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I recorded a timelapse of me making my Eurovision game. Sadly though, about 10 hours before the deadline the script crashed, just as I was recording some guitar for one of the songs in the game.

You can watch everything I did up until that point though:

What happened after this was:
– I did a lot of singing
– I made the animations for the bands

I’m really sad my script crashed, I would have liked to have the video in full, but this is all I have :'(

If you want to play my game, you can find it here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=49432

Hi guys and/or gals,

I’ve finally found some time to work on some new features in my Ludum Dare 32 entry, Word Weapon. The basic idea is that you type words that will have an effect on an enemy. I was wandering if anyone had any ideas about some words and their effects on the enemies or some enemy types.

Hey, all ! For those interested we made a video commentary about our game, The Gun Keeper.

You can find the game here :

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=10263

Hope you like it.

 

 

I decided to jizz things up a little for this Ludum Dare and try something a bit sexier than I’m used to. So after a brisk rub-down with a stiff wire brush, I settled myself on a bearskin rug and began work on Super Cupid, a ‘matchmaking simulation’ set in Ancient Rome…

Was I successful?

 

TURN-ONS

The arrows – I’m pleased with the central bow-and-arrow mechanic. It can be quite challenging to line up shots which pierce more than one target and I think this could be expanded into a decent full game.

The audio – The ‘music’ turned out surprisingly well considering I don’t generally have any aptitude for it. I stuck to something really simple, using drumbot to create a pattern of claps, and I think this was a good choice. Also, I’ve been getting lots of nice feedback about the ‘menage-a-trois’ and ‘orgy’ announcements…

The gods – The game features the ability to receive a blessing from one of three gods and I’m happy with the way these abilities worked and were gained. I think they’re balanced well with the rest of the gameplay. Unfortunately, hardly anyone seems to have noticed that they’re there!

 

TURN-OFFS

The graphics – ‘Functional’ would be a kind word to use.

The presentation – See above.

The instructions – I wrote a page of instructions on play but I think many players have skipped them and been confused as a result. This is my fault really – I could easily have worked most of the instructions into a simple tutorial in the time it took me to write them and I think this would have been better.

 

All in all, I’m pleased with how the game turned out and might even work it up into something longer in the future. As ever, I had a blast participating and I’m really enjoying playing all the other entries.

Play it here

“Smile in your face, Trash you in the back”

My #LDJAM – “Trashbag”; a kind-of… simultaneous love-letter to Saul Bass & hate-letter to the “designed to be trashed” philosophy of fashion-technology.

“Frustrated Cleaning”

Pick up fashion-trash, toss it in the air, hit it with your tyre iron, and launch it directly into the faces of the people who trashed it: Wasting the wasters.

Once more Ludum Dare … strips back our development philosophy to the bare, honest core.

And once more… an enormous… soul-growing experience.

I dunno man, it seems to me that… nothing forces your skills to evolve faster than a game-jam situation. A wonderful, exhausting thing.

I wrote a full, brutal post-mortem on our blog here.

“World of Wasters”

Developed in Unity 5 – a surprisingly stable experience coming from 4.6, albeit with some 2D-physics quirks.

Play it here! It’s kinda hip, I guess. I hope you get a kick out of it.

-Joshua
@DopplerInteract

This edition I’ve had a lot of fun, and I’m proud of the amount of work done, even if the game could use a lot of improvements. My unconventional weapon of choice was words, either to hurt or stun foes.

Play it and rate it here 😉

 

Tools

• Engine: Unity3D
• Coding: Visual Studio 2013 community edition
• Art: Graphics Gale, Photoshop
• Audio/Music: Bosca Ceoil, Audacity

What went right

Early start

This time I chose to wake up earlier in the morning in order to earn some more hours than in other jams. As a result (in addition to the obvious: increased time), it helped me come up with a core idea and decide on the technology really soon. The tradeoff was that I chose to do the same on Sunday, although I’d gone to bed awfully late. I’ve paid for that during the week at work, but here comes the weekend again to relax a bit

Clear tasks

This helped a lot with development and, to a lesser, more painful, extent, to cutting out features once the “LAST HOURS” bell rang.

Familiarity with the engine

I’m currently using Unity3D at work, so I’m pretty used to it these days for 2D. Visual Studio in its Community Ed. is also an amazing tool for coding, so both programs helped me develop a more or less solid code base quicker than I’d expected.

Improvements on art

I’ve tried to pay more attention to art in terms of colour, character and environment art plus animations, and I think the end result is better than in earlier compos. There’s still a lot of improvement on this area, but feeling that you’re becoming better with time feels immensely rewarding.

Late hour change in setting

The game was born with a sci-fi setting in mind. Rather than a grumpy teacher in a high school, I first had an agent infiltrating a building where the main antagonist, a Blade Runner’s replicant-alike character, was taking hostages with the help of some buggy androids. Her demand was for the Government / Big corporation to completely disable a module that made it possible to entirely shut an AI down with a special word or passphrase.

As for the bugs on the enemy AIs, they made them extremely faulty in the Language Processing modules, thus the “damage” and stun effects taken from the speech-related protagonist skills.

Quite different from the final result, isn’t it? I gave up on the idea while I was drawing the enemy sprites. I realised that I had no clear, consistent art style on how the rooms or characters should look like, so they were coming off as very generic, and the deadline was too close for a complete overhaul. As a consequence, I decided to ditch all this and go with a way simpler plot and theme.

Initially I’d put this in the “what went wrong” section, as in a way it feels a bit like sacrificing the original idea which in my mind was very promising. However, I’ve realised that the high-school setting may be better fitting to the current art style and tone than the original idea, even more so considering that the MacGuffin feature (the “death passphrase”) for the original plot, plus a couple of interesting gameplay features that would have complemented a shocky-but-unoriginal revelation, was never close to reaching implementation stage.

What went wrong

No level progression / design

In LD31 I had defined in paper the basic level layout, and I found that pretty useful back then. Here, however, it was way more vague, which was damaging in terms of scoping, art and a tiny little detail…FUN.

Still more effort on art required

Although the graphics look better IMHO this time than in previous editions that I’ve participated in, they’re still average at best. For example, I should have given some early thoughts to the art style in terms of colours, lighting, drawing style, etc, etc (and this is heavily dependent on having a better defined level design).

And, of course, the game is lacking a lot of animations. I created basic sprite templates for the four walking directions, but only the frontal one is showing up in the submitted entry. Also, there’s no feedback on when characters are using their skills or receiving their effects other than a text that shows up too fast. The “boring speech” skill text effect could help some more polish as well in terms of timing, spacing and so on.

Asset creation time badly scoped

Again, I underestimated the time it would take me to prepare a set of animated characters, plus several backgrounds, plus the HUD/UI (I’m not too concerned with the latter, though, as I can get some functional UI graphics pretty quick, but that’s still larger than 0). This was also a result of not having the general visual style or levels defined beforehand.

Last, my lack of experience using Graphics Gale also contributed to the sluggish pace at the beginning.

Unclear / buggy combat

Some glitches in detection ranges, timing and so on, coupled with the lack of art, made disabling enemies bland, which is an awful mistake when the player’s skills were the core of the game. This, again, took away points from…how was that called? oh, yes…FUN

Having a tutorial (even better, embedding it into the game itself) could have helped, but as always…Time.

Music / audio

4 hours before submission I was close to exhausted and lacked all the menu and game over functionality. Still I decided to get some music in. While I don’t think this is a mistake at all, I devoted too little time to get only some bass and percussion sequence which didn’t even properly loop. Also, I decided to cut on sound effects if I only had time to randomly pick a barely fitting sound on Bfxr.

What I learned

• Prepare stubs for basic animations & different visual styles.
• Clearer level/goal design: focusing 100% on feature development is all nice when you’re under no time constraints or working with other people. With so little time as 48h it’s probably best to have in mind the whole set of features to have a more iterative development cycle, and this includes having a vision of where the game entities will be, how they’re expected to interact in a basic playthrough and so on.
• Art: Practise, practise, practise.
• Improvements in tasking have helped especially in the coding area, but I still need to incorporate the remaining fields into the equation. A generic “animations” task card in Trello is worthless if you don’t know if you’re going to need 10 10-frame animations for each character or 4 frames to cover all movement and that’s it.
• Don’t fall too much in love with your idea and don’t fear cutting stuff out or even sacrificing things such as the plot if it’ll help you finish your game or have it more fun.
• Keep working on some set of useful code toolbox. This time I haven’t had the opportunity to use the libraries I’d prepared to support tile mapping, but I did reuse some tiny progress bar script for the health and eloquence bars. Not much, but…

Tags: post-mortem, unity3d

I’m very excited to have successfully completed my second Ludum Dare!  I’ve been working all week on implementing a lot of the feedback that I’ve been getting on my game and am releasing a post-compo version.  Thanks to everyone who game me feedback and already played it.

My game is a puzzle game disguised as a Debate Simulator titled The Great Debate.  Here’s a link to the entry page with the game on the top.  This is the version you should play for scoring.  If you want to play the cleaned up, streamlined post-compo version you can play it here.

It is categorized a puzzle game because the each round you pick a word that is given a score based on a secret scoring criteria.  At first you will just be picking words randomly, all the while you can try to recognize patterns and figure out what is going to maximize your score.  Then pick the highest scoring words you can for the remainder of the game to argue your opponent into submission.

The debate simulator is because you yell random sentences at each other with random words thrown in.  These sentences are actually totally meaningless, so it isn’t really a debate.  Actually, now that I think about it, it is very much like most debates on the Internet.

 

 

Post Mortem after the Read More…

---

 

The Good:

 

 

• The Idea – The theme was announced Friday night at 9:00 for me.  I thought about it for a while and went to bed at 11:00 with only a single idea that I thought was dumb.  A little worried, I went to sleep.  I woke up in the middle of the night with a brilliant idea to make a game about a CIA janitor who was asleep in the janitors closet when terrorists took over the building and he had to fight his way out using a mop, twin dust-busters (so he could climb walls) and whatever other cleaning supplies he could find.  I slept the remainder of the night and woke up… and decided to use my dumb idea from the night before.  I’m glad I did.  At first I wasn’t sure about the whole thing, but the graphics brought it all together.
• The Graphics – I’m really happy with how everything looks and works.  All the sprites and animations are only 4 frames, but they seem to flow.  Allowing different characters to face off in the debates adds to the feeling of absurdity that I wanted to capture.
• The Plan/Scope – I had a very limited list of must have features and there was no scope creep over the course of development.  I had a fully playable game with most of the art finished by the end of day 1.  Day 2 was all polish and content creation.  This was a nice feeling.  I also am proud that there is nothing in the game now that it is finished that wasn’t on the list at the beginning.
• Music – The music seems to bring about mixed feelings for people.  I got comments ranging from “the music is brilliant” and “the soundtrack kept me PUMPED for DEBATE, which is more than I say for my high school debate coach…” to “I didn’t feel the music really went with the game.”  The most telling for me was  Phil, who said “I found the music incredibly out of place, so much so in fact, that I awarded you extra points in humor for it” which is exactly the feel I was going for.  I love the fact that the music doesn’t fit the vibe of a debate.  I think it adds to the absurdity of the whole thing.  It was like when I went to a High School Robotics club competition and between matches they played this pulse pounding music to get everyone excited to watch these robots play soccer.  Out of place, but wonderful.  So I count the music a win.
• The Code:  The code is rushed and hacky, but I invested the time to make it easy to add new content.  This made it easy to add some needed content at the end of the competition.  The flow of the code is good, so I didn’t run into problems where I needed to add something to the game flow but couldn’t find where to put it.

 

 

The Bad:

• Nothing.  Nothing was bad.  There were mistakes made, but they belong in the Ugly category.  I didn’t even hit any bugs this time, which is a good thing.

 

 

The Ugly

• Word choice – A big part of the game’s humor comes from the MadLibs-like way that the chosen words are put into random sentences.  I used a big list of words to draw from.   Something like 50,000 of them.  I am a native English speaker and have a good vocabulary and I had never even seen most of them.  Some of the humor is lost when it inserts a word you don’t know into a sentence you can understand.  It is funnier to see “The Earth revolves around the poodle.” than it is to see “The Earth revolves around the mosander.”  The post-compo version has a greatly reduced word list and I think it leads to more funny comments.
• Game Speed – This was difficult.  It seems that most people who left some constructive negative feedback commented that the game moved too slowly and went on for too long.  They are correct.  I had trouble making the speed fast enough that people wouldn’t get bored but slow enough that people aren’t overwhelmed.  The post compo version strikes a balance between these by eliminating some of the extra notifications that don’t add anything to the game, and making all the different settings adjustable.  That way people who need the extra time to figure out the hidden scoring rules can increase the time they have to choose a word and the number of rounds, and people who want a challenge can turn up the speed.  On average, games play twice as fast now, which is a good thing.

 

Overall this was a great experience.  Thanks everyone!

This was my second Ludum Dare and I had a lot of fun again!

This time around I got a little too ambitious and had to cut some content at the end. I was not sure I was going to finish on time but I made it. I was planning on having another enemy type and a boss at the end guarding the herbs but I ran out of time for that.

I also wanted to spend more time on the level. I was thinking you would have to find the spells in the level before they could be used. I even have code setup for that.

I also did not get to spend a lot of time balancing the abilities. I did not really want the poison mist but I wanted more than one damage ability. (The thorn seed was the first thing that came to mind with the theme.) I was running low on time and I could not think of anything I really liked so I ended up leaving the poison mist in.

I did spent a lot of time on art since that is one of my weak points but I think it paid off. I still am not happy with my character art but the background turned out very nice.

Overall I can see an improvement over my last Ludum Dare game. I took all the comments I got to heart and worked on some of the weak points the community pointed out. Thank you all!

Play Wizard Rescue

Try the game here. You play as an invisible cyclist dodging tanks to deliver important intel back to HQ. Intended to be a twitchy endless runner style game:

My main goal for this jam was to do some nicer art than I usually do. I’m a programmer by trade and art is my biggest weakness so I normally go all out on gameplay mechanics/juics/feel. This time I wanted an excuse to try and up the look of my games or at least try some new stuff art-wise.  In the past I tried pixel art, which turned out ok. I wasn’t even planning to enter this time as my weekend was split up by airplane trips and work, but while waiting in the airport playing Crossy Road I though maybe I could try a voxel style game.

From that  premise arises two questions:

1.  How do I make voxel models? In the olden days I’d have to write my own tools and it’d take forever. Luckily I discovered Magica Voxel in a matter of minutes and had a test model exported to obj ready to go.

2.  How do I get my voxel models in the game? This turned out to be as simple as copying the exported obj and material file into my unity project’s asset folder and presto the model was in game!

After that it was mostly all down hill, whipping up some controls and object spawning, hooking up the intro and tank difficulty progression.

I wanted to get a lot more juice (particle  effects, camera shake, other polish) but I didn’t end up with enough time. The controls are a bit touchy and if I were to continue I would add more variety to the tanks and obstacles you have to avoid. But overall for the 8 hours-ish I put in it’s not too bad. In the end someone mentioned “really enjoyed the visual style,” which is what I was trying to aim for, so the game’s a success in my book despite it’s short-comings.

If anything, I hope I’ve inspired you to try out voxel art sometime. It’s fun and can look pretty good!

Thanks so much for all the comments to help tweak and improve the flow in this game. I always appreciate all the positive critiques and comments, thanks!!

—> Play it here! <—

I finally found my next favorite game! So… My favorite game for today is…..

Rabbit Escape!

Try this one too! Is damn cooooool!

And, if you don’t played yet, you can try my game too.

Ultimate booter

(believe me, i playing games since 1995 (well, i was born in 88 but took me a while to learn how to not eat famiclone controllers))

Hello everyone! In this post i want to talk about my experiences on Ludum Dare #32: An Unconventional Weapon. First of all i am new to this Game Jam things and have a little bit Unity3D experience. By experience i mean i have made a succesful Doodle Jump clone a year ago. My only big hope source was my huge knowledge of C++. I have learned so many stuff while Compo and after it so ill talk about them in time order. Here goes the story of Bird Quest!

Before the Ludum Dare

I was just looking around. Checking twitch chat and other stuff. My fault was not having a look on old ludum games. Like what people does for menus and stuff.

An Unconventional Weapon

Well, what a theme! It’s just too relax! You can do anything! Well, no. After 1 and half hours i had 3 different ideas.

1) Light as a Weapon

You guys know Alan Wake right. Think it in 2d platformer style. You have a flashlight and dark creatures haunting you. This idea was not possible because i dont have enough knowledge about collision detections. How can you check if flashlights light is colliding with enemy or not?

2) Money as a Weapon

This one was fun to think. You are a rich man. Very rich and greedy! An angel comes down to earth to punish you. Your punishment is you can only use money as a weapon! And people you have hurt before are attacking you. Gameplay is simply gun upgrading. Imagine a gatling gun made of dollars firing quarters! Too many pixel art and illogical backstory made me give up on this one.

3) An animal as a Weapon

Robot Wants Puppy is a game that fits too well into the this theme. Check it out.

When i remembered this game i decided i could make something with a bird instead of cat.

So my journey began!

How to Find a Path!

After implementing the bird. Throw and call back stuff. (You’ll see what i mean here) I made a simple enemy for testing birds attack. My first plan was enemies being guards as you are kidnapped by pirates or something. So if someone notices you he will chase you. For that i needed a pathfinding system. Unity only have pathfinding for 3D. But you can always use 3d things for 2d games right! NOPE! In order to use Unity’s built-in navmesh thingy things must be on X-Z plane. Not unlike Unity’s built-in 2d stuff which uses X-Y plane. So i was going to either flip everything and spend more time on future things because i will be using 3d colliders for a 2d game etc. or find another pathfinding system. (Incoming bad pun) On internet i learned that i need “a star”. But i havent used asset store before. And never going to pay for a algorithm. Also i am 17 years old now so it doesn’t make sense spending my dad’s money into something i may end up not using. So i placed a post here. Thanks to community my blog got a help comment. About a free A* package. Haven’t tried it though. I decided to stop spending time on this pathfinding subject and make my enemies just walk to player foolishly when they see the player.

Bird is flying

This is the only thing i have recorded while compo and i feel really bad about it now. I will probably just record some dev progress on next ones. Anyway as you see bird can fly, stop, kill enemy. There is no animation just simple sprites. It was my first time doing a grid sprite sheet and more importantly it was my first time using the animations in unity for animating a walking 2D sprites. I worked out better then i thought. But my art skills were worse then i hoped B(.

Last Hours

On last 4 or 5 hours i had no gameplay. Just enemies and the player with her bird. And no menu. That things done in a hurry. I used GUI buttons in Unity for first time. Made a shitty menu. Added a last minute second map. And i was ready to build.

You can’t build for WebGL on 32 bit

Apperantly B(. I still have this problem if someone could make a WebGL build for me it would be too awesome! Please, please leave a comment if you can help me with that! So i only made a Windows build. By the way end of submission hour was 5 am here. So after i uploaded stuff and took a shower so i could stay awake for a school day and leaved home.

 

Power of Community

Really, this place has a strong community. Thanks to everbody that helped me on any part of this thing!

I tried to play some of other peoples games on my linux computer at school. (Long story short we study for local informatics olympiads at school so i have a personal computer there) It just feels so good when some people just plays and comments to your game B).

There was no audio in my game. Because i really really have no idea how someone can make music. And time was limited so i didnt add any sound into Bird Quest. But ill learn about this stuff and add a music on my next projects. Even the music will be just 10-15 notes looping.

Bird Quest Compo Page

I did some minor changes on some sprites, added a tutorial and 2 new maps etc, and made a Post-Compo build. And also Linux and Mac builds. These arent tested i just clicked build here so please tell me if they work or not. I need to make a WebGL build my pc just can’t do it. Please someone help me with that. All i want is someone building my source and and giving me the build. Also i am planning to make a post about the nice entries i have found in a week. I don’t know maybe even some playtrough videos for them. So stay tuned! (Wow i did a post. It feels good.)

I wondered… how much are the votes I cast influenced by each other. What I mean is… how likely is it that a game, which received an audio score of 4, will also receive the score of 4 for graphics?

Finding this out would be very easy in something like R or Matlab… so I didn’t. Instead I made a webpage which kind of shows this.

Here’s a sample!

You can check this out for your own votes too.

Get stats about your votes here

Note: All the processing is done in your browser, so don’t worry, the super sekrit voting data never leaves your browser. It’s all JavaScript!

The tool also shows you how many of each rating you gave in each category, like this:

It also says how many compo vs how many jam game votes you cast.

Want it to provide more data? Let me know in a comment. Found a bug? Let me know in a comment!  The data that is copied however does not include comments, so I can’t provide graphs that relate to comments. Sorry…

If the instructions on how to copy data aren’t clear, or if they don’t work properly in a browser or operating system, please let me know. I tested it on Chrome 42 on Windows.

Get your stats!

Please don’t look at the JavaScript code too-too hard, as it’s a very ugly botch-job. It’s not code that is supposed to continue to work for years, just a quick and dirty implementation. If you would however like to expand on this, you can use it at will.

Hello guys, this ludum dare has been an excellent experience, a lot of this it’s because of your feedback.

Remember what I sad about Space Boy going for a regional event here in Brazil, well it was incredible, to talk with some professionals and receive their feedback, the positive and the negative, also we watched two lectures about brazillian games that are coming out in awhile.

So here you can see an article released about the event: http://jogosdaqui.com.br/2015/04/24/cobertura-do-evento-powerup-2/

Also if you don’t know about what Space Boy is, you can play it with the link below, it is about Fly And Shoot!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=23927

 

This edition was a lot of fun! For the first time we participated with a concept artist in the team and it was really helpful. We are really happy with the amount of work done even though the game isn’t as polished as we wanted it to be. We decided that our unconventional weapon should be light. Now, it’s time to think about what went right, and what went wrong.

Spheres

Our game is about a guy named Edward, who narrates the whole adventure. He wakes up on a strange island after a night of heavy drinking only to find himself abandoned by his friends. He must find the way off the island, but it won’t be an easy task, because there are strange glowing spheres hunting him. What are they? Where did they come from? Will Edward escape the island? Play the game to find out!

Concept of the game’s map

What went right?

• Idea – The concept of a game where the narrator guides you through the story and you fight enemies using light turned out even better than we expected.
• Voice Acting – Thanks to Elijah Lucian we have an amazing voice acting in our game. It sets the mood perfectly and ensures that the player will have a wonderful experience.
• Art – The game is looking very nice, considering it was made in less than 72 hours!

 

Screenshot from gameplay

What went wrong?

• Fighting – Enemies are very hard to kill at the beginning, but when the player learns how to fight they are too easy to kill and can be dealt with by only one flare.
• Size of the game – The game takes up a lot of disk space. But the problem is, we don’t know why. Packaged game takes up twice as much space as the project and that’s a really weird behaviour.

 

To sum it all up, the game needs more time spent on the design side and a little more work on the performance. We think it’s a very interesting concept and if we would go forward with it the game could turn out pretty great. We’re considering the post-compo version, but we’ll make the decision after the voting ends. Now we just want to gather feedback.

Gameplay video

You can play the game here

Please take a moment to rate it and leave feedback on our site.
We really appreciate this.

Fireline Games

Tags: fireline games, post-mortem, spheres

Here is the URL: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=39898

Also go to this link and get your game rated!!

http://goo.gl/forms/3ss7ES2NQp

PLAY GAME

Tags: ld32, unity3d

Hello again!

I have finally uploaded a new Wok Quest version with a lot of bugs fixed! Hope you like it! =)

Play and Rate Wok Quest here!

Tags: bug fixes, Ludum Dare, ogre pixel, wok quest

— You can play the game by clicking here —

I say this Ludum Dare entry went along as I wanted to go — give and take a few features. “Ay Pinatas!” is my fifth game to enter Ludum Dare. (You can see my other entries in my journal.) I’m glad to get the general idea all completed and some people who have played it seemed to enjoy it too.

Now, I would like to share my development story on how it all went — my postmortem report!

The good:

• Enemies & combat – This time, for a change, I managed to add enemies in the game. Without it, the game would had suffered the same fate as my previous entry “Parallel Worlds.” While I had more enemy ideas during development, I’m glad to have three different kinds programmed. The homing pinatas is my favorite and shows that I still know my trigonometry! The combat is simple enough, but I wanted to key things up to add bonuses for destroying more pinatas in a short time — a spree. The spree is important for scoring.
• Animation – Exhausting, but happy to get the player’s animation done! It wasn’t easy due to a couple factors: 1) small resolution — only 12×12 pixels; 2) 8-directions. Time consuming, but was able to cut corners with flipping.   Sadly, I wasn’t able to add different enemy sprite art other than the generic “evil pinata ball.”
• Special effects – I love the confetti explosion! What irks me is memory leakage overtime. I don’t know how Flixel recycle particles, so that is something I needed to find out soon.
• Camera – It was simple thanks to Flixel. Although, I was especially proud to fix the camera range (the area which the camera can pan) so it prevent unnecessary scrolling.

The bad:

• No audio – Once again, I had to sacrifice my time with the audio to finish the game. I find the programming to take 1-1/2 days to get the game running, but I still got more to do at that point.
• Level design – Because I had only 2 hours left, I didn’t put a lot of time designing levels. So, the world is quite short to what I had in mind. Most of the blame is how to save the level design into a file and embed it into Flash. I was using single text numbers to represent tile types. While that is a good idea, I was out of luck when I’m up to 10.  Time was short, so I didn’t bother with that flaw.
• Lack of pizzazz – I wanted to add more effects to add excitement to the game. While I got the confetti done, I still had more to include to express more excitement.
• Candy Meter Implementation – It’s an interesting feature to not overfill yourself with candy; you’ll explode! Although, there was no warning to you to not overfill other than what I’ve said on my description. I was intending to add a candy meter to illustrate how dangerously close you are to overfilling.
• No story – I had a story in mind to help explain what the main character is and why it’s stuck with a sweeper instead of a broom. The story is a factory making state-of-the-art pinatas that mistakenly turned against humans. One pinata is on the humans’ side, which is the main character.
• No title screen – Like ouch! My last few minutes was spent to spruce up the levels and add enough enemies. So I had no time at all to add a title screen.

At this point, I wanted to develop a post-competition version of “Ay Pinata” to add what was missing or just to improve what I couldn’t during development. (I really wanted to add sound!) Be sure to keep in touch for the latest development on that. Here’s a teaser on what that version would look like:

Hope you could give “Ay Pinata!” a try and share your comment on the page! Thanks for playing and rating my game!

Tags: postmortem