LD16 was a lot of fun, despite continually running into killer bugs that took ages to fix.

What went well:

• I managed to pull it all together in the last couple of hours and actually end-up with a game. I very nearly didn’t.
• People seem to like it, too! Didn’t expect that one.
• After releasing, I managed to locate and destroy one last memory leak. Otherwise it would have been unplayable.

What went badly:

• The aforementioned bugs.I probably spent at least a third of the time I was working on the game trying to fix memory leaks, infinite loops, and the like. These were often related to…
• I didn’t prepare. DESPITE knowing very well that I needed to get a basic framework, in the end I was just too lazy, and started the compo even without most of the libraries I needed.
• I didn’t spend enough time at the start thinking about what my game would be. Instead, I charged ahead with a turn- and tile-based engine, assuming I’d think of something later. Fortunately I did, and the idea was reasonably fun.

What I would improve:

• There are still a couple of glitches – one is that sometimes monsters manage to get on the same tile as you and you can’t attack them – not sure why.
• The view is too small. This is mostly so I could avoid trying to do any ray-casting and what-have-you. Though since I let you see monsters for an extra tile away, you can still see through walls. Whoops.
• You automatically climb down ladders, which isn’t ideal. In fact, I think I accidentally left it so that you’ll go down a ladder if you attack a monster which is standing on it. I ran out of time, and it was easier to code like this. Sorry!
• I had ideas for more things you could ‘explore’ and earn XP from – such as each time you come across a new animal or plant. But I never got time for it.
• The difficulty increase is really naff. Or at least, what’s meant to increase the difficulty – each time you go down a level, the monsters get +1 to attack, defence, and hp. But each time you level up, which can occur 2 or 3 times per level, you get +2 max hp, are fully healed, and your attack and defence increase by 1. So it’s very, very easy to quickly outpace the monsters. I didn’t take the time to balance it, as it was about 1:30 am by then, so yeah.

Final notes:

• I do have some ideas for expanding it, and I hope I actually get around to doing so this time. I think I will do, as I’ve wanted to make a roguelike for a long while, and after I lost all the code to my other one (Nooooooo!) this is a good opportunity to get back into it.
• Hanging out in #ludumdare made the whole thing a lot more fun, even when it seemed I would end the competition with only a mediocre level-generator. 😀

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

You guys, a good feature for the website would be for game developers to be able to reply to comments on their games. It helps to say thanks and clarify things. I love that people play my games and I’d love even more to be able to tell them personally. This is the only way to do it currently.

C418: Brilliant. Shame I couldn’t get the Spacestation into my little space ship

I lolled. Thanks.

eli: The lonely, introspective feel is really great. Artwork is excellent, the music is cute. However, the back-and-forth mechanic was a bit tiresome for me. Overall effort: 5 stars at least.

Thanks for the comment. Music is cute? That’s different! The back and forth mechanic was kind of on purpose, the idea was that the game was forcing you to travel further to get more valuable items so you could upgrade your ship and make getting even further than that more viable. I wanted to have things to shoot, like space pirates but I never got round to it, so I would have added more mechanics eventually.

SonnyBone:This game looks REALLY NICE in motion. The pictures don’t do it justice. The game is very relaxing, which is what I think of when I hear: EXPLORATION. Everything works well together. For a 48 hour game this is incredibly polished, as others have said. NICE!

This LD I made a very conscious decision to polish things as much as possible as I went along, assuming it was viable in the time. It only takes a few lines of code for me to make something popout or fade, or highlight etc. It seemed worth it as it enhances the overall feel of the game. It seemed to pay off. (Thanks for the trophy recursor!)

refrag: Beautiful. A simple premise, beautifully executed. Well done!

Thanks! My initial idea wasn’t simple. Infact the debris sucking up and upgradinfg thing was meant to be a side thing that you could do in addition to the main game, but as time went on I decided to shift my focus to it.

madk: Good and well-executed concept, and it’s a relaxing game. However, more variation of gameplay would be nice. I got bored of just riding around and absorbing debris after a short while; some sort of enemies would be a good addition.

Go further. 😉

Codexus: Nice little game with a good ambiance soundtrack. I would have appreciated the option to play in windowed mode, playing low-res games on a 30″ monitor isn’t too great. (with distorted aspect ratio too due a nvidia bug :/)

Jees, it’s ludum dare! What more do you want from me?! Hehe. Really this comment confuses me, how many LD games let you decide to play it windowed or fullscreen. I felt having it in a window would ruin the insular feeling  of the game.

TenjouUtena: Great game! Full of fun stuff to do, fun places to go! Great to play, will probably pick it back up after the compo.

Thanks! With luck I will too.

ExciteMike: I love the atmosphere! I played for a long time before I got down to the enemies. Form some of the other comments it sounds like many never made it that far. Two biggest problems: 1. Hold meter catches up too slowly, it looks like I still have room when I filled it, it just doesn’t show it yet. 2. The enemies were killing me before I even got to see what was shooting at me, and it’s really not easy to dodge so that’s where I stopped.

You’re not the first person to make that comment about the hold meter, I noticed it upon extended plays after the 48 hours too. I know how to fix it, but it didn’t occur to me at the time. As for the enemies they are kind of meant to stop you going down there since it’s where the most valuable items are, I appreciate that their range is perhaps a little on the long side though. If you hear the pew sound then just run, you can outrun the lasers easily!

Arne: I like this. I think I’m going to write a clone, if that’s ok.

Uh, that’s a bizarre comment. Okay, I guess.

recursor: Wow. This game has an impressive amount of polish for a 48 hour creation, and it is quite fun. This is one of my favorites so far. I hope you do even more with it.

Thank yoooou! With luck I will!

localcoder A couple of things almost stopped me getting into this game. First, I pressed escape to get out of the inventory screen and the game quit. Then on my second attempt, I collected junk because that’s what I thought you were meant to do, and when I sold it and got no money I thought the game was bugged. But once I worked out what was going on, I really enjoyed the game. I love the creative items, both the funny ones and others that suggest the story of the destroyed fleet. The variety keeps the game interesting and I wanted to keep exploring to find bigger and better treasures. The surprise hostilities at the end were great too. The only disappointing thing is that there is no ending, so once I had all the upgrades I was left with no reason to use them.

Yeah the escape thing is silly. I’ll mentally put that aside. Even though I had time to have a start screen, a quit screen never occurred to me.

The not really knowing what to do aspect was definitely part of the design. I intentionally didn’t say much about the game (if you notice I don’t say that you can even tractor with the mouse button, you just sort of discover these things). To keep with the theme as much as possible I wanted to make the game mechanics themselves explorable as well as the playing field.

Once you twig that the further you go in the more items are worth you end up all “Oh alright it’s on now.” and try to get to the end of the field, about half way you run into a mine and don’t know what the hell. Putting the turrets right at the end was definitely the right decision I think, the shock when they first blast you apart after there’s been nothing like it for the whole game is cool I think. Discovery and exploration go hand-in-hand.

Yes there’s no ending, I had big plans but time and all. Thanks for the nice comments!

And thanks very much to anyone who has played it but not commented!

Massacre at Misfit Toy Island

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=rate&uid=258

I know my entry is way too hard. Changes I made at the last minute turned the game from way too easy to way too hard. And I didn’t have time to balance it. That’s the breaks with a 48 hour contest I guess.

Also, stupidly, I set the key to continue from the Win screen to “space bar” and during the game you fire by pressing the “space bar”. So what that means is that if you do win the game, you are sure to bypass the win screen!! Haha, well, just reward yourself by viewing the win screen in your favorite graphic software I guess if you actually get so far.

But I have actually completed the game. It is possible, though definitely CHALLENGING.

My idea of the game came from the great PS2 game Shadows of the Colossus. In that game, you roam around a landscape looking to fight a few gigantic and incredibly difficult to kill bosses. So I wanted the misfits to all be difficult boss battles and my influence on boss battles is pretty much from the 90’s SNES games where killing bosses takes figuring out the bosses weaknesses and then applying a huge number of hits using a repetitive process. I guess I just have the belief that a boss battle should be like playing a match of tennis, that is to say, exhausting! Call me Old School, hehe.

Well, that’s exactly what it takes to beat the Misfits. For example, the Tootsie Roll takes 50 hits. If you are able to kill it, you will get 25 health from it. Some bosses require as many as 600 hits to kill. Generally, the bigger the misfit, the more hits it requires to kill. The key to beating the game is understanding that you get half the hit points of every misfit you kill, so what you have to do is find the biggest, easiest to kill misfits out there and kill them first. I would recommend starting with the Jägermeister or the Electronic Battleship game. What you want to look for is big misfits that have a slow rate of fire. The slower the rate of fire, the easier the kill. If you kill the Battleship game, you’ll get 300 health.

Now that extra health will really come in handy. You see, if you touch a misfit, immediately death to either you or the misfit will occur, depending on who has the most health. This can be very dangerous at the beginning of the game. Once you have built up a lot of health though, you can quickly kill some super tough small misfits such as the bottle of Bengay or Snoopy by just touching them. You will know they are super tough when they unleash an endless stream of bullets that make them virtually untouchable.

Some big misfits you will need to battle rather than touch because they have so many hit points. The teddy bear is a good example of one of these. During these tough battles, you need to figure out the weakness. What you will usually find is that you can position yourself so you are at such an angle that it is difficult for them to hit you, but you can hit them repeatedly. Usually you need to play around with the angles, and aim for a corner of the misfit that maybe sticks out a bit. Eventually you will find a location where you are relatively safe, yet able to hit the misfit with regularity.

Also, after each misfit you kill, you move faster. So by the time you get to the last misfit, you are really able to fly around the screen and can pretty easily dodge the bullets. So in this sense, the game does get easier as the game progresses. I had also intended to increase your rate of fire as well, but I guess I forgot and this never made it into the game.

Hope this helps you conquer those misfits!

Folks who are getting a white frame — would you mind posting your browser version/platform in the comments?  You may also try running it in Safari (where it was developed) or Chrome (which uses the same rendering engine).

(Edit:  maybe I have written this post-mortem too soon, i.e. without having enough feedback about the game. Post-mortem of the post-mortem.)

This is my first LD entry. I intended to work on another game (not related to the competition) in order to benefit from the worldwide good vibes emitted during these 48 hours. But things turned out differently…

What went right

• Initial research. After reading the theme, I thought about it peacefully for about 3 hours, with ideas coming in naturally. The result was an extensive list of the elements of an exploration game.
• Keeping it simple. I selected the absolutely core elements to implement first. Finally, I even had to remove one of these elements after performance troubles of the implementation, without much loss (the knowledge of a location is either 0% or 100%). Maybe the result was too simple, but the aim was to complete something, even if too simple. Despite this simplicity, I managed to get somewhat addicted to the game.
• Iterating. I have probably spent as much time playing the game as programming it. Playing the game showed the need of additional controls or warnings to remove some tedious tasks. Adding these features sometimes completely changed the game feel. For example, a very late addition: right click to go back to the NEAREST source, instead of the previous source. This allowed a faster gameplay because going back or to a recently found source doesn’t require precise pointing anymore.
• Sounds. Creating sounds with sfxr and Audacity didn’t take too much time, and the result is at least consistent.
• pygame. Starting from scratch using  almost exclusively the online reference documentation was much simpler and faster than I thought. Note: this is not my first game made with pygame.

What went wrong

• Using a never-used library. This was not the time to discover a library I was not familiar with (numpy). Lots of time spent stumbling upon gotchas. Reading the documentation in a rushed way is not so fun either.
• Programming some of the audio events. Making sure that some sounds (especially the alerts and the reload sound) were played at the right moment and not repeatedly was trickier than I expected (this problem didn’t appear in the visual part, more forgiving). I even added a (minor) display bug who made it to the initial release (sound was added at a late stage of the development, so there were less tests to detect bugs).
• pygame and py2exe. Too many time lost at the worst moment figuring out why it wouldn’t work. For some reason, switching to Python 2.4 did the trick.
• Graphics. I didn’t even try. Not enough time,  energy, and knowledge. I plan to play with Gimp more often.
• Music. Same here. Maybe a very discrete ambient loop would have helped. PureData?
• Full screen. I didn’t make sure that the game would be the same for a different resolution (mine was 1280×1024). So monday I had to send a new version to make sure that the difficulty is as intended. The game would have been too easy with 640×480.
• A random game level. Maybe handmade levels with an increasing difficulty would have been better, with more time. A bitmap would have been a way to store these levels and benefit from an image editor used as a level editor (a colored pixel = an energy source).

Surprises

• While it was not intended, and while as few mechanisms as possible were implemented, the result seemed original, even somewhat addictive (discovering an energy source, even an easy one, is always a pleasure, even without a sound effect).
• While there is no hint, no way to know where the energy sources are, the end game is not totally random. Moreover, it might be how exploration or research works: there is a safe, mechanical, yet somewhat pleasant activity of moving around the known sources; then, when the safe routes have been explored, there is a risky, “no way back” activity, with calculated risks, and yet depending on the ultimate factor: luck.

What’s next?

This game could evolve in several distinct ways.

• A single player version, very similar to this game, with a quick gameplay and few additions  (graphics, background music, maybe gray out known zones).
• A single player version with more mechanisms: hints (legends gathered from visited settlements) , enemy AI, etc.
• A multiplayer online version with a slower persistent gameplay, using waypoints (add color warnings when tracing routes); the discoveries would be published or not, etc.

Using a 3D engine with nice light effects (still with a “from above” 2D gameplay) might be fun too. Maybe the energy sources could be also light sources, and give hints about their location (some kinds of satellites with big orbits might be interesting too).

Includes a trailer.

Very interesting. Can’t think what else to say, really!

Yeah, me neither!

Wow, a very original idea! It’s exploration, but not in the visual way. You made it incredible! The music is fantastic. I found two endings!

,o/\o,

This is a cool little experience. The audio is TOP NOTCH, as it should be. Good implementation of theme!

Okay, responding to compliments was a bad idea.

This was refreshing. I can just imagine what may be done with this given more time…

I tried to think of something, came up with some crazy ideas and thought it would be a bad idea to try that out with my missing programming knowledge, so I migth try … later.

Excellent use of audio and minimalistic graphics.

I say!

Five stars for audio from me – I really like it. I like the visuals as well, very nicely styled minimalistic graphics.
The game itself doesn’t feel all that much like a game.

I don’t have mushrooms you jump on. But I may or may not have, well, you do the interpretation

I like this game! And it remains me, how much atmosphere i have lost by not being able to add music and sfx in my game… are there just two endings or more?

Eight D:

Concept is shore interesting.
Not shore game play is tough. Passed it in two ways. Not shore there are others and not shore sounds are that expressive on where you should go. May be it would have been better if there were 3 buttons. 2 for turning right or left and two for going in current direction + going somewhere and turning changing direction from which sounds go.
Or my be I do not get it…

Problem was, controls were the least issue I had, so I didn’t experiment with the around. And as I’m inexperienced, I didn’t want to try out other stuff while having a Ludum Dare. I have ideas now, but now it’s too late.

Original idea and good use of a minimalistic approach. The sounds are great!

Can I marry you?

Very compelling. Interesting use of sound. Interesting experimental game concept. I’d like a little more feedback as to how much I’m supposed to change directions, or what input are required from me. I got 2 different endings, anyway.

As I said, didn’t experiment enough with how to control the game.

Ive played a game like this before somewhere….But this was better 😀

Ezo Ripoff?!

A very simple idea. Though I don’t like not having a sort of character visible onscreen, but I guess this is just what the game is meant to be like.

I like those sounds/music! Really nice!

Yeah, I guess that was the idea of the game. I should ask the responsible person, wait a second.

Oh, and are you married yet?

I liked this.

Marry me?

I *love* the idea here, and hope you continue to pursue this… I think you could end up with something really incredible. As it stands, very nice prototype. Will definitely pop open your source code at some point, as I’m interested in exactly what going on down there. I’m curious: did you have any particular inspiration(s) for this? In any case, kudos.

NO. DON’T DO THAT. You would see the horrible, HORRIBLE smileys to try out the controls. DON’T!

PS: You mentioned that you were having trouble finishing 5 Colors: Pandora, and I just wanted to let you know that I now have a walkthrough up.

Not having troubles really. I accidently found the next room button and felt cheated by myself and didn’t want to start all over again. But I should play it again I guess. It was good.

Get to it from the ratings page or take the direct link to the download.

A bit late perhaps, but here’s my timelapse video, on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eYLpt8P0Jk. Enjoy the polka

I used a bad codec, and some of the files randomly disappeared, so the video represents about 24 hours of the 48.

Hey, and if you haven’t played 5 Colors: Pandora yet, now’s your chance! (Or, you know, later.)

since people might be wondering

the “music” should be best appreciated as textural rather than melodic

falling off is the end

the fact that there’s no gameplay is intentional

the only part I didn’t finish is windows on downtown skyscrapers

the game does have meanings but none of them are related to each other

I get a kick out of the love/hate reviews

everything was drawn with a mouse

sfernald sank his teeth into the game engine for my LD#16 entry – the light in the end of the tunnel and the results came out swinging!

He’s used the game engine better then then me, making some winding, fun, hard to beat, acid-filled caves.

Check it out:

Source:  http://www.bitjets.com/thelight2.zip
Win32 exe:  http://ippa.se/games/the_light_2.exe

Maybe I’ll make a sequel too since the original game was so tiny. Actually I already started hacking on it. Some ideas/goals:

• The collision detection wasn’t perfect (for example you couldn’t jump while running into an obstacle)
• I’m thinking level-building from One big image instead of several small, but there’s quite some things to work out before that’s possible.
• More interaction with the world, could be levels to pull, buttons to push, doors, modification of terrain or living enemies, not just acid pools/drops.  Preferable additions that don’t complicate the level building to much, now it’s basically drawing a new image and creating one class — liberating easy.

Tags: gosu, ld16, remake, ruby

Some people notified me of a pretty bad bug in Cat Planet where you can fall through the floor and get stuck and have to restart the game. I didn’t completely fix it because I couldn’t replicate the glitch no matter how hard I tried and I don’t know what causes it, but I added a cheap workaround that makes it possible to continue playing if this happens. More details on the entry page.

So yeah… the only thing I added after the compo was this whacky easter egg.

If you’re not into artsy games you’ll probably enjoy it, try it here:

http://www.2bam.com/magic/FindingHerV051.swf

When it finally loads, type “duke”

Cheers!

Here’s the source for This is Infinity:
http://cactusquid.com/games/expfps.gmk

It’s been updated since I posted my entry, I didn’t know sources were a requirement for the competition. And I can’t figure out how to update the entry info or how to post a comment on the game… Pff.

Tags: LD 16, source

What went well:

• Obviously I got good game idea
• Physics turned out well
• Game mechanic was fun
• Interface turned out to be simple, not buggy, etc. For 12h spent it is weird

What well wrong:

• Failed to make more complex graphics because most I tried made it lag fast
• Made mistake of making game time constrained. Should have been some ind of resource constrained. Thing is that most fun is aiming probe well and exploring planet or even few in one show. Time constraint rather made you shot a lot of average shots instead of aiming really carefully which is bad.
• Probably 1/3 of time spend was spent on things that did not work… Would have been good to spend it more on polishing core mechanics and game aims.
• I added only a mouse-wheel based zoom. That was a mistake as Mac users have problems in Flash with that (tough I head Flash player release on 9 December 2009 should have fixed that, can’t confirm)  Also users playing on notebook without mouse had problems too…

What now:

• Well firstly I think I will make one more version of it removing time limit and adding some “probes per planet” limit. Should make it more fun. May be I will try adding a little bit more graphical things.
• As for large game based on idea I think I will but it on hold. Needs a lot of content and thinkering on technical sides of it(there are some). Exploring idea for enemies and war, AI, etc. I have some other game ideas that have less of such complications so for time being I will not make it in to a full game. In time being I welcome anyone to try and make their versions of the idea Just bother to send me a note/mail. Would like to see it  and play it
• Need to add alternative to mouse zooming.

Longer version of how it went

Day 1.  Well woke up and read the theme. Started brainstorming for ideas and come to two options. First I considered was some top down exploration game based on this my older experiment Alone in the Dark But quickly came to a conclusion that it will be aether boring or too complex(high chances on not finishing) so started to think about second idea.

Second idea. Basically solar system exploration game based on rocket lunching with trajectories. In short idea was to build some model of solar system with planets divided on to regions. First you need to send satellites to find planets and then orbit them to find info on the regions. Then you can send colony ships to colonize some regions. This is that some regions give bonuses and on some it is not possible to land at all. So you also have test probes. They fly in a same way as colony ships but should be something like a lot cheaper. So you lunch those until you are shore you can hit needed region with your colony ships. Of course all ships should have some fuel/distance/view area limitations. Idea seemed very basic and not so hard to make + original at least to some extant + probably fun + easy to extend in myriad of direction adding tech tries, enemies, some defense mechanics, anything

Well all that planing cost me 1-2 hours. I had still 2-3 hours left that day to start making something. Well I set down and made solar system generator with all the rotation and simple graphics in a half of an hour probably. And then hit my first problem. In usual strategies stuff is usually stationary. I mean level and usually buildings are. But in my case everything was always in a move… So I went for following camera target scheme without possibility to wonder with it around but with large zooming. Was not shore it would work well. Also I got stuck here for probably some 2 hours not managing to make proper camera code It is simple but probably long week of work had it toll on my brain and I spent probably 2 hours on thing that really should take 15-30 minutes… Well another thing I spent my time on thinking how to make regions on the planets and how to color them. That was really problematic… Did this in a process. Turned out that it was too laggy and would take time making textures. There was another idea for how to make it but my time was up. Spent something like an hour thinking about this problem and trying this radial texturing.

Day 2. Well it was clear that I will not have regions in time so I scraped that part. Added physics, simple probes, collisions. Took me some 3-4 hours. Then got stuck for 2 hours making fog of war… Turned out that adding even very minimalistic effects (smooth transition on a border of fog, separate view area circles for planets and probes so that you can see which sees which etc) was bringing performance to some 10Fps with 30 probes flying Well you can see what I ended up with. Good I can have more then 30 particles without lags there. Haven’t tested how many tough.

Well spent two more hours polishing parameters, adding screens and sounds.

Tags: post-mortem

Ok, I’m not going to spend any more time on this project, but a few things were really bugging about the game and it only took about 15 minutes to fix it.

What this new version fixes is:

* Win screen will not be skipped when you win the game

* You can hold the space down to fire – makes it much easier!

* Each time you kill a misfit, now your rate of fire will increase slightly

* The bullets rotate as they are fired

* And I shrunk Santa a little bit making it easier to maneuver him around the screen

In all, I think these fixes make it a more enjoyable, easier game. Now it is much more solvable and I think more fun too. You now have a fighting chance against those misfits!

I’ve tested the game on Windows 7 and Windows Vista and it works fine. I think it requires either DirectX7 or DirectX9, not sure which. If you are having problems, it may be your graphic card. I am using some huge bitmaps that may be causing some problems with some graphic cards when they are loaded as textures. Maybe try a beefier machine.

Anyway, here is the Windows version:

http://www.bitjets.com/MassacreV2.zip

I won’t post a fixed version for the Mac, unless there is some sort of demand.

Take care!

Topsy Turvy post-mortem

What went right:

* The concept. I’ve had the idea in my head for a while, and I’m very glad that I used the competition as an excuse to make it rather than forcing myself to think of a game idea inspired by the theme. And the game ended up pretty much how I imagined, so that’s good too.
* Inkscape as level editor. AS3 has some rather lovely XML-parsing abilities, so reading the SVG file was surprisingly simple. It’s very much hard-coded to the specific output that (my copy of?) Inkscape generates, but it should be fairly easy to fix if it ever stops working.
* Abstract graphics. I am not an artist, so I decided to save time and just draw everything out of lines. I think the results fit the game fairly well, even if they’re not actually good.

What went wrong:

* The goal. I added the collectables to provide an incentive to get to the more difficult areas and also as extra landmarks for getting your bearings. Unfortunately, with time running out and no win conditions implemented, I made the decision that you would win if you could collect all of them. In hindsight, I should probably have added a level exit instead.
* Difficulty. The game is ridiculously hard. I knew I wanted to have some areas which would be tricky to get to, as a challenge, but when the goal became “collect everything”, those areas suddenly became non-optional.
* First day motivation. I wanted to have all the basic game mechanics done by the halfway point, but I was just procrastinating like crazy. I’d come to the conclusion that it just wasn’t technically interesting enough to hold my attention, but then on Sunday morning I added death and respawning. Suddenly my game idea was in front of me and I could start constructing devious routes through the level, and I spent the rest of the day excited by it.
* The name. It actually changed name twice between starting and submitting, and I’m still not really happy. Currently thinking about maybe renaming it “Jump-Zap-Flip”.

Lessons learnt:

* Get death/respawn implemented earlier in future
* Think of a win condition as part of the design process
* Don’t make ridiculously hard challenges required to complete the game

Tags: flash, post-mortem, postmortem

Better late than never!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScV5QMFUB6U

Tags: timelapse

Taking advantage of the “bug fixes are allowed after submission” clause, I’ve fixed a few more bugs in 5 Colors, having to do with collision detection. I don’t think you can get stuck in walls anymore. If anyone still has any bug trouble with the game, I’d really appreciate knowing. Thanks!

Clarification:  the collision bugs I fixed were critical, because people were getting stuck in the walls and not being able to continue the game. I did not tweak the collision detection at all in so far as it effects normal movement or anything: the game plays just as it did before, it is not “smoother” or anything like that–you just don’t get stuck in walls now.

You can download the new build from the game’s entry page.

From a comment on bashplore’s page:
“dertom says … Hehe,…a game in bash. That is really hardcore :D”.
YYYYYYYEEEEEEESSSSSSSSS It is, but it adds a lot more fun!

What went right:

– bash it’s good, i like its feeling
– bash can do stuff for you
– save/load it’s super-easy
– bash teach you tricks, a lot of tricks! :p
– bash is great for roguelike
– bash give you sound for free!!! [got no time to add some, sorry]

What went wrong:

– bash rendering it’s slow
– bash doesn’t have data structure
– bash syntax it’s a pain
– bash it’s a iper-pain for non-roguelike game
– I was not so good at bash to write a game

Final thought:

– if you want to use bash for a roguelike game, that’s fine but you have to prepare some good utility function BEFORE the 48H.
– if you want to make games other than roguelike, then DON’T USE BASH, NEVER THOUGHT ABOUT BASH!!!!
– if you want to have a great fun makeing a game, just use the strangest programming/scripting language, that’s worth the effort.
– never forget to add graphics using color in the terminal 8)

What next time?

I’ve already some very very sick yet fun idea in mind and i’m already coding something. Keep an eye on samel’s perversion 8) 8) 8)

c-ya next time!

Tags: post-mortem

Ok, more than a week after the compo finally ended, here my short summary what went fine and what was a fail (again?)

Good:

– After about one year experience with jMonkeyEngine and blender the comparison between ld13 and ld16 is really a progress.

– clear gameplay (platformer game – 3 buttons to use)

– added music. actually I’m quite happy about that smooth music. Wasn’t that difficult to create 😀

– added soundfx (thx drpetter :D)

– webstartable java game. (most of the people was able to start it)

– timelapse

– created quite extendable platformer-framework for jME and blender

Cons:

– created quite extendable platformer-framework for jME and blender (although this might be good for the future it was not good for the compo! I hadn’t enough time to really show its capabilities)

– christmas-party the day before + 2h earlier starttime

– webstartable-game: not everyone was able to start it

– too less gameplay  (4h more time and……. )

Ok, even I’m not happy about the low-level gameplay I’m quite satisfied with the overall-experience. Next time I will for sure not start with jME from scratch again. It’s time to concentrate on gameplay! 😀

Ok,…here my timelapse (3:30min)

http://thomas.trocha.com/misc/timelapse_ld16/ld16.htm

LD-Preview

One last think: To the people that are not able to start my game: Plz post me your configuration (OS, Browser and if possible installed Java-Version) THX…