek love. (Blind love)

   

   Blind love…

6. Clearer here… Background stops to get darker here and begins to get clearer. This represents the true person that is behind the good parts and the bad ones. But you already know the bad parts, so the screen always show something black to reminds the character that.

   

   This is a heart, is beautiful!

7. You remembered some stairs… I know it, you don’t like this secret xD, this represents the best part of the person, and the “seems impossible” way to reach it. So the secret is a white square! …. Yeah, not so smart here

   

   White like my heart white (8)

8. The background is the key. If you keep an eye in the background you see three “greys” but in the bottom of the photo are  4! This represents the weird parts of a person, the “freak” part that amuses you.

   

   Hide

9. White or darker grey? In this room you choose a side. If you choose the grey path you will leave the room with nothing. If you choose the white you leave the room with a four greys secret. This represents the main character itself, with lighter greys in the secret.

   

   Greys everywhere!, Good choice ;)

10. Christine’s heart: Just a name guys! A name to the person that the main character gets to know. Or not?… This represents the many states of a relationship between two human beings. (The heart have multiple greys)

    

    The end

I hope you all enjoy with my bad english, see you 😉

Tags: greys

(Originally posted to ViNull.com)

The twenty-ninth Ludum Dare was my third and the second time the Knoxville Game Design (KGD) meetup participated as a location.  The last time the KGD took part there was much press coverage that still seems a little surreal.  Less press this time, but five games were made by members over the course of a weekend.  (Hey, now is a good time to sign up for the KGD mailing list to get meetup reminders!)

Meet #TeamNeel

Instead of entering the solo “compo” I choose to enter the “jam” with a team (if that sounds confusing read the FAQ).  The team was comprised of myself, my oldest daughter Rachel (13) and my second daughter Hannah (11).  Both Hannah and Rachel have experience making games with Scratch and App Inventor as well as knowledge of Inkscape and Gimp.  I offer experience in Unity, Audacity, Reaper, and Paint.Net and together our powers combined to form #TeamNeel.  The hash tag is required, as is making the finger sign when said aloud.

The Good

In the early DFA backer videos, Tim Shafer explains his process for designing a game.  I’ve used his process multiple times with great success (in short, spend a good chunk of time free writing and after a bit you’ll have a game design).  This was the first time I went through the process with someone else (Rachel – Hannah was on a school trip Friday night).  The results did not disappoint – we met the theme “beneath the surface” with a hidden object game mixed with a film noir plot in a jungle setting.

I set up a Kanban board on Trello and gave a brief explanation of the process to Hannah and Rachel.  I was surprised by how efficiently this made everything.  I’m a big believer in agile but I didn’t expect it to work so well with two team members that had never used any project management system before.  The girls got the concept of a pull flow, breaking up tasks into small self contained units, and working on one task at a time until it’s completed so well they even told me when I hadn’t updated my own tickets.  I fear the day they learn about code reviews!

I’ve always wanted to make a game with voice acting, for fun and for the experience.  In the alternate reality where I make games for my indie studio full time we always include voice acting.  In this reality it’s a bit harder to pull off.  On Sunday we were sufficiently along in development that we could record lines for all the characters (with special guest Cicelie reading for the Sexy Toucan).  We’re not going to win any awards with our voice talents, but in context of a game jam I think we did a really good job.

Having a game with this much dialog and voice acting meant a script had to be written.  This was another first for me, and I used a table layout in Word that I saw Tim use in a DFA video.  I transferred this data to XML and the bulk of the game’s code was reading and rendering the dialog (and playing the audio dialog at the same time).  The table system I used was a simple three column layout with a column for the speaker, the dialog, and what characters should be on screen when the line is seen.  I had some issues (mentioned below) but overall this was a helpful process that I’ll use again.

Rachel created all of the objects and scene art in Inkscape and Hannah created all of the character art Gimp.  When it came time to create the credits screen they collaborated, but not without an argument of which tool was better.  I wonder if Gimp vs Inkscape will be as big as Vi vs Emacs.  Probably not – both Gimp and Inkscape are useful whereas Emacs is just taking up hard drive space.

The Bad

I mentioned the script above, and the problem I had most was keeping the XML and Word file in sync.  I initially assumed I wouldn’t need to keep them in sync, that once I converted all the dialog to XML I would no longer need the Word file.  In reality the Word file was printed out for reading during the recording session and needed to match the game exactly.  There may be a tool out there that exists to solve this problem and I plan to find it or write it before I do another game dialog script.

The plan was to create a click and point adventure game, which quickly became an hidden object game, which almost became a visual novel.  We had to cut some puzzle scenes to fit in the voice acting but if I’m being honest those scenes were not worth keeping.  Designing actual puzzles takes a lot of time, and I think you could only do it well in a game jam if you had a team member who did that part full time.  Still, I would have liked to have more interaction in the game than what we ended with.

The Ugly

I don’t have anything for this section.  Nothing went wildly off the rails, we never lost hours to a bug or gameplay issue, and no road blocks ever shut down progress.  This will ever happen again in my lifetime.

Closing Thoughts

I really enjoyed sharing my passion for game development with my daughters and look forward to doing it again.  To all the parents, siblings, and friends I highly recommend making a team and entering a game jam.  Game design combines so many different disciplines everyone has something to offer to the process and there is something to learn for everyone as well.  Not to mention it’s a lot of fun!

I’ve noticed something from my game jam games – I tend to create “experience” games rather than “mechanic” games.  Each of my Ludum Dare games have been designed to complete in a single play session of 5-10 minutes long, with no intent of replay value.  Several of my game ideas are either for a similar games, or designed around key moments.  I don’t think this is a good or bad thing, but I think it’s good that I can identify a design bias.  Not sure if I will lean into this bias more or force myself to create a mechanics driven game next.

You can play Jungle Noir at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=19362

As I’ve done for my prior games, here is a time-lapse of the development:

Tags: jam, postmortem

Instead of doing a traditional postmortem per se, I decided to do a video playthrough of my LD29 entry with some light, befuddled commentary :

Hopefully it’s not too boring to watch (or just to flick through). Mostly just talking about the game from a design perspective instead of how I made it.

You can play the entry RIGHT NOW :

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=26427

Day One Summary

Day 1: Morning
I woke at about 8am. I powered up my computer, got breakfast, and mulled over the theme while chatting on IRC.

I decided pretty quickly that I would make an overhead 2D game that involved strip mining the land. I had no real idea what the game would become at that time. My first task was to draw some terrain textures, and get code in place to render a terrain.

I realised straight away that to make the terrain look nice, there would have to be nice transitions between the different terrain types. And I really needed a minimum of 4 types: grass, dirt, water, and land that had been stripped.

Blending between two tile types is easy, as the transition can be part of the texture proper. But with 3+ tile types, the sheer quantity of transition tiles becomes unrealistic to draw. After some discussion about this on IRC, I decided to do layered textures (which was the solution I was leaning towards anyway).

This means that many kinds of terrain can be drawn with transparency, stacked on top of each other. I wanted to get this up and running with a scrolling camera by noon. Which I did much to my delight with literally 5 minutes to spare.

Day 1: Afternoon
Throughout the morning, I had developed a couple of different ideas for what this strip mining would be about: It could be people digging for gold and gems, birds digging for worms, or pigs foraging for truffles — either way it would be generating an income for buying stuff.

With my fondness of the strategy genre, this harvesting mechanic reminded me of Warcraft II. The idea of using income to buy fighting units to stop enemy harvesters appealed to me. So that was my goal.

I’d attempted to make an RTS once before for LD24, but that didn’t go to plan. The difficulty with it was:
– It was 3D, which needs more work for pretty much everything.
– Path-finding took too long to set up.
– Combat system was over-complicated.

My game this time was 2D. I needed to ensure I had simple path-finding and simple combat system.

So it was now time to start making some characters to populate this land. My first attempt at drawing birds was not very successful, and I feared that pigs would all look alike. So I settled on human characters with pig workers.

The basic character sprite was drawn and animated, and then copy-pasted, modified and recoloured into six other characters. All together that drawing took me about 3 hours.

The next couple of hours before dinner were spent adding units into the game, and perfecting their collision detection/reaction.

Day 1: Evening
As day one passed the half way point, my next step was to add unit group selection. And since orders can be targeted at both units or areas, I needed to be able to differentiate between clicking points on the terrain and clicking on units. I tested this initially by having units follow other units if I right-clicked on them, or simply to move to the clicked point if I right-clicked terrain.

I spent all of the evening fleshing out this order handling system, as it was the core of the game engine. This included writing an auto-attack subroutine, whereby units could assign themselves an attack order if there are hostiles nearby.

Day 1: Night
By about 10pm, I realised I needed a HUD! No good me having this fancy order handling system if I couldn’t select which order to assign!

The button images were drawn at this time, mostly by copy-pasting bits from my sprite sheet. Plus I wrote a few lines of code to detect the mouse hover/click events over the buttons. The HUD wasn’t functional at this time.

At around midnight, I started writing my game music. This took me about 2-3 hours more I think. I’m not sure when I fell asleep.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=5745