Ok, so I did not finish my first LD on time Monday morning. Mainly because lack of gameplay and content, but also the collision detection. Also I didn’t know you could submit versions for other platforms afterwards. No worries though, I’ll know that next time.

I fixed the collision yesterday, I just had to work on those algorithms I had in mind at first. So here it is for Windows and Linux.

Run LUDUMDARE17.bat/-.sh respectively.

Short postmortem
I wasted to much time on the game engine, clearly. The concept was initially to walk around the islands (planets if you want). I was sure I could manage to get that working, I had the math right on paper, but I have missed some variables of course and had to give that up later on. Unfortunately the concept was a bit too vague, and I was sure it would pop up more stuff in my head once I was done with the major coding parts. Never got there in time though. 😉

Of course some things went right, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have made this post. I learned how much more efficient I became by just having a TODO on paper instead of a in text file on the computer. Much more satisfying to physically cross something off. My framework needed some minor tweaks but it was working very well during development. Implementing the key and hatch went smooth, and the overall code structure is okay. And most satisfying Monday morning was being able to do the test maps very quickly in GIMP, when I was tired (of coding).

Too bad it didn’t get more game in it though. I’m eager to participate in the next LD, I can barely wait.

Post-mortem, being something we may analyze after its untimely passing, strikes me as being the wrong approach. I would like to present a short living analysis; an ante-mortem, if you will.

yippppp yip yip yip yip yip yip

Building You are me now was wonderful, mostly because it had closure, but I do not consider it complete. The central idea, using the Islands metaphor as a physical mechanic, falls short of my initial thoughts when considering the theme when it was announced. While walking around Tel Aviv’s Neve Tsedek neighborhood, I chanced upon some graffiti that seemed to fit the idea of making islands stop being islands. (Continued…)

inspirational graffiti in Neve Tsedek

Concept, plot, story

To be honest, the original idea I had doesn’t work as a game makable in 48 hours. Infecting NPCs with your brain waves, becoming a kind of hive mind, spreading your mental capabilities. Instead, the graffiti solidified a simpler concept of trading places with your enemy, using a kind of teleportation mechanic.

I liked the idea of “Islands”, and it made its way into the game as a settings and a further mechanic. This, too, could use some expansion. Lowering the water level between the islands should be more than just a switch buried in the ground. It needs to be connected to the psychic capabilities as well. Lowering the water level should connect you more with other “minds”, allowing you greater freedom. It should make your clone-self last longer, or jump higher, enabling you to visit locations previously inaccessible.

It was due to this partial thought that the ending is not very satisfying. A truer ending would include a feeling of mastery, as you have swept an archipelago populace into a transcendent state. But nothing along those lines was available in this time frame, so I opted for keeping the ending simple and blunt.

The story is hopefully somewhat implied, but it ended up being mostly absent. I didn’t get around to writing big texts, or adding any sort of characterization.

Technical

Having played around with Flixel these past few months, getting a simple game up and running was extremely fast. Approximately half of the time was spent on code as it was on graphics, and very little time wasted on bugs (though I did have a few annoying ones).

One major time-drain was getting the maps and tiles to work. I have used Mappy->Flixel in the past, but this game incorporated more layers than ever before, and my workflow is a pain. Next time, I’ll probably use a different map editor program, like Flan perhaps.

I wishy-washied between GraphicsGale and Inkscape a bit too much, and the resulting pixels are pretty bad. My friend and LD-jam-mate, Daniel Zoran, explained how I should really be making the tilesheets (make a big square page so you see how they fit together), instead of my 1-dimensional tile sheets. Definitely on my list of things to learn how to do.

What? What is, what is this thing?

I can’t believe I made music! This part really contributed to my feeling of accomplishment, when seeing the finished product. I think next time, I would want to extend beyond sfxr sounds, or at least learn how to layer them together with an external program, to add complexity. but daaaaaaang, I made a whole game, including music and sound effects, winning condition, and bad guys.

Gameplay

This one hurts the most. During the last hours of the competition, I neglected playtesting, even though multiple opportunities presented themselves. Even something as simple as tuning the jump mechanic – this could have added much in the way of playability. After the compo was over, I watched a non-gamer play, and I was ashamed that I left so many little annoyances in.

Also, more feedback to the player would have helped. It isn’t obvious that backtracking is necessary, and the checkpoint markers were misidentified as information booths (or even telephones, perhaps because of their sound when activating).

External

• DO: keep track of your time! Excel is your friend. It says I spent 20.06667 hours working on Ludum Dare.
• DON’T: drink caffeine late at night I had a very bad night’s sleep during the compo.
• DO: have a great friend like Daniel, to keep each other smashing away at the keyboard.
• DO: get the hell out of the house!!! It probably saved my life, going for walks every day. Also, this is how I found the inspirational graffiti (pictured above).
• DO: have a supportive spouse!

Thank you for reading. Thank you for playing. Thank you for leaving meaningful comments.

Play You are me now.

ps. Thank you, Ludum Dare! I can’t wait for the next one.

Tags: analysis, ante-mortem, antemortem, post-compo, post-mortem

Tags: LD17, motivation

IndieReview looked at a few Ludum Dare 17 entries this week over at their website:

• Deep Under An Island
• A Fishing Adventure
• Artillery Isles
• The Adventures of Archie Pegalo

If you have time, stop by and drop a comment!

Since some people were having a lot of problems with the first version of my game, I’ve decided to release a new version fixing a few things (mainly the huge background bug with some graphics cards..) the only things changed are problems, there was NO more content added (which would be against the rules, if I remember correctly) and I got permission from an admin in IRC to make sure it was okay to do this.

Check it out here!
The Layabouts “Island Escape” Mini-Site

Alright, I think it’s time for some post-compo thoughts.

First off,  I must say there are a lot of really amazing games this LD and I’m hoping to work my way through all the ’em if I can 😀 (I’ve rated or commented on ~70 so far).

I’ll write up a full postmortem sometime in the next while, but overall I’m very happy with how it went. Everything really just fit together and I managed to do a whole lot in the 48 hours, and so far I’m getting some pretty positive feedback (and the bytejacker article just made my week 😀 ).

This whole experience has really gotten me thinking, in the past I’ve focused on really large, long-term projects projects; and while they may have nice clean code and cool technical buzzwords under the hood, this 48hr game is quite a bit more enjoyable than my previous ~1yr effort. I’m thinking I’ll stop/slow working on my current long-term project and keep making little projects like this every couple weeks or so, the instant feedback (a couple days of coding and you know if it’s a good/bad concept rather than a couple months….) and the variety is really great.

I am still working on Island Hopping, I just now got an online high score thing working (the game doesn’t read the data back yet, but my current build uploads the data correctly) and I’m playing with some PHP/SQL stuff to make the scores/stats display nicely online.

I should have another build with high scores and such up in a few days.

Also on the todo are: better difficulty curve-age, allowing you to turn off the music (also, perhaps some better music…), some gameplay tweaks (maybe combos for the red islands, or more types of powerups, etc), lots of UI tweaks, a tutorial, etc. And after all else is working, I might whip up a fancy water shader as a high quality option…

And I have some comment responses:

fun concept, and really quite addicting. nice work!

Thanks!

Fun concept indeed! The only problem I have with this game is interpreting the platforms as islands, but it works with some abstract thinking :3 Good stuff!

Haha, yeah it’s a bit of a stretch, but my art skills don’t include palm trees and such…

Very nice graphically, very clear what you’re meant to do, just incredibly buggering hard to do so! Good fun but too hard due to the controls.

Thanks! and yeah I really need to tweak the controls/difficulty… (the updated version is a bit better, but I’m gonna be tweaking  it for a while…)

Very nice 3d graphics, very fun, a bit too hard. Good work for a 48 hours short time

Thanks! and yep seeing a pattern here with the difficulty…

Way too hard to get into. The learning curve is a cliff.

Ouch, but it does seem to be true… I’m workin’ on it 😉

You *really* gimped the jumping, and that’s what killed the game for me. Not so much the aiming or timing, but the falling miserably short on every single platform I attempted… sad. My highest combo was a measly 4 islands.

I’m hoping the update with double jumping helps at least a bit, but yeah the jumping and handling still have a ways to go…

Very nice looking albeit simple. Pretty hard, though, and the first straight line is maybe a bit long, since we die and start over every 3 islands
Music is clean but a bit repetitive. Overall quite well polished.

Thanks! I might trim the start platform down a bit then. And yeah, I made the music in LMMS in about 20 mins (haha, and the fact that I’ve never played an instrument probably doesn’t help in my music generation skills…)

Fun and addictive, but needed a smoother difficulty curve

I’m trying to smooth it now

Madly addicting. If you continue this, I would consider allowing players to use their own music

Yeah, I’m definitely adding a toggle to the music for the next version…

Best game I tried so far. Really adictive!!!

Thanks! 😀

Very fun game, reminded me a bit of Counter-Strike bunny hopping. Music got repetitive very quickly though. If you ever keep on working on this, I’d love a online high score.

Thanks! the music will be toggleable in the next version and I’m working on online high score right now.

TONS of fun!!!!!!

The music really got me in the mood, but it got old quick.

Great idea, having the different difficulty settings. I was able to master “Easy” before moving on.

Excellent work.

Thanks! Definitely seeing a pattern with the music, I might search for something nicer online now that the compo is over, in addition to letting the player toggle it.

I played the original version, and while it was difficult, it was also a ton of fun. One of my favorite entries so far. The graphics are very simple, but they do their job very well. The music is repetitive but not annoying. What the game does sorely miss though is a high score table. Preferrably online high score table. I haven’t played the double jump version yet, so maybe it’s not that big of a deal there, but what I thought could had helped with the difficulty is if you had a minimap that you could refer to, especially for long jumps where you’re staring at the sky. Frankly though, I think maybe you should limit the player’s vision or just make looking up not do anything, because that’s a bit of an annoying thing to have to do. My best score was 49700. I got close to that on other runs, but on that run I got a 4x multiplier followed by a decent combo, so I got lucky a bit.
Oh, I guess the game also really needs a tutorial. It’s not obvious that you have to tilt your view to affect your jump height.
I hope you keep working on this. I’m going to download the double jump version now and play some more.

Thanks for the in-depth feedback! The high score table is on the way, and I’m working on tweaking all the controls and things, and good point on having a tutorial, I’ll add that to the list

Well i certainly had a lot of fun last weekend, The theme was so-so, obviously created many similar games (i believe someone posted a list of all the games who’s names started with “island”, but i digress). I personally really liked the theme, if only because if it had been something else i would have never created the game i did. Now if you’ll bear with me, i’d like to share my thoughts about the voting:

It always seems like we get these generic themes (caverns, exploration, islands) and not many people are ever overly happy with them… so how do they win? Here’s my oppinion; other themes such as “continuous motion” are more personal; more likely to get a direct YES or NO. Themes like “islands” are much more open to lots of different genres and mechanics. When you’re going through the list of themes, you’re likely to be “continuous motion? what am i going to do with that? NO, PAG? awesome! YES, Islands? hmm… meh NONE”. and since it doesnt really have that much going against it since it’s so open, it’s mostly going to get a few YESs and mostly NONEs. Other themes will get lower because they already allow the voter to think about their game, most likely resulting in a lack of ideas for a game and a NO.

Now that that’s over with, how about i respond to some comments on my game?

It would be cool to have a speed adjuster that would allow me to speed up night and day even faster. asides for that I can’t think of anything else to add. Well made game fun to be able to collect power-ups and build your own world.

I understand that you’re wishing that days were longer and nights shorter, unfortunately an adjuster would make things much too easy and imbalance everything!

Fun game, i never understood how the underlying system for when you got what tool/weapon tought. The day/night cycle could be a bit shorter aswell. Really liked the intro!

I’ll make sure to shorten the cycles when i mess around with the game some more, as that’s two people now who comment on it, i never really had time for an actual description of how you get items.

Very interesting idea but somehow it was very hard for me to get into it. I didn’t understand when I earned a new tool (do you need to gather different tiles?)

Also, I have no idea how to fight back actually. I didn’t get the sword and don’t know what to collect for that. A bit more details in the intro would’ve helped a lot.

Yes, each item has different requirements for tiles, another thing on the to-do list: explain items more. Holding SHIFT brings out your sword, there’s a description of each item by mousing over them saying s0, but i realize i never told anyone that 😛

A clever little game with cute graphics and an amusing intro. Unfortunately, whenever nighttime rolled around and the screen got dark, performance for me dropped precipitously and the CPU spiked, which basically meant that when night approached I had to find a safe spot to stand and not move at all until morning. Which somewhat diminished my enjoyment, but overall it was still a good game. Rather difficult, but eventually you get the hang of it.

Yeah, hopefully i’ll be able to do some optimization of the darkness tiles when i go over the game again, i noticed it lagged quite a bit while programming it but due to the time constraint was forced to leave it be if i wanted to actually have an ending to the game.

I liked collecting different materials and making things.

When I got to a pirate lair, I killed everyone and nothing happened – I didn’t know what to do from there.

Also, when I got the sword I didn’t know how to use it. I assumed I had to click on the pirates. It was only later that I noticed the tooltip that said to use shift.

Apart from that, I thought this was great. Especially the little lantern.

Yes! somebody commented on the lantern 😀 once you’ve cleared the pirate cave you’re supposed to go to another island and clear the pirate cave there too. Sorry i didn’t put that in the instructions <_<

It was hard for me to figure out how to play at first. A tutorial would be great.

Hopefully I’ll be able to input an actual tutorial of sorts, the intro explanations were all i could do within the 48 hours!

So yeah! as you may have noticed, i’ve commented on an updated version of the game. i’m basically taking away everything except graphics and the engine, new story, stuffs, stuffs, and more stuffs that i can’t think of right now. but it should be fun!

A few days have passed, so its time for me to write a postmortem before I forget everything I did with Invasive.

First: Thanks to everyone who played my game!

This is long, and possibly of little interest so I’ll hide it behind a read-more tag.

What went right/techniques learned…

– Hybrid blitting engine

I didn’t implement a full-redraw-each-frame blitting engine, so I’m calling it a hybrid. The main viewing area of the game consists of three “zoom” classes extending Flash’s native Sprite class, which in turn each have a terrain, flora, fauna, and artifact layer. Those layers are 500×480 transparent bitmaps to which I draw almost every frame. (The zoom class tracks a camera, and if it hasn’t been moved the terrain layer doesn’t refresh. The other layers get fed model data, and get cleared and repainted every frame.) At any given time, only one zoom class is visible, the others are .visible=false and aren’t fed model data.

Performance isn’t earth shattering, but up till now to do this project I would have added sprites to the display list for every movable object. Having a Flash display list several thousand items long just doesn’t really work well. So I was happy with this.

-Bitmaps for storing data

There are several cases in the game where I need to know if two things are in the same place. (A kiwi and a tree, a glomper and a kiwi, etc..) Since I had divorced the model from the view, I couldn’t do use either Gilbert’s bitmap collision class as I had planned , or Flash’s bitmap.hitTest[method]s. I was storing every objects locations in their own arrays. (Ie: Kiwi:Array, Glomper:Array, etc) Each object had it’s own class, but all of them had public GlobalX and GlobalY properties.) I’m sure there are faster ways of finding all intersections between two lists than a nested loop, but unfortunately I don’t know them (yet). In pseudo-code:

FOR EACH Kiwi:

FOR EACH Tree:

if the Kiwi's location == the Tree's location:

Do Stuff;

On the other hand, most of the objects weren’t colliding at any given time. So, rather than checking -every- Kiwi against -every- tree, I did the following (in pseudo-code):

PLOT EACH tree on an off screen bitmap

FOR EACH Kiwi:

Look at bitmap and see if there is a tree, IF there is a tree:

FOR EACH Tree:

IF the Kiwi's location == Tree's location:

Do Stuff;

Even though I added an if operation to the nest, and even though there’s an extra loop outside the nest (to do the plot), the second pseudo-code snippet runs faster because it cuts out a nested for loop in a large percentage of cases. Since in the cases of the Kiwi/Glomper interactions the arrays could have literally thousands of members, this made the game possible. (Though I think the second snippet is still O(n^2)? I don’t have enough of a CS background to assess that.)

I also used a bitmap for initially storing map information (to set terrain tiles during initialization). This worked beautifully vs using an xml, just in terms of my own convenience.

What went wrong:

The zoom wasn’t intuitive

I was pretty happy/comfortable with my pan and zoom, but i had written it in the first place and knew how it was going to operate. I -should- have provided mouse-wheel zoom, mouse-edge panning, etc. And the zoom levels I provided were poorly chosen; for my convenience, rather than the player’s. Several commenters noted this and they’re right.

– On the outermost level of zoom, animals should have been more than 1×1 pixel. And their colors could have been better.

It’s very hard to tell the difference between glompers and kiwis, because they’re represented at this level by single pixels– and those pixels are red and brown, two colors which don’t really show up well against the terrain. I think 2×2 pixels might have been more visible, and I could have given more thought to contrast. (Also noted by commenters)

– I spent most of my time on displaying a model, and didn’t spend time on gameplay or interface.

In the versions up to 0.6, walls stop glompers but don’t stop Kiwis. Since I cowardly shrank from the challenge of pathfinding several thousand animals at once, the movement is decided at random. As a result I was afraid there was no win condition. So at the last minute I changed it so that walls stop everything… this meant there was an easy but possibly tedious way to win, hurting the fun value of the game. I didn’t really tune things I should have, such as the number of kiwis each glomper needed to eat before reproducing. Ultimately, this comes down to me failing to test sufficiently.

Likewise, several commenters noted that it would have been nice to have click-drag to place walls (which after all, are useless if just single blocks!). They’re right.. in fact I knew this before I released it, but-

– Time management/motivation

I stopped with several hours left because I was dead tired, and probably should have tried to take a nap rather than calling it a day. The major casualty of this is a sound effects engine, but there were others.

For the present:

I had fun building the game, and I think I improved my technical skills by dealing with the movement of large numbers of objects– a task I just wouldn’t have attempted in my usual projects.

For the future:

– I’ve now done two LDs where I tried to pull off something with more complexity than I was able to do properly. Next time I’m going to try to do something small, and polish it until I gotta wear shades.

– The general setup seems ok, and I like the idea of doing a game about invasive species. I may revisit this and try to implement a better ecosystem model (along with the interface improvements), and come up with a better game. There are other projects I need to finish first though.

-TF

Ok,…one week ago we were all still coding and developing like hell and it is again amazing what cool stuff was created. Big respect to everyone.

I as always viloated the “keep it simple”-rule and switched from a too complicated RTS approach to a not less complicated Third-Person-Shooter… 😀 That’s me, and even I know I decided to change my behavior for the next time, I’m sure I will fail again 😀 (until the complicated project works out)

Nevertheless I want to present you a little introductional video I created with blender and windows video maker. Actually I have absolutley no experience in that so expect not too much(click the image) 😀

EDIT:

I also created my timelapse video now. Have a look here:

http://thomas.trocha.com/games/ld17/ld17.html

I was feeling like crap so I figured I’d do a Ludum Dare game to cheer me up. The theme turned out to be crap so I decided to just make a stupid game instead of a good one. I hated working on it and just wanted it to end the whole time, and was totally ignoring it for part of the day. That seems to have helped me avoid getting too focused and prioritize my TODO list so ironically the game turned out okay.

I did get something out of it. I learned how to prioritize features and that it’s really better to do something you want to do as soon as possible instead of waiting for the right time, even if it’s shoddy, because the longer you’re exposed to it the more improvements you can make. But that doesn’t really help because I still felt like crap working on the game, and I still feel like crap whenever I do anything positive, and the ego trip from reading the comments on it doesn’t make up for it in the end.

P.S. On a lighter note, the game was inspired by a Radiolab episode that discussed how fighter pilots performing high G-force maneuvers sometimes lose consciousness and have dreams and out of body experiences. I read that hallucinations can also happen due to sensory deprivation in high altitude flight. Of course, my game isn’t even close to the actual experience, but I thought it was an interesting idea.

Play Nuclear Test

Tags: postmortem

Because of complaints about the difficulty I added 2 easier levels at the beginning to serve as a learning phase. Since it’s not in the spirit of LD I haven’t changed much the rest, but now biting push your enemies away.

Here’s a timelapse link for my LD17 entry.  Sorry no music on it.

GALAPAGOS TIMELAPSE

What went wrong? What worked? Full post-mortem writeup after the bump… including a SNEAK PEEK screenshot of the progress on the game!

• Art Style — One of my goals for the contest was to make my game have a distinctive art style, and that really worked out. In addition to making it stand out visually, I also chose a style that made the art a bit faster to create. Even so, I didn’t have a lot of time to make art but I think it looked as if I did.
• OGMO — Tried out the OGMO level editor for this compo. It’s great. Get’s a bit slow on large levels but if you keep it small it’s a great tool. The flexible ‘value’ system saved me a lot of coding.
• Music — Around midday Sunday I was faced with the choice of add some music and certainly not have time to finish the game, or don’t add music and still probably not finish. One of my goals this time was to do music, so I went for it. I think that not only did it add a lot to the game, it also helped mentally recharge me and allowed me to be even more productive Sunday afternoon.
• Tweakval — I used my tweakval code again, and it saved me hours of work, especially in tweaking the projection. Getting the “simple” ortho projection right was surprisingly tricky.

• Idea — I took way too long to decide on an idea. Even by Saturday night I had a good sense of the look/engine I wanted but only a vague idea of the gameplay. “roguelike” isn’t enough detail of a design. I should have sketched something out on paper on friday, and stuck to it.
• Not doing gameplay first. The key to success is first do player interaction, second do enemies, then work on map and world building. That way, if you run out of time, you still have something playable. But somehow I always seem to mess this up, probably because I have a lot more practice writing the map/world kind of code than gameplay code. It’s a vicious cycle. Next time, right?
• Blender — This didn’t really go “wrong” because in the end I was able to build my models but it took me like an hour to build a half-sphere (most of that was because I had specific ideas about the UV layout). Really I just need more practice, but it was a time sink.
• Basecode — I don’t really have a formal basecode, just a pile of snippets and functions from past LD’s and stuff. I spent a bit of time debugging some stupid graphics bugs and redoing basic stuff. Hopefully I’ll have time to clean up and simplify this before the next compo.

The Future of “Crater Galapagos”

Here’s a sneak peek of the current post-compo game. It will be a while before I release anything though:

That's my game

Welp, guess I should talk about this.

Message began out of frustration for the theme of Islands; a theme I initially had no clue how to make interesting.  I mean, it was so specific that I had problems wrapping any of my previous ideas and mechanics around it, but strangely enough that’s what pushed me into starting; I knew I would be using Unity, and I thought “hey, I’m going to need an island anyway.  I mine as well just start modelling an island and go from there”.  So I made the island in the screenshot above.  After that, looking at the island and a little dude moving around caused my mind to wander, and before long I had a vague idea of how the game would look.

So according to gdmag.com I’m supposed to talk about what went right now.

Things started going my way when I sat down and started coding.  I’ve worked with Unity before, and I knew that for the most part getting things up and running was extraordinarily simple.  Like, the player movement from the beginning to what’s in game now took 10 minutes tops, adding new islands became quicker every subsequent time, the music (which I’ll talk about later) was trivial to put in game.  Also, all the “modelling” was done in Unity entirely out of primitives.

Of course, there were hiccups during development (trigger-trigger collision not working unless both triggers are forced awake took the better part of the first day) but for the most part it went as well as I would expect from Unity.  Also it’s web playable which I think is nice.

But there were significantly more things that went wrong during the development of Message.  Here they are in no particular order.

1. I took way too long doing nothing but trying to peg an idea for islands.  Literally nothing but staring at the ceiling and going “HMMMM”.
2. When I did come up with an idea, it was too vague.  There was no primary mechanic to focus on.
3. The game is story heavy, which meant the style had to carry the game; if I wanted to make the game have any impact, I would have to do it right and that took time I didn’t have.
4. I didn’t really read the rules and used a song which, albeit perfect for the game, was not legal for use in the competition.  I have my own opinions on the subject, but it was still not right to have used the song I did.
5. My game didn’t have enough hockey.

The song thing was sort of remedied later on when I found out about the infringement.  You can see not only the process I took to make the music in the new version of the game but my reaction the the hubub here.  Also, more information about the tool I used in the summary.  I can’t remedy point 5.  That’s just something I have to live with, one day at a time.

In regards to comments made, I agree that the character is really boring.  I was thinking about implementing a voxel character with a beard and tattered pants with simple walk, swim and ground reach animations but believe me when I say I was still implementing win/lose cases like 2 minutes before submission time.  Also thanks for liking the second puzzle.  I finished doing that right before I started the win/lose cases.  So  I guess 6. Not enough time, but gdmag.com says (and one should note this is bold face important) “try to come up with things that went right/wrong during project that are likely unique to your project”.

Yup.

Tags: LD17, postmortem, unity

The responses to Forgotten Isles on the Ludum Dare site kept mentioning that that the music was missing. At first I just accepted this as a cross-platform issue, or maybe someone didn’t have their volume up (the music is pretty soft). After a few more of these comments it occurred to me that I probably left it muted.

Like during Waddlefield development, I disable the music so that it doesn’t play EVERY time I’m trying to test. Cute tunes are fun, for the first few repetitions, but then not so much after a dozen or two repetitions. So, bug fix for Version 3! The music has been unmuted!

The other tweak is that I’ve adjusted the camera’s position and rotation so that the character’s movement is relative to the camera position. before, the camera was at a 30-35 degree angle, and movement was less intuitive as it is now. While this added confusion to navigating the maze, the purpose wasn’t to make it more difficult.

You can download or play Version 3 now. Version 2 and 1 are still available for download and online play.

Now, responses to some comments:

AClockWorkLemon says …

great game, however i found this extremely easy due to the fact that on the 2nd island, my ‘memories’ glitched up and got stuck at 45.

Yes! A version 1 bug. If you lose, and start again, the timer doesn’t re-activate. This is fixed in version 2.

Jonny D says …

…I didn’t hear audio though…

Audio is now fixed!

Almost says …

…Some more variety in the type of objects within the maze would help to reduce the feel of wandering in a maze and more so wandering an island. (trees, not just bushes)

Yes, Original plan called for many more types of terrain, but maze design and implementation took up a lot of my time.

pekuja says …

…I do think if you work on this further, you should add something more than just the maze. Mazes can be a bit boring unless there’s a lot of different things to see.

I was thinking there could be some “guards” which you have to avoid, or even some platformer elements for jumping perhaps.

While mazes are the challenge and game of The Forgotten Isles, Ludum Dare is about more. Specifically, the judging of Ludum Dare. With 204 entries, time alloted to play each game is only a few minutes. I want to make sure all the other players can experience as much of The Forgotten Isles as possible.

Below I’ve posted the four maps so you don’t spend your whole time frustrated and lost. You should at least try the game, so you get a proper idea of the difficulty, but use the maps below so you can unravel the whole story.

Island 1
Island 2
Island 3
Island 4

Endurion says …
Absolutely unplayable slow. Maybe 1 frame per 10 seconds. What weird stuff have you going on there?

Well, rendering about 500 sprites per frame without checking if the sprite needs to be drawn. I noticed a slowdown on the Mac version, but in my opinion it was still playable.
Anyways, it’s fixed now… or at least I hope so. I just updated the links.

Hello,

First of all, thank you all for your nice comments.

This is the postmortem of my entry for LD17: Clean the Island!!

My plan:

• Submit my first game to LD
• Learn PlayBasic: I was looking for a language that allows me to code 2D games. I chose PlayBasic because I read it has sliding collision and pixel perfect collision built-in.
• Compose and play a great song for the game
• Have fun

What went right:

• I did submit my first “game”
• After a couple of hours of thinking I decided to create a top-down perspective game with mouse-only control. I’ve spent a lot time trying to develop games that can be controlled using only the mouse. I would like to develop games for people who can play card games but cannot play Platforms games: playing with the mouse is easier than playing with the cursor keys.
• I think the game mechanic has a lot of potential.
• I learnt PlayBasic: good and bad things. Good things: it was easy to code with it, and implement sliding collision was simple.
• I think that I’m not good at graphics/animation/pixel art, but I think the sprites creation went well. I decided to implement a retro-look: I created all sprites 16×16 px and then resize to 128×128 px and he palette didn’t have more thatn 16 colors (I believe).
• I used Paint.Net a lot. Before this game my only graphic tool was The Gimp, but this time I used Paint.Net only and now I think it is great.
• I did have fun

What went wrong:

• I almost couldn’t submit the game. I finished it like 5 minutes before deadline.
• I was using a new notebook. I had to install a lot of applications during the weekend.
• I spent a lot of time trying to implement vsync+time-based movement. I couldn’t do it, so I just implemented vsync (built-in in PlayBasic). Part of the problem was that I couldn’t make vsync works in my new notebook. Two days later, I reboot the notebook and vsync started to work
• I spent a lot of time learning PlayBasic. It is very similar to DarkBasic Pro so it was easy but some parts like camera code and map creation was new to me. I don’t think it was a good idea for a 48 hrs. competition.
• I didn’t understand the map creation application for PlayBasic so I had to write the complete level as a read/data commands. Because of this I could only make one level because it took me more like one hour to code just the first level.
• I din’t have time to write and play the song. So I created using pre-recorded loops That was the worst part for me, although I think the song is quite good 😉

The future of Clean the Island!!

• Besides being voting for other entries in LD competition I’ve being porting the game to Game Maker 8: As a I said before I’m trying to find a game development environment that allows me to create 2D games easily. I’ve skipped Game Maker because I don’t feel confortable with point-and-click tools. But then I was reading about GML (Game Maker Language) and it looks great for 2D games. I ported most of the game mechanics in 4 to 6 hours.
• One problem I had was that GM don’t have sliding collision built-in, but I made a simple one in a very short time period.
• Then, I created two new types of enemies (cacti and spiders) and 6 levels. You can check the new levels here in Gamejolt.
• I’m planning to add more levels, enemies and some puzzles without changing the core mechanics. Stay tuned 😉

Best regards

JF

I want to give Perrin an award for his game, but I can’t because he doesn’t have any journal posts.

I want to give people awards for their games, but I can’t because they don’t have any journal posts.

Well i’ve been stupidly busy at work at the moment so I haven’t really had any time to evaluate how it went properly, so here it is:

Things that went well:

• Graphics – I was overall rather happy with the art in the end, it’s really my first time doing my own art at all (short of modelling some stuff from TRON for fun) and I was surprised at how motivated I was to just continue doing it, i’m usually so terrible with drawing and so on that I tend to rely on others for this sort of thing but with super low-res pixel art it’s so confining it’s hard to get it wrong if you don’t mind stuff looking a bit silly.
• Controls – I don’t want to take credit for Unity’s physics or anything, but this was the first time i’ve done 2D platforming mechanics in Unity and was pretty happy with the result, jumping is a bit weird as I was trying to achieve jump height relative to the amount of time the button is pressed down but apart from that it came off well enough, if a bit heavy feeling.
• Getting it done – I was waylaid by a series of small jobs I had to do around the flat and helping people out with various computer problems, so most of all i’m just happy it was a somewhat complete product.

Things that went badly:

• Sound – Pretty obvious one given that there wasn’t any, I tried to record some basic stuff on my guitar but I couldn’t record it cleanly enough and trying to learn Musagi in the 3 hours I had to do sound proved way too much. I didn’t know about sfxr either so I gave up on sound effects altogether. Next time i’ll be much more ready for this sort of thing and if the theme fits i’ll probably be doing some form of rythm based game.
• Length – Again another pretty obvious problem with it, there’s literally 30 seconds of gameplay tops, primarily due to me building the level with about 5 minutes left and I wanted to make sure it looked right. I didn’t realise you could submit 15-20 minutes late otherwise I probably would’ve had 3-4 levels of significant but repetitive length.
• Dead bodies – Yeah those floating things are meant to be dead bodies, I have no idea how i’m meant to do those properly given the limited amount of pixels but they’re remarkably abstract.

I’m sure there’s other things that went wrong and right with it but those are the main things that come to mind.

Going forward i’m not sure if i’ll continue with it as a game, it’s a rather boring concept and i’m not a huge fan of the cliché’d super hard indie platformer genre, but if people actually want more levels i’m more than happy to implement some of the extra art I did and put together some interesting levels. The theme was fun but I couldn’t really think of anything that interesting to do other than the play on words in the title, but if anyone comes up with any interesting mechanics related to buoyancy and general island jumping I could easily get motivated again.

With regards to the whole debate about Unity/Game Maker/etc i’m a bit on the fence, I’ve done a lot of C++ with SDL/GL/D3D projects in the past and it’s such a laborious, un-fun experience I don’t really have a lot of inclination to take part in a strict competition like that. That said I think each game should be evaluated based on the amount of work gone into it, if you’re using a pre-made engine there should either be significantly more content, or some form of mechanic that would be too time consuming if you had to do the base engine for it too. Then again with that attitude you could end up with people forcing themselves to do contrived game concepts over simplistic but brilliant ideas just to keep up with the joneses. I guess the whole Tech category thing could work but then again that could result in LD being a glorified tech demo event, although it is balanced with the other categories (this was my first LD so i’m unsure as to why it was added then removed previously).

I’ll either be taking place in the Mini-LD this month or in the EGP for this month (High Velocity theme sounds pretty fun to play about with). It’s really fun taking part in these contests and getting feedback, it’s really nice to have people take the time to look at your stuff and give constructive feedback, I tend to be hyper-critical of myself so when people have fun with anything I make it’s a pleasant surprise. I’m working through the list myself and it’s pretty incredible to see how some people interpret the theme and how some people can achieve so much in so little time.

I’m open to collaboration on interesting game concepts (especially if they’re in Unity) so if anyone is serious about a particularly interesting concept or prototype and is capable of finishing products to completion with a high degree of polish i’m more than interested in helping (although with full time work I don’t have a huge amount of time). On another note my company (www.rubixstudios.co.uk) may be looking for a freelance chiptune composer for an upcoming iPhone project so if anyone wants to throw their hat into that ring, PM me here or email me at billy (at) rubixstudios.co.uk.

Lots of love,

Billy ‘brian’ Fletcher.

My previous host was having problems with downloads. Now I uploaded it to gamejolt and it should be working fine. If you couldn´t play it yet, do it and vote 😀

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=rate&uid=1901

Also, thanks for all the comments. They have encouraged me to do a polished version of the game. I think that it is funny and addictive enough so I´m making a flash version. I think I will need help with the graphics though.

All the problems with the game are due to the lack of polishing. It is very hard for some and very easy for others 😀