Well.. It did went as I was hoping. However I’ve submitted it.

On the bright side my idea for the game engine worked quite well. However I did spend a lot of time on the mechanics (or rather lost it, for example for stuff to move properly around took me like 6 hours) and actually almost finished it. And of course barely any graphics and no sound at all. Levels are also only two. Maybe I’ll try to finish the game just to see if it will turn something interesting.

After the submission found a major controls problem, do not use trackpads for development !

Here is a link to my entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?uid=5130

This was my 2nd Ludum Dare (you can play my LD #20 game here) I was a bit un-prepared this time, since I only found out that I would have the weekend free about 45 minutes before Ludum Dare started. Talk about timing!

Once again I chose to use the Flixel engine. It’s a powerful and simple little engine, and developing in Flash means just about everyone will be capable of playing my game with no trouble. For my IDE, I used Flash Develop running in Windows 7, running in a Parallels VM on my Mac. I don’t recall exactly why, but that’s what I did last time so I stuck with it. Once again, sounds were recorded on my iPhone and edited in Audacity (cfxr doesn’t work on OS X Lion. I might need to fork it and fix that…) Also, I recorded a time-lapse of the whole thing using ScreenNinja, a Mac app I developed for exactly this purpose. One minor hiccup: I didn’t have Photoshop installed on the machine I was using, so I grabbed Pixelmator from the App Store. It’s a nice little photoshop replacement app suitable for most tasks, but unfortunately making pixel sprites isn’t one of those things, and I think that may have cost me some time.

The main frustration I had with my previous Ludum Dare game was that it was very short, so this time I knew I wanted to have some sort of endless map (plus, I think it fits with the theme) – so that’s where I started. Progressive level generation is tricky to get right, and looping though a single map just isn’t the same thing. What I ended up doing was designing a number of levels (at first 3, in the final entry I believe there are 11), each only slightly larger than a single screen, and as you approach the edge of one level, the game randomly picks another level and inserts it on the screen. Because the ‘levels’ are tile maps, and each is loaded from a .png file, I was able to design levels in Pixelmator and easily see how each level would look next to all the others, and make sure the edges lined up right.

Once I got that working I quickly threw together some basic player and enemy logic (it’s fun seeing the henchmen jump off cliffs, lemmings style), then it was just a matter of throwing things together and seeing what was fun. In action movies, the gun is a versatile tool. Along with killing the bad guy, guns can also be used to open doors, disable equipment, activate buttons or traps at a distance, or anything else an escaping hero might need to do. So I thought a game based around a sort of chase sequence might be fun. One of the things I programmed and didn’t end up using was for the wall mounted turrets to fire missiles that would destroy the ground under you. It looked really cool, but unfortunately the player could get stuck in the craters, so I had to take it out (although it’s still in the source code if you’d like to see how I did it)

Bugs. Hopefully there are no major bugs in my game, but there’s always a few weird ones. Occasionally the henchmen just won’t jump off the edge of a cliff, and I can’t figure out why. I’m pretty sure 30 lines of AI code isn’t enough to gain sentience, right? Also, sometimes the door spawner will spawn a henchman 32 pixels lower than it’s suposed to (and he ends up stuck in the ground below) But, since neither of these were game breaking bugs, I said screw it and worked on new features instead.

And finally, I tried to add a little humor and competition to the game in the final few hours with the game over screen. Much like in Super Shotgun Deathrace, the final text is assembled from many different pieces so it’s different each time. After showing a near final prototype to a few friends online as well as the IRC, it was suggested that I should have some stats besides distance displayed at the end of the game. So, I added the damage values and a henchmen killed counter. Took all of about 10 minutes to do, and I think it significantly improves the game, so thanks everyone who suggested that.

Oh. One more thing. Play (also, please vote and comment on) my game here, then you can click here and watch the timelapse

This has been a good experience, which I will sure repeat again in the future.

At the end, I have only spend about 12 hours into developing the game, as I was sick and was sleeping almost all the time.

I hope you like the concept behind the game and I look forward to the next Ludum Dare!

Hey All!  I wanted to do a quick postmortem on the game we submitted to the Jam, Reveal.

What went right

A solid  artistic vision.  Most of the artistic vision for this game came from @pixelbutterfly,  who also did the art.  At the core of the game, it’s about uncertainty in a world where the media tells you who to be and how to look.  But as you scratch deeper below that, and peel away the superficial layers, the world only gets uglier.  Finally, as my own little nihilistic touch, you realize that the escape you sought from your uncertainty wasn’t exactly as you had planned it.

A simple mechanic.   We wanted a game about systematic destruction.  What could be funner than that?  Unity3d has a great support for physics at its core, so it lent itself quite naturally to such a game.  Almost everything in the game (except the wallpaper) is powered by pretty standard rigidbody physics, so it was very easy to implement and get running quickly.

What Went Wrong

Startup time issues.  We had some initial creative differences and as a result, ended up not getting started until Saturday night.  As a result, we ended up cutting out several of the more meaningful layers for some of the less intensive ones.  Oddly enough, this didn’t really get in the way of development too much…after cutting the more time-consuming room layers, we finished the game way ahead of time (even submitting before the contest deadline).  That gave us more time for audio and testing.  Sure, it’s not perfect, but for 24 hours of dev it’s pretty good

Learning.  I’ve done a lot of game jams in the past, and every time I go into them with the mentality that I want to learn something new and significant.  This is either something specific like, “I want to learn how to write 2D physics and do pixel-perfect collision from scratch,” or something more general like, “I want to think about Level Design in a new way.”  Unfortunately, I can’t say that I learned that much from this game development, and the same goes for @pixelbutterfly.  Because of the vision and scope for the project, she didn’t have any game assets to create from scratch, and her dev computer was out of commission for the weekend.

Summary

Ludum Dare is great!  I’ve followed the Ludum Dare scene for the past year or so, but this is my first time participating, and I’m astounded by the level of creativity and enthusiasm that has come to the table from all over the world.  At Uni, our game development club would host game jams a few times a semester, but they were generally ill-attended affairs with 2 or 3 teams coming out with something to show, and solo development being a rare bird.  As I look through the 500+ game catalog of LD #21 and wonder how I’m going to be able to rate them all in the next 21 days, I know that this is something I want to be a part of for years to come

I had to sacrifice any community effort to get this in…  It’s 3AM and I’ve just finished!

A ZX Spectrum RPG

Here is the link: the link

My entry: http://code.kevinworkman.com/EscapeFromMonsterCity/index.html
Timelapse: http://code.kevinworkman.com/EscapeFromMonsterCity/timelapse.html

I only worked for about 12 hours, so instead of making a video, I took screenshots as the program changed. You can check them out if you feel like it!

This was my first Ludum Dare, and I’m pretty pleased with how everything turned out, especially considering that I had never used Processing prior to the contest- learning it was half the fun!

I stuck with the bare minimum considering the time constraints, but I’m surprised to see how many other entries were pretty similar. I guess that’s the nature of working around a theme, but I think next time I’ll work at coming up with something a little more different.

There is one bug left in the final version that causes the program to freeze occasionally- this is due to logic I attempted to write to prevent monsters from spawning inside buildings, which doesn’t work anyway. Lesson learned, next time I’ll stick with something that definitely works instead of trying to implement algorithms I know might break things.

Also, I didn’t have time to implement a goal, or score, or an ending, which I think hurts replayability. I did manage to throw in a title and game over screen, which goes a long way to making the game feel more legitimate.

However, I think I came pretty close to my original goal of capturing a creepy mood, so I’m happy with the outcome. I wanted to create a spooky feeling as the player rounds a building and almost runs into a monster, and I think I came pretty close to that. Yay!

I’m also satisfied that I met the theme, which is extra awesome because I wasn’t really thrilled when it was revealed (I was hoping for evolution or adaptation). The main focus of the game is to escape the city, with the added terrifying mini-games of escaping monsters that wake up. Yay again!

All in all, I had a bunch of fun, and I love the Ludum Dare community. Awesome job to everybody who managed to put together something in 48 (or 72) hours! You guys are all rock stars.

Thought since others are doing these after-submission look-backs I would too!

What went wrong:
>The physics from the start were a shambles, collision detecting is a very awful thing to deal with when you don’t have some solid code for it, and mine wasnt! All through the game I continuously made changes to the physics.
>I didn’t brainstorm… Being my first game to complete, I had the idea for a game where you smash into atoms, then just dove into doing the physics, graphics etc, and didn’t brainstorm any features, so I ended up making them as I went along.
>Coded in GameMaker, not the best idea if you want a retail quality game, or a game thats cross-platform… So I started learning Flash(FlashPunk) straight after my entry…

The main point i’m disappointed is not following the storyline, I basically said at the beginning “Go smash into atoms” then didn’t elaborate too much.

You can play it here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5696
Some screenies:

Wow it’s done kind of BEF

Not sure if it’s a fun game but mechanically it ‘works’.

Quick Postmortem:

The concept was viewing the Evacuation of Dunkirk as an Escape, the problem how to implement that in 48/72 hours as a game!

Initially I just though it was the wrong way to go but the idea stuck and after thinking I could make the whole game in a Narrow almost 2D path then maybe it could  work ( I probably should not have stayed up until 3am to catch the start of the compo).

Also I thought that if I restricted the actions on the Units (yep it was turning into an RTS) then maybe it could work!

What went right:

Modelled the units, used a simple style for the troops but differentiated their helmets ( Well I liked it ;o).

The combat system, I thought how to get the units to fight, and realised that a simple D20 style combat would help prevent predictable/repeating outcomes but outcomes with trends.  I think I had it up and running in a few hours, initially the German army just stormed the French lines and that was my way of testing it out!

The idea of a slider driven scrolling map area works well.

Keeping the control simple was a great help, only allowing units to move left or right/ fast or slow, stop and dig in.

What went wrong:

The UI was complex well you have 3 cameras one for the Main View, another for the Map and a third overlaying the controls.  This combination was arrived at after a great deal of hair pulling and dead ends were tried to resolve UI issues and get it all to work.

I didn’t get the Spitfires and Stuka’s in the game, yes the plan was to have the full blitzkrieg style of battling to occur, after all the game was 2.1D.

The Ship, well if you want to take soldiers from England to France you need a ship, how to load it and get the troops on probably one of the most complex and convoluted aspects of the game.  The ship has ended up being a 2 door system with a locking when docked mechanism (it’s frustrating to lose troops to the deep when in the dock)!

LOL the best bit was when I was struggling to get the Units to stay on the ship while crossing the channel, I did have to use physics didn’t I, anyway after much tweaking I managed to get it to work only for the Tommies to shoot across the channel and then fly out into France, over a hill and into the German army Angry Birds Style! ;o)

The game is not really balanced, it just about plays but it needs quite some time spent on it adjusting the combat parameters and unit speeds, tweaking and fixing a few bugs!

No Textures, Music, Explosions, Stukas, Spitfires, Little Boats, Re-Supply Trucks, Ambulances, Prisoners of War, Injured, Blood Splats, Artillery, Historical List of Casualties/POW’s/Medals!  ( I need to learn how to work faster!)

Conclusion:

I am very pleased with this game, not sure how fun it is, I’ve had fun making it and I’m very pleased with what I have managed to get working!

Hope you enjoy it, any and all suggestions welcome!

TIP#1: Get troops to Dig-In downward triangle makes them tougher.

TIP#2: The last troop in a row of three can push the two ahead of it.

Tags: postmortem, screenshot, unity

Howdy I finally finishing building the windows release of Zeta Prime you can try it out here
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=2879

Enjoy!

Well, I finished my first jam game (Escape Velocity). I’m pretty damn happy with it too! My goal was not to make things “simple stupid,” but stupid simple. It worked like a charm :). It’s funny because the gameplay is by-far the most fun of anything I’ve made – all from trying not to work too hard. Weird, huh?

Anywho, there’s only two levels and no score but I’m already addicted to my little game. Then again, I’m very, very biased ;). I would’ve liked to take more time on the music, and at least have an indicator for your ship’s delivery destination.

I wanted to have a small map popup before each level so you wouldn’t die right away but c’est la vie. I also realize, just now, that extra lives would be a good idea :/. Funny how that slipped my mind *shrugs*.

Also, I haven’t actually beat it yet but I’m pretty sure it’s doable (I haven’t had much time). I do know that the first level is doable, even with less fuel than I give you.

Why are you reading this? PLAY MY GAME!

Hi everyone!

First of all, I’d like to say that I’m really happy with finishing my game. Unfortunately, due to the site’s issues, I couldn’t log my progress. I guess this isn’t just a postmortem but rather also an “I’m in” post.

So far, this is the third game I made for LD. I made a game for some miniLD or another (I don’t remember which), and another for LD20. However, I wouldn’t count either game as a “full” game (for some definition of full corresponding to the 48 hour time limit). The miniLD entry was a game where you shot enemies that came at you (sort of like asteroids but with people) but had no video feed; instead you had the audio of creepy footsteps, gunfire, and screams. While it didn’t turn out bad, it wasn’t quite complete because it had no graphics. As for the LD20 entry, I made an (almost) exact clone of part of the original Legend of Zelda game. So finished or not, it wasn’t really my game. That’s why I’m extra-proud of finishing this time.

Before I analyze what happened, go play my game
Here is the entry page:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=3743
and if you won’t vote anyway, here is the game:
http://mr.galacticgaming.net/Real%20Live%20Avatars%20Inc/Game.html

What went wrong:

1. Sound – I wasn’t planning to make sounds and I didn’t, so no loss here.
2. Community – I didn’t even say that I was in
3. Physics Bugs – There are two bugs with the physics in my game. Because the rest of the physics went well, I’ll address these bugs in the What went right section.
4. Presentation of the story – First off, I’m about to talk about the plot of the game, so if you haven’t played it and will, skip this part for now because there are SPOILERS here. The story turned out to be almost exactly the same as I envisioned it when I came up with the idea.Real Live Avatars Inc is a company who pray on weak civilizations. They abduct people and take control of their bodies via implants. The controlled people are then sold to members of more developed civilizations as avatars for a game. I had hoped to create a cutscene for the start of the game. It would feature people talking about what they would do if the rumors of the company coming to your home planet to abduct people turned out to be true. All the things I explained could thus be introduced. Then the screen would shake and the game would begin with you running away from the company. A side effect of this is that in the process of running, you could see all the other people from the conversation caught and abducted.When you won the game, a person would walk in from the right (throughout the game you run to the right and away from the right-advancing enemy) and proclaim that your implants are working perfectly; just look how well you did in all the tests. If delivered well, this could have resulted in a realization of the futility of the situation; Even as you were “escaping,” you were actually only being tested. The player, who was supposed to sympathize with the abducted peoples, would be horrified to find that they were actually controlling one of these people in the exact way that Real Live Avatars Inc would.Whenever you lost, you would be presented with that same person saying something about testing implants which would make sense in the context of escape, but would take on a whole new light in the context given by the “winning” cutscene.Of course, I didn’t get to ANY cutscenes. Instead, I have Bob, an employee of the company:
   
   While Bob got across all the facts I provided above, I doubt he got any of the emotion across.
5. Level generation – The procedural generation of the obstacles in a level made winning or losing a level sometimes a simple matter of luck. Also, I wanted to include caves into the floor (I wanted the ability to have more than 1 floor at a certain x coordinate and potentially have ceilings). As it stands, the framework only supports a single floor height and no ceilings per x. Inherent in the idea of ceilings is the idea of low ceilings; the player was supposed to be able to roll or crawl, depending on their speed, under such obstacles by pressing down.

What went right:

1. Graphics – I think the graphics were a great success. At this point, those of you who have played the game are probably raising an eyebrow and wondering whether this was supposed to be item 6 in the above list and only ended up here accidentally. For those who haven’t, here’s a screenshot:
   
   Frankly, the graphics suck. Despite being a person, the player has no head and no appendages, and only a rectangle for a body. Similarly, Real Live Avatars Inc, who by virtue of traveling the galaxy we know must be very technologically developed, are represented by a simple beam into the sky. The reason the graphics are so bad is two-fold. First of all, I’m not an artist; my best is only ever programmer art. And second, I took Baby McFunkypants’s advice. I didn’t waste time fleshing out the graphics, but rather tried getting something playable ASAP. Had I spent time on impressive machines on the part of the company, or appendages on the part of the player, I might not have finished.
2. Physics – I made it from scratch without any tutorials, libraries, or previous experience with in game physics. Each case in the algorithm for deciding the player’s motion is based on real physics, but by virtue of it being composed of various cases, the result is “weird” (the first person to play the game said that they liked the weird physics, so I don’t mind the label). Since I made the thing from scratch, there are several idiosyncrasies which probably contribute to the weirdness. For example, while jumping, none of the keys do anything.Another example is how jumping works. When you press up, a vector in the direction of the normal to the surface where you are standing is added to the current velocity vector. Thus jumping on an upward slope pushes you back towards getting caught. In order to find the normal, I needed to find the slope of the tangent to the surface where you are standing. I approximated by using the secant between the point on the ground one to the right of you and the point on the ground one to the left  of you. Unfortunately, this results in the first bug: If you stand right before the ground drops off, then when you jump, the point one in the direction of the drop is much lower, resulting in the jump propelling you almost horizontally. I have no clue what caused the second bug: sometimes, you get stuck on the edge of a drop. You would expect to fly off, but instead, you suddenly stop.
3. Code – Quite accidentally, my code ended up very organized. Usually, it sort of builds up in a couple of classes. This time it didn’t. I could probably tell you exactly where in the code any specific functionality came from, and what any piece of cod does. I could probably draw a diagram of the way the game was structured without looking at the code.
4. Hosting – I placed my last LD entry on my dad’s website. It kept crashing and people couldn’t get to the game. This time, I got lucky. the31 graciously offered to lend me a sub-domain of his website to hold my game. I took him up on that offer, and my game can now be reliably be accessed. Thank you the31!

Tags: flash

I found out today that the last level was impossible in the game I submitted last night. This was due to some last minute changes that I thought were too small to merit testing.

Oh well! It is at least good to know that players made it that far in!

I fixed that level; CLICK HERE FOR THE UPDATED VERSION.
Or CLICK HERE FOR THE SUBMISSION PAGE – the update is linked on there as well.

The leaderboards are growing, and I am both sad and happy to say I’ve been dethroned on all levels – except of course that last level on which hamburger holds the first and only score.

Tags: bugfix, impossible, post-compo, update, vault

I put it off long enough! Here’s my timelapse video of me creating Glissaria:

Timelapse

I have to say, reliving an entire weekend of your life in 6 minutes is kind of fun.

You can rate and play Glissaria here:

Glissaria

Hi,

This is my first time in Ludum Dare, I don’t know if you already saw it but anyway I would like to get comments from you if it’s possible :).

This is my entry for the competition: http://is.gd/qrkSjE .

Maybe it’s a bit annoying that you have to download the game instead of playing online but I worked in XNA, next time I’ll try to do it easier and use Flash.

Here is a screenshot of the game, as you can see it’s very simple, a platform runner. You are the rounded piece of candy and the goal is to escape from the walrus. I hope you enjoy it.

Caramelo screenshot

The comments section on my submission page (for Goat Milk) is broken! HALP!

That’s right, I finally uploaded the game, with 2 minutes to spare! And after trying about 5 time times, I managed to complete it (I guess a one-level game’s gotta be hard, huh?) with a score of 2605, try beat it 😉

-Will be adding a scoreboard within the next few days

Tags: jam, score, sheep, upload

It was supposed to be Flash, goddamit. But the Greek… he owns a Mac with Gamemaker. And he cannot code a single line.

The Greek listened to Enrique Iglesias Escape Album the whole weekend. He should go see a shrink or something.

Right now, the Greek is sleeping. He told me to promote his game. Right. He deserves to have nightmares. He made his game for OS/X! But we love the Greek and maybe we will port his game to Flash, make some original artwork and polish the gameplay.

Enrique Iglesias on a game? Only the Greek can come up with something like this. He wrote some description before passing out:

In 2001 people in the United States were terrified. Something terrible had happened. Something that frightened even the bravest ones. Enrique Iglesias released a new album in English: Escape.

There was more. Enrique decided to make surprise appearences around the States. In shopping malls. It was said that listening to his new songs would blow your mind. Literally.

In the game you are a shopping mall security guard. You should protect visitors from him. You should find Enrique Iglesias among the visitors and click on him. Then, people could escape from Enrique.

But fail and people would listen to him.

More info: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=5634

Download (OS/X): http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2051675/EnriqueEscape.zip

EXTRAS

Who is Enrique Iglesias?: http://bit.ly/WhoIsEnrique

Listen to Escape album: http://tny.gs/EnriqueEscape

Tags: LD #21

phew, this was tough!! I’m way too tired to write a post mortem right now, I wanted to enter the main compo, I couldn’t make it, but I submitted it to the Jam.

3 days of non-stop work. I need a rest. I put a lot of heart into this game, I hope somebody can play it and appreciate it

cheers!

EDIT: Timelapse video is up :3

YRGBO Timelapse

With all the server problems, I wound up using twitter (for pretty much the first time) instead of posting journal entries here. I did take timelapse screenshots. I just need to figure out how to turn them into a movie.

Anyway, let’s see:

What went right:

• Flixel  turned out to be a great choice. The debug layer (available by pressing the backquote key) was slick, and every time I went looking for how to do something, it turned out flixel had a simple way to do it built in.
• DAME completely rocks. It’s a lot more than just a tile editor. I was able to set up initial states for each sprite (dead vs live aliens, powered vs unpowered machines) and even set up relationships (this lock powers these portals, and this portal leads to that one).
• Pomodoro technique (when I remembered to use it) helped me be a lot more self-aware. The break time would come up, and I’d realize I’d drifted into a low priority activity like polishing graphics instead of sticking with the core work to be done.
• Having a walkthrough. Maybe that’s the wrong word, but once I mapped out the basic solution to the game, it was easy to see what items and features needed to be in each room so that by the time the player makes it around to the other side of the ship, he knows everything he needs to know to solve the puzzle (ie, how do you actually reach the door that you can see from the first room?). I actually mapped this down to narration that was supposed to appear in each room, for a “learn as you go” experience. Even without the text on screen, I think there’s a pretty clear logical progression to the encounters.
• Font-based graphics. Except for the ghost and the background tiles, pretty much all the graphics came from standard fonts. (Webdings for the spiders and aliens, Consolas for the player and most of the other things) Even the hero’s ship outside is made from various symbols.
• The “grab/drag” mechanic. I really like how this turned out. I’ve been playing a lot of Arimaa lately, and I had a hunch the push/pull mechanic would work well in a video game. Once that was working, lots of other neat effects just sort of happened: things like slinging spiders around, carrying items through portals, and letting the ghost drag objects through walls.

What went wrong:

• Learning curve: most of the time I lost had to do with not knowing enough about flixel. Most of what I wanted was easy to find, but one or two small gaps lead to massive disasters. In particular, my dragging and portal code both tried to move sprites around by setting their x and y values. This appears to work, but causes all sorts of trouble with collision detection. All I needed to do was also set last.x and last.y but that small oversight had me pulling my hair out for hours, because I thought the problem was with my game objects. I think the fix here basically just boils down to experience.
• Polishing Early. I spent WAY too much time on the graphics for this game. It was originally going to be straight ANSI art (Kingdom of Kroz style) but I got carried away, and pretty soon I had gradients and two layers of shadows and way more detail than I needed. I should have limited myself to solid colored rectangles until I had the basic gameplay working.
• Not having a walkthrough up front. In Arimaa, you capture pieces by dragging them into traps, and I was going to use that idea, too. I also planned to use expand on the push/pull concept with machines that moved whole rows or columns of boxes. So I drew graphics and wrote at least some code for all that, when it turned out I didn’t really need those things (mostly because I hit on the idea of using the spiders as a weapon instead of as an enemy). There’s also a fully working implementation of on/off switches that I wound up not using. So lots of waste in this area. The walkthrough really clarified things for me, but I didn’t do it until the second day. Next time, it’ll be first thing on my list.
• Too many contraptions. I really thought I was aiming small, but… portals, dragging, machines with various states, keys and locks, combat and health, and an NPC that passes through some walls but not others… That’s quite a large scope for such a short game. I’m actually pretty proud of all the neat gizmos in the game, but in terms of a 48-hour contest, the cost was too high.  Toward the end, it was too late to design a new puzzle, so I was locked in to finishing the implementation for all the machines instead of adding the narration, which would have wrapped everything up into a nice coherent story. Here again, the walkthrough would have helped, and perhaps even an iterative walkthrough: start with nothing but the hero and an exit, make sure it works, then design and implement one obstacle at a time. At least that way the game would always be playable start-to-finish and I’d have more flexibility in choosing what to add next. Basically, I should have adopted a more agile development process.

Hi,

There is nothing like LD to clear up misconceptions and bring you up to speed:)
Since the a few LDs ago, seeing some brilliant games made in Flixel I’ve always wondered what are the advantages of using a Library like that?
(Please be patient, I was quite a noob at game making for the web, let alone a 48h competition)
After all, it seems that all the tools that are available in AS3 API, are sufficient to create great games quickly.
After this LD I finally understand, even though I do not use that library because I enjoy learning to make stuff myself, I now know why it is so great and helps a ton.

Here are some reason you would want to use Flixel instead of writing more code yourself:

1. You can talk to people about something in Flixel, there is a community.
   Having conversations is beneficial to learning for beginners and advance users.
2. You get every tool neatly organized and handily available during the competition when you really need.
   Doing well in the competition may require preparations and knowing Flixel well covers that.
   If you write the code, you still may need to organize it properly.
   You may have a ton of code but is it handily available?
3. The tools are tested for bugs and they do what is expected.
   If you write it yourself, you still need to test for bugs and even if you do, one person testing in 48 hours or a few weeks does not match with ? thousands that are constantly testing it during the whole year.
   Having bug tested code saves you unwanted surprises.
4. You get really high performance, this is something I did not know. These tools are tweaked for high peformance.
   I made a huge maze for the competition and I know Flixel handles tile based maps, however I did not know it does it really fast and takes advantage of the best ways this can be accomplished in AS3.
   I actually learned and used Bliting in AS3 for the first time this LD which was really exciting to me.
   Flixel would have done that for me and I wouldn’t even need to know it is doing it. The same principle is true about other tools. Flixel offers an answer to the need for speed. This is very important for games where low frame rate ruins the experience.
5. Bottom line: If you understand how Flixel works, you can focus much more on the game instead of writing the “low lvl” functionality.
   Sure writing an engine is a wonderful learning experience but when you compete to make games, you can use this precious time to work on other aspects of the game itself.

So basically I’m not planning to use it but by I highly recommend it for most AS3 based game projects.:)
Now I finally know why. If you have any comments on the advantages of using Flixel please share.