My long-winded post-mortem for my Ludum Dare #16 entry, Cubees.

Background Information
This was my first Ludum Dare game. I’ve been working on games for about a year, and programming for about a decade. I’m not much of an artist, but I make due. I try to make up for that with more creative scripting techniques.

What Went Right

• Solid Start. Fifteen minutes after the start if the competition I starting outlining the core gameplay mechanics. After another fifteen I had finished with the essential elements I needed to have in this game.
• Rapid Prototyping. Four and a half hours in, I had a prototype for basic island generation and character movement. Five hours in, I had the hidden/reveal mechanic implemented. Nine hours in, I had the procedurally-generated islands completed. At this point, the game itself, save for a Win condition, is done. This allowed me to focus a day and a half on polish.
• Optimization. I’ve never used meshes this extensively, but because each tile, fog for each tile and decoration (mountain or village) were additional meshes, the graphics because very expensive, very quickly. I had never used the combine mesh functions, but they performed extremely well, reducing draw calls by 90%.

What Went Wrong

• Downtime Scheduling. I had slept most of Friday leading up to the start of the competition, in the thought that I would be able to work for 48-hours straight, which I may have been able to do a decade ago. I did get 7 hours of sleep Saturday night, and I took a 3 hour nap on Sunday, but I didn’t realize how exhaustive hour after hour of intense mental work really was. My scheduling for breaks, downtime, and sleep, weren’t ideal and it caught me by surprise.
• Music Prep. I didn’t have any music in mind. I had succumb to the realization that I had no idea how to generate this, and would just leave it. Late in Day 2, though, I figured it out, and it cost me at least an hour trying to find the right software, playing around with it, exporting, converting, and importing. Had I prepped for this, I could have changed this 60 minute chunk, into 5 minutes.
• Final Build Prep. I had never built for Windows using Unity before, and with my first test I only copied half of the files I needed. This was a pain considering that I only had about half an hour until the deadline. Figuring this out before, just as with the music, would have saved time in the critical last few hours.
• Not Difficult Enough. I focused on function, before design. This is the sign of a programmer who can design, instead of a game designer who can program. Many people have commented that the game is too easy. The problem is the island-generation equation. Current what happens is that as the levels increase so does the potential size of the island, and the possibility of resource, obstacle (mountain) and village tiles. What should happen is that the size of the island should increase and the amount of obstacles should increase (costing you more turns to find new ways to get around them), but the bonus tiles (resources, villages) should always have the same chance of being found, possibly decreasing after a certain point.

What Could Have Been Better

Future

Over the holiday break, I will be continuing to work on this game. I am satisfied with how it turned out with 48-hours of work, and I’d like to see what this could look like after three weeks. I think by that time it could be quite a fun little Facebook game.

I had plans for achievements and more of a story in the original 48H version, but those were cut because of a lack of time. I’d like to put those back in, especially in a Facebook app, with leaderboards and friend lists.

The video proved out to be terrible quality, but I wanted to record a playthrough of the game. I think I might also do a run with all the crystals (the “all out run”) and a run with the secret ending.

anyway, enjoy this bad-quality video at vimeo: link

Here is little gameplay video (interface was not recorded by fraps, music not from game!) and timelapse of making my entry.

Gameplay

Time elapse

Enjoy! )

…I updated my game to have diagonal movement too. (Linklink! And it is faster as well.)

But don’t worry, the main windows download on the entry page is still the old version.

So I thought I’d write up a post-mortem on my game, so I’ll just outline the key points which I have come up with.

What went well

• The art – I’m quite happy with the images I created for it, it could have been a little better in some cases, but I’m quite fond of it.
•  The audio – A lot of people have commented on how the audio is cute, or funny, the voice of my boyfriend proved rather successful for Rex the dinosaur.
•  The menus – I quite like the colour scheme of the menus, although looking at it now it’s very Bonsai Barber. However there aren’t many clicks needed and it’s easy to navigate around so I’m happy with that.
•  All the little bits and bobs – I love that in the last remaining 5 minutes I managed to pull together an icon file along with all the other little touches that makes it feel a little more finished.

What went wrong

•  Not being a coder – I was limited in what I could make, so I thought making a seek n’ solve game would be easy. However I was wrong as it was a lot harder than I thought.
• The pop-ups saying you found an item – I had to keep these in to have it work properly.
•  The fact that it repeats items and never ends – I couldn’t figure out how to get my game to work the way I really wanted it, sadly this is the huge downside of the game, showing no progression or reward.
• Items staying there – Yes I realise they still stay there for everyone that seems to point that out, I couldn’t make them disappear and also because the game doesn’t work how it should, so no need to point out something I already know please. I know this means it shows know progression for the player, why else would I add the quit button, it was the only way I could make the game end.
• Not enough images – For the game to work really well I’d have to of increased the number of images by about 500% as this would then add the complexity needed for the game, and then the gameplay would be down to the placement of the items.
• The controls – Having right click as a drag button would not be the first thing  a player would think of, I could have fixed this many ways, either by telling the player when they start the game in a pop-up with arrows or something, or the better way. By having items over the edge of what is visible on the right side of the screen, then encouraging the player to look. However if the player reads the instructions they shouldn’t encounter this problem.
• Zelda – Unfortunately The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks came out so I had to stop myself from playing it all the time, although I did play it a bit over the weekend at times.
• Sleep – On the Friday night I didn’t actually stay awake for the theme to be announced, and had a large amount of sleep, although this was mainly down to having a long day at work, doing food shopping and my podcast in the evening. So I was quite tired, and I had about 4-6 hours each night, so that knocked a fair bit off my development time. However if I had less sleep I’d not work as well as my brain wouldn’t function properly.

What I would improve

• More images – I would add a large amount of images to populate the space and make Rex’s living room more junk filled, originally the game was two times the size it is currently, unfortunately I didn’t have the time to make enough, but now that I can improve on the game in my spare time I will attempt to create more assets to populate the space.
• Learn a bit more code – It was pretty much the first time I’d really made something on my own in Game Maker, which was so vey hard, I am a designer, however not a designer in any way of programming. I hope to try working on my programming skills a little, not that it’s really essential for my job, but it’s always good to know a little of everything.

Final thoughts

•  I intend to work on the version and perhaps make a version 2, when I do it’ll be posted up on my blog
• I’m extremely happy with the outcome of the game, not being a programmer, I made something that i feel was a little successful. I know of its failings, and I hope to work on them so it can then become a better play experience.

You can give Rex’s Junk Hunt a try if you want, don’t expect an completely engaging gameplay experience though

Tags: final, postmortem

This was my first Ludum Dare, but have been following the competition for the last couple years if not longer.  I did not manage to finish my entry in time, but did really enjoy the process.  Having family time at the weekend is very important to me, so my coding time was limited to around 5-6 hours over 2 days.

Time lapse:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeIedoXsfIQ

Game play: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALXlAzhhi30

Download Game: http://blog.codheadz.com/file.axd?file=2009%2f12%2fJungleExplorer.zip

Download Source: http://blog.codheadz.com/file.axd?file=2009%2f12%2fLDExplo.zip

To run this you will need either the XNA studio 3.1 or the XNA redist from the link below:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=53867A2A-E249-4560-8011-98EB3E799EF2&displaylang=en 

What did not go so well

• Did not finish the game to a level ready to submit before the deadline
• No sound
• No prepared engine, other than XNA
• Lack of time
• Giving up with an hour to go, when so close

What went well

• Keeping the concept as simple as possible to give me a hope during the very short amount of time available
• Coding with high velocity freed from my usual constraints of IOC and unit testing
• Ignoring my ball of mud engine and coding from nothing
• Getting 90% of it done

Here’s looking forward to the next one.

Tags: post-mortem

Bah.  My game is crashing for samel on OSX, but the comments system for entry pages is a bit … unwieldy for communication purposes.  If someone on OSX can get my game to crash, I’d appreciate if you could

1: launch the ‘console’ application and let me know if you see anything there relating to the program (ideally paste the results in the comment to this)

2: let me know what version of OSX you’re using (I only aim for intel osx 10.5+ , so if samel’s crash was on PPC or 10.4, and other people can get it to work, I guess I’ll just relax and forget about it )

Probably a linking thingy, but I don’t know.  I used a completely new setup for building this version, so amn’t sure what might be going wrong exactly.

Two days after the end of Ludum Dare 16 I finally write my post-mortem. And you will find it after the break.

This was my first Ludum Dare, although not my first time trying to make a game in a short time frame. Twice before I’ve participated in the 24 hour games competitions the game development club at my university holds. I must say that having 48 hours, which allows more time to sleep, is much nicer. And certainly less detrimental to one’s health.

My entry, I Never Missed Anyone Until They Were All Gone, to give its full title, is here. I never really finished it, I guess it was overambitious. Though I think that mechanically it’s where I wanted it in that you can walk around and you would be able to explore if there was actually something to explore. Drawing all the art by hand took far to long.

I would like to continue working on this. Hopefully I don’t lose all motivation now the LD is over. I think my next step will be to try and create some sort of level editor where I can assemble the the world visually and have it calculate the positions of the areas and the lines of the paths for me. Having to write out everything that defines an area by hand and typing it into text files is a pain.

I’ve noticed that it’s difficult to tell where the paths that the character follows branch, since he does follow fixed paths. I think I will keep him on fixed paths but I want to make it clearer where the paths branch. I might do this by having him stop when the path he’s following branches until the player selects one, rather than having a default path for each branch. I will have to try some things out and see what works.

Other than that the large part of what needs to be done next is creating the rest of the world, which means more art I need to draw. I’ll also need to figure out a point for the exploration as well as maybe add some puzzles or some such thing into the game to flesh it out. I’m wondering if I can design puzzles based around observing the environment, rather than necessarily interacting. This might be difficult though.

To finish here’s some photos that I couldn’t be assed to post during the competition proper.

All of the work I did off of the computer, mostly art, and a lot of blank papers dumped rather unceremoniously on my bed near the end of the competition.

The results of a trip to the grocer. I grabbed snacks, only a quarter of which I went though during the competition, and a cooked chicken.

The chicken and leftover rice from my fridge served as most of my meals during the competition. Plus apples.

What I drank during the competition, juice and chocolate milk. Sorry. Chocolate Dairy Beverage. I’m still not sure why it was labelled as such.

Now I need to get started on playing the other Ludum Dare entries and continue working on my game before I lose interest.

Why is there never enough time…

Now that the ludum dare is over I get to laugh at myself. I made a spaceship that shoots yellow balls in my game that would help players get higher up and guess what… I never used it. I spent time drawing it, programming it, balancing it and never used it… I do the silliest things sometimes.

On the plus side everyone seemed to like the music in the game. Funny part is I spent about 10 minutes making the music and 10 more minutes adding it to my game. Whereas I spent a total of about 5 hours on my game.

Another funny thing… I gave my game 2 names. One is Reach for the Stars and the other is Shoot for the Stars.

Ok I’m done mocking myself for now. Have fun everyone.

Shoot for the Stars

Entry: Echolon (check it out here)
Timelapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_toZ_YeZ6U

Summary:
Nothing is a more effective motivator than a hard dose of reality and time constraints. Also it’s way easier doing something you’re familiar with than trying something new in 48 hours.

What Happened:
Developing what eventually became Echolon was a tale of two games. Saturday was spent on one idea that failed to pan out and Sunday was spent primarily on what ended up being my final submitted game for Ludum Dare. This essentially means that I gave myself around 9 hours to go from near-scratch and create Echolon.

This was my 3rd attempted Ludum Dare and my second consecutive successful one (along with caverns from Ludum Dare 15). There were two points during the weekend I was unsure if I would finish, but some radical redesigning and acceptance of certain limitations allowed me to push until the end.

The initial game attempted to approach exploration in an indirect way. The basic idea was that you as the player never went exploring yourself. Instead you used a rover/robot that would explore in your stead. There would be little to no graphical component, most of the exploration would be conveyed in text reports and other feedback. As you explored the landscape outside you would find equipment to modify your rover and allow it to explore new areas, carry new items, and extend its capabilities in general.

I spent most of Saturday working on the background mechanics and trying to figure out the best way for the player to interact with the rover. The game ultimately started becoming heavily UI-dependent which was the worst thing possible. In my experience user interfaces tend to be time-consuming and tedious to craft and ultimately are the biggest time sinks in any project I’ve done. The trade-off between UI creation and time is pretty piss-poor.

The first game on the left and an early image of Echolon on the right

This wasn’t help by overall poor time management on Saturday. Part of Saturday night was spent going to the movies with my family (Princess and the Frog) and doing other tasks unrelated to Ludum Dare (you know, the important stuff). So by the time I had crashed on late Saturday night/early Sunday morning I basically only had the fragments of a game in hand.

Waking up Sunday it quickly dawned on me that at my current rate the first game would never be complete on time. After this realization my mind quickly scrambled for a second idea that could be implemented in a short amount of time. I ended up thinking about a game where the player explores a cavern with no lighting except his own bullets. I added on the idea of illumination through shooting along with some basic reflection mechanics and I had a game idea to implement.

Afterward development was fast and furious in the final 9 hours of the competition. The basic game controls are pretty much Asteroids and Flixel pretty much allows that kind of gameplay to be implemented immediately. Things like shooting and reflection were also implemented with little to no problems and basic enemies quickly followed.

Echolon in its near-final state

The biggest obstacle in that 9 hours was spent on creating a procedurally-generated level. I originally had planned a more ambitious generator that would construct various rooms of differing sizes that would be connected with hallways at various points essentially creating a large maze. Over time this became less and less feasible as I had a hell of a time figuring out how exactly to create “screens” that didn’t conflict with each other. I spent roughly an hour on this before abandoning it near the end for a much simpler solution. What I ended up implementing instead was one large room that had random blocks placed inside. There’s no real smart logic to the placement, but overall the result was passable for the purposes of the competition.

To demonstrate how much I was pushing time in this case level generation was complete with about 45 minutes left in the competition. The final 45 minutes I had to create a pretty terrible menu screen, victory/game over screen, add the final sound effects, finish up the UI, and make sure everything sorta worked. I pretty much finished with 2 minutes left before 9 PM.

The big question in my mind is if things had gone exactly right would I have been able to complete my original idea? Possibly if I had worked the full 48 hours, but even then I feel like nothing of the scope I had imagined would have been completed. The idea was a radical departure from any thing I’ve done before – attempting to create a limited simulation game with a heavy emphasis on stat manipulation and menus. When this failed to pan out my second idea relied on simple game mechanics I’ve done before and could easily mock in before focusing on newer ideas. I still really like the idea however and would like to return to it in the future.

Overall my feelings on Echolon are pretty muted. It’s not very fun nor very playable and it comes off slight (although for 9 hours I don’t know if I personally could have done better). I like some basic ideas, but having even an extra hour to tweak some of the gameplay variables would have been nice. I had some additional ideas I would like to implement and I wouldn’t bet against me returning to the game in the future.

What Went Right:

• There was a game. After everything I managed to submit a final game. That by itself is a win in my book.
• Accepting failure. After realizing the first game would never be completed on time I completely shifted gears to developing Echolon and never looked back.
• Not rebuilding the wheel. Echolon was a game well-suited to the tools I was using and also similar to other games I’ve created. Getting to first playable took little time.
• Rush rush rush. With 9 hours pretty much uninterrupted for coding I managed to get in the zone and almost never left it until the deadline.

What Went Wrong:

• The first game. Oh god did that not work out.
• No playtesting. Echolon as you may note is not balanced in any sense. Chalk that up to limited dev time.
• Remaining overambitious the second time around. Things like trying to implement the full-fledged procedural level generator and an upgrade system was far beyond the possible scope of a 9-hour game.

What I Ate:
4 Eggos, a Jimmy Johns sub, some chips, popcorn, lots of tea, some lemonade, and a roast beef sandwich.

Finally:
Still an awesome experience. Plus I made a game! Score!

Tags: postmortem

If you’re having trouble finishing the game, this walkthrough should get you there.  (Otherwise, don’t watch before playing, as the video contains MASSIVE SPOILERS!)

YouTube link:  5 Colors: Pandora – walkthrough

I’ve fixed a stupid issue in bashplore for people using laptop. Now you can play without the numpad!!!

I’m sorry

Download link  :  http://donotjava.netsons.org/Download/ludumdare/LD16_latest.zip

c-ya

I will soon be spending Christmas vacation in a land where non-dial-up internet access is somewhat hard to come by.  So to prepare, I have downloaded offline copies of almost all the games.  Now that I’ve put that together, it occurs to me that maybe others would like that?  If one giant download of (almost) all the LD16 games would be useful to you, you can get all 327 delicious megabytes of it here.

I think there are only 2 games that I couldn’t get working offline copies of.  One was Linux only and the other looked like it would be nontrivial to steal from Kongregate.  For all the games whether I could rip them or not, the folder contains shortcuts to that game’s page on ludumdare.com.

EDIT:  Link fixed.  Thanks, Jonny D!

Xplorer the timelapse

Tags: timelapse

There was a pretty severe memory leak in my game which either caused the game to slow down to an unplayable state or crashed entirely. This issue has been fixed.

Furthermore, a readme has been included which specifies the goal much clearer (well, at least I hope so). Also there was a problem with shooting cannon balls which prevented the player from winning if used uncorrectly, so shooting has now been removed completely. It didn’t really work anyway.
And I found out that you need the Visual 2005 C++ Redist package to start the game, so the required DLLs to launch the game have been included as well. The Mac OS X version also works on Mac OS 10.5 now.

The links have already been updated. If you had any problems earlier, I strongly suggest to try this version. For those of who already downloaded my game, you can download a patch here (90 kB). (Just replace the exe.)

Thanks to everyone who played and rated my game and especially to those who gave their feedback. Much appreciated.

Tags: bugfix, colonial age

I’m updating my entry with a couple typos fixes and using much more coherent wording in one sentence.

Tools
Visual studio 2005 express, paint.net, sfxr & Turtoise SVN for development
DestroyTwitter & Chatzilla for community
Firefox, wikipedia & google image search for information gathering

Languages & libraries
C++, sfml2, boost & stl

The good
Retained focus on a easy game and trying to polish it. I originally wanted to do something with a hex-based map, but since I hadn’t done anything close to that, I decided to go with a traditional square based map. I also decided to make a random level making my need for a level editor pretty much null.

The bad
There was no time for polishing.

Missing, but wanted features

• A better gui, with buttons and a in-game tutorial
• More than 2-players game
• Increase the positive reinforcement when picking up treasures, with animations etc
• Computer opponents!
• More treasures, I had plans for some inca gold and some western/money treasure too
• More environments such as rocks/mountatins that you can’t pass, quicksand that forces you to wait a turn and, in general, more pleasing enviromental grahics. I guess once you stop working on a texture, in ludum dare it is finished
• Bonus items, such as binuclear that allows you to see far and lantern that illuminate the area around you.

Well this is my 2nd LD and I must say I thoroughly enjoyed it once again.

Tools I used

Novashell

Paint .NET

Notepad++

Audacity

sfxr

Here are some random thoughts both good and bad about my experience making Bees n Flowers:

• This time instead of spending time trying to do pixel drawings, I drew my graphics freehand, scanned them in, and touched them up using in Paint .NET. I got this process down pretty good and felt pretty good about the results.
• Aside from a few annoying bugs I fought with, the Novashell engine worked out well for me and it also has the advantage of being able to generate both Windows and Mac packages (which I still need to do). I know, Unity can too.

• I had originally intended to learn Unity beforehand and do the game with it, but alas I just … dropped the ball and didn’t get to looking at it until it was too late.
• I really wanted to get random generation of the sequences, and at least one enemy (a wasp)  into the game but was unable to do so before the deadline
• I think the game could have used actual levels that change after you get a certain number of sequences. Then the locations of the flowers could be changed and maybe keep things a little more fresh.
• I had more flower types but they didn’t make it into the game
• I wanted to do more with the flowers as far as player interaction goes but again with the time…
• I had a list of features I wanted in my head, but I still found myself thinking “now what?” every so often

In the end it all comes down to how prepared you are beforehand and how well you manage your 48.  A few things I want to do do better next time:

• Get all my tools installed beforehand and familiarize myself with any new tools I plan to use.
• Figure out my process for generating art and sound and practice executing it.
• A written and prioritized list of the features I want to shoot for broken up further into ‘must haves for a complete game’ and then ‘icing on the cake’ features.

Okay, so I was baffled by some of the comments on 5 Colors that indicated that some of the structures in the game were partially invisible for some people (when people compared playing the game to watching the walkthrough).   I was completely unable to reproduce the bug on my system, and the really puzzling bit for me was that the background sprites used in the game are one-piece sprites.  So it seemed that random bits of otherwise visible sprites were invisible for some people.

The mystery was solved when I was finally able to reproduce the bug by playing the game on my wife’s netbook. It turns out that non-dedicated graphics cards have a hard time handling textures that are longer than around 2000 pixels on one side, which some of my background sprites were (my laptop has a low-end Geforce 8400 GS, and there’s no problem, but I’m assuming some people were playing the game on laptops with no dedicated video at all).

I chopped the larger sprites into bits (a process that is going to make any changes I want to make in the future incredibly painful), and the game now plays as it should on my wife’s netbook — and I’m assuming it will work on everyone else’s laptops as well.

So you can see that the bug was not entirely my fault, at least, not in the direct sense that my programming caused it  — though I will take responsibility for  it, since my ignorance did cause it 😛 .

Thank you very much to everyone who has commented on the game so far: I wouldn’t have found this bug without your help! I would be incredibly grateful if some of you who were experiencing this problem could try the game again, and let me know in the comments if the it is now working for you properly. Incredibly grateful.

You can download the fixed build here.

Seen that people have found my game boring (which it is, tbh)… but there’s a note I’ll have to make: the “correct” way of winning the game is by destroying enemy ships, you’ll get 10g for each one you sink, get 100g to buy a map, and go to the map location…

You can find some enemy boats to the West of the starting position, for example…

Don’t forget you have infinite lives, the only drawback of sinking is that you lose half your gold…

Think I should have given the player a starting map and/or some money, so they feel more the need to explore more…

I would add this to my entries post, but I couldn’t find a way to edit it…

Bring back the ability to comment on my own post! 😀