So I finally got my timelapse for Throwbots up. It’s on YouTube right now! Just click the link below to watch it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QpwoeDswoE

I know that’s not particularly interesting a post, but it’s taken me literally all day to kajigger it into working. Couldn’t even get music into it, had to use the YouTube audio swapping thing (which isn’t in effect yet as of this post). Unfortunate, but I wanted it up for people to see it. Post-mortem for the game should be up by tomorrow or by the end of this week at the very latest.

It’s time to gather all the moments of the last two days in a short yet interesting post mortem. So much happened in these days that it’s kinda hard to decide which are worth mentioning the most. I better start with quick reconstruction of both days.

Ludum Dare – Day 1

Competition started at 4:00AM (here in Slovenia). I fell to sleep at 1:00 AM and woke up at 3:30 AM then I’ve prepared some coffee and soon after that, theme was announced! “It’s Dangerous to go alone! Take this”…what to do now. Idea shouldn’t be too complex yet fun and I took my cup with a coffee and lit a cigarete. While I was watching the trees in the dark that crazy idea got over me – Darkness, light, creepy, item, old man = Lead a character trough a dark place and let him have a torch from an old man. That’s it, plan was made and ready to be excecuted!

First I drew my humble design document with character vizuality, hud elements, goals, plans, how will the map look like and that kind of stuff. All that on a single page to keep it simple, and I was ready.

Development in order (1st day):
– Map editor (drawing, loading and saving maps)
– Game engine (loading maps and support sidescrolling)
– Player (red dot on start)
– Collision detection
– Some graphics
– Particle system
– Lighting (which wasn’t successful on the first day)
– More graphics

Lunch: Pasta with tuna
Dinner: Pizza with pepperoni
Coffee drank: 4 – 6 cups

Day was over and I went to bed around 1:00 AM planning to wake up at 6:00 AM. At that time I went over the day at myself and there was satisfaction because I made a lot of things. So I fell asleep…

Ludum Dare – Day 2

Plans didn’t work out. I overslept  from 6:00 AM to 9:00 PM and I got nervous and went back into action with cup of coffee next to me. I’ve made a quick ToDo list for more organized work and clocked started to run like crazy – it didn’t stop.

Development in order (2nd day):
– Flame system (flame bar getting lower and coal refuellig the torch)
– Lighting (I still had problems but it was implemented afterall)
– Character animations
– Enemies and their fear before the flame
– More tiles
– Death/victory condition
– Main menu and level selection
– Making maps
– Story dialogs (for beginning and ending)
– Adding 1 single SFX for picking up coal and lame repeating music (I can’t do music, don’t judge!)
– Entry was submitted 30 seconds before the end.

Lunch: Pasta again
Dinner: Toasts with cheese, tuna and pomodori
Coffee drank: 4 – 6 cups

Clock pointer said “It’s over” and I made a toast to the victory! It was over, I was among other strong souls that have made it to the end. I did something like that for the first time, game in 48 hours even if I had some doubts on start. I believed in my game concept and at the end, I had that realized even if it didn’t include all features. Ludum Dare chat was full of joy and I stayed around for a bit more and went to bed later at the dawn.

What went well

First of all, I’m glad that idea was born few minutes after the announcment which was huge advantage. Trough the competition I wasn’t distracted much and I just kept doing my work. Experience from the past helped me a lot because few things took me less time than I predicted. Overall, I think two main factors were idea at the start and experience from the past.

What went wrong

First problem that I’ve encountered were lights. I’ve never done fake lighting in 2D world before and so I was trying different stuff and functions without success. I’ve lost nearly 4 hours at that part if not more – I’ll have to concentrate on that part now. Maybe I did set my goals too high because some features were cut off and those that are in the game right now are bugged or poorly done (or at least some of them). Music is another weak factor. I’m artist and programmer but I can’t do music so I’ve tried to make something with Inudge but I’ve encountered problem to record from my speakers (records were too silent) and so the lame piece of music was born! (If you try the game out, you’ll know what I’m talking about). Next time I have to prepare my framework properly to save some time and I shouldn’t be learning new stuff at the competition.

Conclusion

It was first “Make a game” competition for me and it was exciting, especialy when I saw all the people working on their projects and in the same time together as a community. It’s obvious that we’re not here to win but to participate and have fun at what we like to do the most in our lifes.

I invite you to try my game out and rank it if you will
[ RATE GAME |  DOWNLOAD GAME ]

Tags: postmortem

So this is my first post, as I joined especially for LD#20 “It’s Dangerous To Go Alone, Take This!” I’ve just finished Mary’s Awesome Adventure, which I wanted to submit to the Compo, but I guess it’ll just go into the Jam section now.

Title screen for LD#20 It's Dangerous To Go Alone

So that’s that, and hopefully I’ll be able to do something more awesome for the next Game Jam. Tools used:

• GIMP for the title graphics and editing of the graphical resources I found online
• Eclipse for the IDE
• Java for the language
• JGame for the engine
• Linux Multimedia Studio for creating the music and sound effects (+ various soundfonts I had sitting around)

Figuring out the collisions in JGame took a decent chunk of my time, also hanging out at a friend’s house for a few hours on Saturday. Plus I was developing on Linux and I had Eclipse set to use OpenJDK at first, and OpenJDK apparently does not like to do sound. I’m going to chalk it up as an issue with PulseAudio (which I can’t seem to rid my system of 100%) since it worked fine when I switched to the official Sun JVM.

In retrospect, I should have become more familiar with JGame before the competition. At first I was only using it because it provided for threading of the screen-painting and logic procedures so my dual-core with no graphics card could actually run it at a decent speed, but it turns out that the collision detection capability is pretty nice too. Next time will probably be in Java again, but hopefully with more interesting mechanics. I’ve already got an idea for a music shooter where the attacks are timed to an mp3 file you input.

Now, I just hope I can upload a .JAR file. I haven’t checked, but that shouldn’t be a problem… right?

I just finished porting my XNA compo submission to silverlight.  So it now runs on the web!  It’s currently identical to the downloadable version that several people have commented on having trouble with (likely due to missing XNA redist).  Try it by visiting: http://sugarpillstudios.com/games/zomkeybotcalypse.html

It’s unfortunate that I didn’t get to compete this time around. I was really looking forward to LD20, considering it’s a milestone number for the event. Oh well.

I had AP exams to study for, a couple projects to finish and some plans with friends that prevented me from competing. I’m sad I didn’t get to exploit the newfound power of my Ubuntu installation.

Best of luck to those who competed, and may the best game win!

Tags: motivation

… Wow… My entry sucks!

But feel free to check it out HERE: My entry: Matt’s Trial Dungeon

I was way to busy this weekend so I couldn,t push out a game…. ;(

I just submitted my first ever “complete” game! I had originally planned to stick to the 48 hour competition, but in alot of ways I’m glad I didn’t. The extra 24 hours was sorely needed, as I was able to squash some game stopping bugs and even add in a boss level. It was my first real experience with Unity and despite some strange bugs that arose during development it was a good experience. There are still lots of small bugs, but at some point I had to just call it done. I want to thank everyone who posted updates during the competition, seeing all the great games being made gave for a good drive to finish mine. All in all it was a great experience participating, I can’t wait for the next one, maybe next time I’ll finish the competition. I wish I had posted updates over the weekend, but there’s always next time. I’ll post a post-mortem tomorrow. You can view my entry at Zombieland Entry

…but hit the jam.

Entry is here.

I have no idea why I ever thought it possible to get this done in the first 48 hours. I have got to stop trying to make games that use a whole ton of unique art assets for competitions. That’s always where most of my time ends up going.

Would like to add music, and a bit more variety to the events. It depends on how I feel about it tomorrow, post-jam.

I said I was going to make ‘it’s dangerous to go alone, take this: the girl game’. So I did. But I ended up focusing more on the girl game theme I think.

Well, this is disappointing… I suppose I should have guessed that I really wouldn’t get very far with the extra day. Even though I originally was going to submit this game for the compo, almost nothing visible has changed with it in the last day; it’s been mostly code cleanup, a few new features (not readily visible), and a bit of story. Oh, and I now have install instructions that should work on Windows and Mac OS X as well, since I had a couple of other people try it out, and spent some time fixing the issues they were having. Other than that, most of the day was spent at work (you know, actual work I get paid for) so I sadly haven’t had much time to devote to the game.

Well, what I currently have is going to be my Jam entry. Congratulations to all compo contestants for getting your games in on time, and cheers to my fellow Jam participants… I look forward to playing all the games! Now, I only wish these things were held more often. 😛

I’ll be posting my game on the site in a few minutes.

Found a bug in the game, it’s still the submission hour so I’m putting up an update!  Is that cool?  Really I was just noting this here because I’m doing that behind the scenes as it were, with no change to the entry page – just a swapped file on the server!  Thought folks should know.

I finished a prototype of one of the ideas I had in mind, the name is Codename: Taken.

In a quick description, the objective is to to survive from red flying robots (mushrooms) attacks but you can’t defend by yourself, so the creator of the game (me) gives you a green flying robot to defend you from the enemies.

Here is a video of the game play:

Ludum Dare 20 – Codename: Taken – Gameplay

note: dunno how to embed youtube videos.

I made a time lapse of the game development too:

Ludum Dare 20 – Codename: Taken – Time lapse

Sadly I couldn’t complete it in time as a game, some core features like dying so game can finish, couldn’t be added in time. However, I wanted to complete a bit more the game so I worked today in adding some stuff to enter the Ludum Dare Jam as well.

Here are the links for the game:

• Java Webstart for the main contest version
• Java Webstart for the Jam version
• Android apk for the Jam version (yeah, it works on Android)
• Source code

Hope you like it.

I made a time lapse of my work. It’s not as good as it could be, because there’s one screenshot for every minute, so the framerate isn’t very good. Oh well.

Tags: timelapse

Since I ran into so many hardware issues this Ludum Dare, I thought I might take the time to go over them. Sort of a cathartic, stress clearing exercise I suppose.

1. Slept a full 8 hours the first night and was excited to get going the next day, everything was going just swell until viruses struck! Not sure what it was, but it was blocking access to everything “cmd.exe is a virus” it said, “tskmgr.exe is a virus” it whined. I tried fixing it through Safe Mode, but all I did was make it worse, much worse. After I was through with it the computer wouldn’t even start properly… nice.
2. Decided to waste my time formatting the computer, I forgot that my desktop PC is retarded. Once it was formatted I was unable to get the internet working again to download the various drivers/software I needed. I know, internet is easy, but my computer is just weird that way, I have no idea why it wouldn’t work. It found my network, said I had a great connection, but refused me service.
3. Gave up and switched to my laptop, and guess what? Virus! I have no idea how, after working for a while I was looking up what a certain error code meant and BAM! Needless to say I was a little frustrated… so I may have thrown my laptop and I think it is fair to say that my neighbours have a less than respectable opinion of me after that. Reset my laptop to about a month ago, so I was ready to go.

I would say that I lost about an hour of my game (luckily I backed up frequently) and about 8 or so hours between my crashes, attempted fixes, fiddling, and formatting.

Lessons Learned? Back up frequently because you never know what’s gonna happen and check for viruses on a regular basis cuz’ Jesus that was unexpected.

Note: My friend wants me to reenact the throwing of the laptop and post it, so if I feel like humiliating myself tomorrow I’ll get right on that.

1. The tools – I recently got back into 2D game development after focusing on 3D for a very long time.  I had used AS3 and Flashpunk for a couple of prototypes, but I was still worried about getting stuck on some functionality the engine might not allow me to do easily.  Thankfully, I was way off.  I don’t think I hit one technical hurdle the whole weekend. In fact, FlashPunk saved me more work than I thought when I realized it had functionality for moving and swept collisions, something I thought I was going to have to implement myself.  I told Chevy Ray on Facebook that I owed him a beer, I will probably be using FlashPunk for several more projects.  GraphicsGale, which I used for the first time for this project, was also the other reason things went so smoothly.  Being able to author, animate, and export assets in spritesheets quickly from one program was incredibly helpful.  And of course, Ogmo Editor and SFXR were really good timesavers.  The reason I am so happy about this positive is that this was the biggest negative for me the first time around.  I was using my own still-in-development engine and working in 3D, so I spent most of the time dealing with plumbing and getting Maya (although I use Blender now) to do what I wanted level-wise rather than writing the game itself.
2. The art – This was something else I was worried about that happened to work out in the end.  I don’t consider myself a good artist, but I’ve been working really hard for the last year to improve through a lot of study and practice.  Most of that was on paper and pencil though and I hadn’t done pixel art, much less animating it, in a very long time.  Given that, I was happy with the end result and hope it’s at least a step up from programmer art.  Also, like I said above, GraphicsGale got out of the way for most part (although I dont like how it deals with alpha) and sped up my workflow.
3. No stress – This may seem like a weird one but I only mention it because the first time around I found myself getting stuck on dumb stuff because I insisted on using my own incomplete tools.  This led to a lot of stress and almost no time to participate in the blog posting/reading and IRC part of Ludum Dare which I think is very important to the experience.  Due to the feeling of getting stuff done and not getting stumped on anything, I didn’t feel bad about taking time to read and participate in the IRC channel and the blog.  I was still pressed for time obviously, but was still able to keep up and even play with a couple of the games.  This led to a much more enjoyable experience overall, the way LD is meant to be done in my opinion.

WHAT WENT WRONG

1. The theme – I did make my peace with what I’m about to say, but I put it in the negative because it did cost me time.  I feel that over time Ludum Dare has attracted more and more people, which is good, but along with that comes a lot of newer game developers that tend to shy away from the more narrow and challenging themes.  This has led to a lot of generic themes getting voted on and winning most of the time (“Enemies as weapons” was the only recent exception) which I think affects things negatively for two reasons.  First, the personal reason that probably others share: I tend to come up with better ideas faster with a good thematic constraint.  Themes like this one are very vague and apply to almost any game, so it’s very difficult to come up with a game from the set of every game imaginable.  I ended up wasting 3 or so hours because I couldn’t come up with an idea I was happy with and I do think that I settled because I didn’t want to devote any more time to brainstorming.  The second reason, which sounds superficial but it’s still important, is that the games don’t tie together very well at the end.  The theme isn’t obvious when you play all of the games like it is with themes like “Advancing Wall of Doom”.  Regardless, I don’t think I will ragequit Ludum Dares because of generic themes.  The experience of getting a game done in 48 hours and participating in the community far outweighs bad themes.
2. Cutting features – This happens to everybody obviously due to the time constraint, but I think my game would have been more interesting with varied zombie types as I originally described it.  I would have also prefered more weapons to get done from my list, but I’m surprised I got through as many as I did.  There was also a few larger art assets I wanted to work on to vary the environment but I decided to improve a couple that were in there already instead with the little time I had at the end.  I also didn’t have time for music, but I predicted that in my intent-to-join blog post.  Regardless, I’m still bummed about that because I think music is very important to most games.  The bright side of this is that I have a pretty clear set of things to add or change if I work on the game post-compo, which I probably will at some point this year.

Overall, this LD was a far more positive experience.  I can’t wait for the next one!

Tags: postmortem

So, that’s it, this frantic weekend is over, and live from a train, I’m going to give you some thoughts about how the making of my entry went.

What went right :

• The coding itself. Once again, I used python, and everything went smoothly. Not having to spend time working around language limitations was a huge advantage, and helped me stay focused on getting things working.
• Using a new engine (Panda3D). Prior to LD20, I had never used Panda3D for more than just fooling around and display a couple of objects. But once again (as with pygame last time), the Ludum Dare constraints helped me to just take the plunge and get to grip with the engine. This learning aspect is probably the best thing about LD compos from my point of view.
• Time management. I’m really, really happy with how that turned out. I managed to get almost everything I had envisionned done, and even had time to record two tracks for use in-game. I had a good night sleep, and managed to spend some time with my girlfriend. And that’s with the first 8 hours or so of the compo lost to night and a japanese exam. So all in all it went well.

What went wrong :

• The packaging… Once more, I found out that packaging wasn’t as straightforward as I had hoped. Though a helpful comment prior to the weekend had made me research packaging means beforehand, I still find that packages don’t work as expected. For example, the easy windows installer present you with a “run the game” option that just doesn’t work. It’s a bit frustrating, really… For the record I may try a web-based game next time, Flash maybe (that is, if I can lake myself a nice dev environment on Linux… any tips ?)
• Making the game fail beautifully. Even though almost all of the planned features made it into the final release, I failed miserably to include any kind of checks to see if, for examples, shaders were available on the user’s GPU.
• Sticking to the theme. The problem was two-fold. First, I wasn’t inspired much by it. And second, I had a game idea of which OUT OF HERE is  a prototype in my head for a couple of week. The first reason then quickly became a justification to just go with that idea and simply try to somehow shoehorn the theme into the game. But well, at least I know have a prototype I can build upon. The code is really short, so tidying up shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

That’s it. Once again, Ludum Dare has been a blast (which means I’ll definitely be there next time around), and a tremendous opportunity to learn and, basically,  just go and make a game. All in all I’m quite happy with the end result, and while it’s not breaking any new ground, it gave me confidence that the much broader idea I have should be, basically a fun game.

Thanks to everyone for all the motivational/informative blog posts and project updates, I’m looking forward to continuing rating games until time runs out ! Here’s mine if you want to do the same. Cheers !

Since my last post was so darn pessimistic with all those hardware malfunctions and what-not, I thought I would write a happier post about what I did well in Das Sad!

Wee Scope

First thing was that I managed to keep a small scope this time, hooray! If I didn’t have all those hardware failures I would have had oodles of time to make more audio, build some actual escalation, make a tutorial, and balance the whole thing out a little more. Next LD, providing absence of aforementioned issues and a similar scope, I should be able to make a exceptionally radical game for you guys.

2D Arrays are Exclamatory Adjective!

For this here game I taught myself how to use 2D arrays, super handy for grid-based movement  and collision. This here is the tutorial I used:

http://flashdevz.wordpress.com/2008/08/27/as3-pathfinding-part-1-understanding-2d-arrays/

I ultimately used the grid system that came out of the array as a basis for… well just about everything else.  As you can see in the picture right over <—– positions where a dude was were marked with a 1. All I had to do for collision then was check if the position in the array I was moving to was a 1 or 0, if 0 reset my current position to 0 and the new position to 1.

If any of you have more foresight than me and say “But what if you move two side-by-side and the poor first guy sees the position is blocked even though it is about to be clear? What then?!?!” Well, I certainly stumbled into that problem and came out a better man.

What I did for that little issue was if a piece was moving to an occupied position, it would store that position in a Global variable. Then, whenever another piece moved it would check if the position it was moving from was equal to the Global var. If so, tell the other fella to go ahead and move, the way is clear.

Paths Everywhere

Next thing I did that I thought was pretty neato was the enemy pathing, all of which was based of the grid that came out of my 2D Array. It was rather simply really, I would initialize an enemy with an array of point values represented spots on the grid (as seen —–>). Then, from spawning the enemy simply moves from its spawn location towards the first point and as it exceeds it, increases a currentTurn variable. Then it will look for the next position at the currentTurn value index of the array filled with destination points.

The red path was drawn with basically the same approach, only with a few more conditions in there. At enemy spawn the path would set up one-by-one at a delay of what I believe was 0.05 seconds? Sounds familiar enough. Going one grid space each time, it would check if the current destination point was at the same Y location, if so it knew it was moving moving horizontally and would place the horizontal piece. Same thing for vertical, only replace “Y” with “X”. When it was spot on the destination point, it would check if the next point where above, below, left, or right of it and place the respective corner there to. Neat right? At least I thought so.

The Rest

That’s pretty much all the stuff that I thought was interesting enough to talk about unless asked or coerced. All-in-all I’m happy with how Das Sad turned out despite all the issues, probably going to try and take it a little further down the road.  Well, not take it down the road, but down the road do more with it. Oh, by the way, in case you were curious about the name: Well I was testing it  I lined up the A,S,D keys as SAD and I thought DAMN! I’m gonna call it Sad, then I noticed that backwards it said Das, and I thought JACKPOT! So Das Sad was born, as little sense as it makes.

I would also like to attribute much of my happiness to a wide variety of software and libraries that did not fail on me and was also free! FlashDevelop is a great IDE if you wanna make some flash games and don’t wanna pay Adobe. FlashPunk is a totally cyber-awesome AS3 library if you just don’t want to work too hard. SFXR, I believe I have Ludum Dare to thank for this handy little sound effect creation device. Also, Audacity, for being free and helping me convert .wav to .mp3! Oh, and graphics were done in Photoshop, not free therefore not as cool.

That was a pretty long post on what you probably already know. Oh well, I shan’t un-write what has been written.

So I finally figured out how to put videos in these posts. Enjoy.

Go play.

Tags: 3dsmax, max, photoshop, timelapse, unity, unity3d

THE GOOD:

A lot of things went very, very right in this competition.

• The theme. I loved the theme, tbh. It was wide enough to give flexibility, but still had some coherence. I really enjoyed the theme, a lot more than anything else like “girl games” or “absorb.”
• Graphics. By choosing to stick to the NES palette and limit myself to 4 colors – including transparency – for everything, I really was able to keep a consistent graphical style and I pulled it off so well, that I found it more visually appealing than games with literally 256 million colors.
• Sound. I was actually able to mix my own sound for the first time, thanks to a program I recently came across (sfxr bro, sup) and this did nothing but further complement the graphical style and general play of the game.
• Gameplay, definitely. This went so well I could cry with joy. I’ve never had a game turn out this solid in a while- and it’s got everything – no, MORE than what I had intended initially. It was just going to be one final boss then bam, that’s it. Instead it’s got two mini-bosses and a final boss with an epic escape bit (if you play the game on hard like you should). I never thought I could do a fully playable Metroidvania in 48 hours. The first game I ever made (full length, that is. shitty pong clones don’t count) was a lot like this, years ago, and it took me at least a year to complete. I just topped it in 2 days.

• Time. I didn’t treat it as 2 days of dev time, I treated it as 48 hours of dev time. That really helped me pack in everything I needed to. I didn’t have to keep ideas small-scale, I firmly said “I’m making a badass Metroidvania,” and had enough time to do it.

THE BAD:

Sadly, not everything was as planned.

• The length. I wanted the minimum play time for my game to be at least half an hour. I can run through and beat it in five minutes or less. Of course, it’s hard to get that out of 48 hours, but hell. I tried. XD
• The music. There was none. And there should’ve been.
• The theme. Well, mostly my fault. I loved the theme, but I suck at story telling in-game, especially when I wind up shoehorning it in. Now it’s hard to tell what the theme was for the game, and I could’ve pulled that off a lot better.  That’s my one thing.

Now, for non-competition purposes, I do plan on releasing a few updates to this game. Mostly fixes and a little new content, so those of you who really enjoyed it can squeeze a little more out of it. The engine was so solid I’d hate to let it die with the competition.

Well, I didn’t finish my game, but I managed to record a timelapse of me not finishing my game using Chronolapse. Unfortunately, I simply ran out of time.

Ludum Dare 20 – Timelapse – (Unfinished) It’s dangerous to be lonely, take these every hour.

I decided to take the “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this.” theme and make a game that was about a depressed main character that was prescribed pills by his doctor, and you had limited time before your anxiety kicked again and you started hearing voices. I started development with FlashPunk and FlashDevelop. Unfortunately, I couldn’t finish the entry in time, because I still barely had an engine by the end of it. The idea had long way to go. But I have art assets that I could see myself reusing on a later date.

Music is “Surfing on a Sine Wave” by FearofDark (Copyright © 2011 Stephen Hemstritch-Johnston, and released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence.)