Dos personas son compatibles en esta categoría si ambos tienen los mismos niveles de optimismo en general o la felicidad. Si una persona es siempre ver el lado negativo de la vida, la persona que encuentra la esperanza en todo lo que puede sentirse estancado. Sin embargo, lo contrario podría ser cierto si los dos individuos honrar a los de otras cualidades, como el pesimista se siente mejor porque de puntos de vista del optimista, y el optimista es más arraigado a la realidad de estar con el pesimista.. Artículo recomendado por Carteles

The entry. http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=110

Pekuja manufactured the code, Arne created the splendid art, and I made the music.

We didn’t get as far as we’d have liked. All of us fell a little short of where we wanted to be. The game was made in C# with Unity.

Pekuja did great in getting things done, even when having to deal with quite a few technical concerns. Also, Arne. His artwork surpasses an amazing amount of completed games on the web.

Everything from the background tiles to the moon are beautiful.

From what Pekuja said, it sounded like he was unhappy with his choice of Unity. It seems that all the bells and whistles just kind of got in the way.

All in all, I learned a few things from this LudumDare. I’ll try to keep the list short.

1. Time is limited, so make use of what you have. Don’t mull around thinking, just start doing. If you want to just think on it the first day, that’s fine, but don’t let it hold you back from getting things done.
2. Working in a team is awesome. It allows you to focus on just the task at hand. Working with great teammates to make a game is an experience every game dev should be able to have.
3. Don’t wait for inspiration. Make it yourself.
4. Use tools you’re familiar with. It’s just not fun to spend all your time learning a new API, or bug-fixing weird corner cases. Once again, “Time is limited, so make use of what you have.” I used a new vst when working, and ended up wasting a lot of time fixing a problem where some of the sounds were desynchronized on the final audio render. Learn from my example!
5. Don’t get stressed out. It’s just a compo. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t finish on time. Just do your best! A lot of people take their projects further even after LD is said and done. (That’s what we’re trying to do.)
6. Most importantly, have fun doing it. Accelerated game development compos are an awesome way to teach yourself tons of things at an incredible rate. All the minor things you get caught up in during normal development get thrown out the window, otherwise you run out of time. You learn where all the little pieces fit together to make a complete game, where most time gets spent in the development process, and most importantly, you get better at it. Sometimes you need impractical experience to learn how to be practical. Compared to LD’s time restrictions, ordinary development afterwards looks easy.

I guess one of the biggest points I’m trying to make, is that if you spend time and effort on something you enjoy doing, you’ll have fun and become better at it. LudumDare lets you make something you want to make. That’s it.

Ok, so this was my first Ludum Dare and it will not be my last!

I enjoyed myself sooo much last weekend, even if i didnt get everything I wanted done.

Things that went right:

– Was very happy with the overall look of my game (2.5D type of style)

– Small story elements and the pixel graphics I did

Things that went wrong:

– Music *facepalm* I am no good with music. I’m so tone deaf when it comes to music that i probably cant even play the triangle.

– Collisions weren’t correct, which caused problems with doors and lasers.

– Didn’t focus enough on the levels (its a short game).

Cant wait for the next one as I’m teaming with so many ideas now that I have seen everyone elses work.

I posted this on my personal blog as well, but thought it was appropriate to post here as well, since it directly relates to my Ludum Dare 22 entry.

Ludum Dare Entry: Play/Rate The Wizard Apprentice

Ludum Dare was really an eye opening experience for me.  I had a ton of fun and I’m getting an amazing amount of feedback from the indie gamedev community, which is fantastic!  Thank you all so much for running the competition, for participating, and for the honest feedback.  I intend to compete again, not for prizes but for the love of game development and to give back to the community!

I think as a result of the experience, I’m going to continue developing “The Wizard Apprentice” prototype into a more feature-full game.  I may even write the 2nd chapter in our curious little wizard’s adventure for the next Ludum Dare…  I love doing the level and puzzle design and dropping the assets in and playing with them is really a blast!  I’m not going to abandon my HexDev project, but it’s moving to the back burner for a while.

I decided that I’m going to run with the concept and fix a lot of things, keeping some of the puzzles the same, rewriting some, and adding a lot more content.  I’m probably going to rename the game, because the name is too generic and I literally decided on the name in the last 10 minutes of the competition while I was submitting my entry. 😀

I’ve done a couple of things so far, worth mentioning, so here’s a glimpse:

• I’m revamping the way my modeling in Blender was done, so I have cleaner transitions and better control over connections like the stairwell.
• Opened up the room depth, taking full advantage of the “octagonal space” on each floor.
• Stairwells no longer require a turn halfway through (I’m not sure if this will make it harder or easier, but so far I like the new style better)
• Adding Toon-Style shading where appropriate
• Fixed some camera angle issues to give better depth perspective.  (may tweak this some more)

As a result of the feedback I’ve received so far (and the lack of time I had for implementing it to begin with, the following fixes are on my list already):

• Fix First Person Camera control to face the direction the avatar is upon entering.
• Fix the mouse cursor by locking it in place and adding a crosshair type GUI element while channeling “C”
• Add Textures to the walls to give it visual flare.
• Add Music, Sound.
• Improve “hidden” objects like keys in cabinets, so picking them up doesn’t go unnoticed.
• Adding more floors, more puzzles, more secrets, more ghosts, possibly a kitten (?)

Lots more to come!  Stay tuned!

If you’re interested in following the progression of this game in the future, you may want to subscribe to my blog, where I will probably be posting some Alpha builds continuously as things get updated.

Thanks!

-Josh

Made a gameplay video of my entry, The Sheep & The Peach. Warning: totally spoils the game if you haven’t played it yet!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24PBXF5Yo7w

– Nightmares of a Wizard –

Christopher Yayahkeekoot – @TheYayahkeekoot – Art and Design

Initially, we had our everything figured out. Going smoothly, we started on our various jobs but within the first 4 hours, our sound guy quit so we had to repost and restart. This was a major setback because we knew we needed sound for this game to go as we wanted. I remembered our friend Jacob Lake (aka ClankyTheGorn) did some awesome ambience so we skype called him and asked him what he thought… we were in luck as he was all for it… After that I found producing sprites wasn’t as hard as I had thought as long as I didn’t try to hard, letting my inner feeling take over.  This helped me a lot I think, more so than sleep food or even the bathroom (ok, mabe the bathroom helped more).

Things that went well:
-The title menu and HUD
Having finished most of the sprites, I decided to rework the title menu so that it fit the feeling more, I added a fade around the edges and a blood glob that looked more like red wax seal, in the corner which probably made all the difference.
– The Voice Acting
We found that by the time we had it finished, it required voice acting to put the cherry on the cake. This wasn’t so much hard as it was  repetitive.. the mic we used wasn’t of the best quality as it lived on Gabriel’s floor. Instead, we worked with it so that it produced something that, though quiet, had no background noise or sharpness. Finally, using audacity, Gabriel amplified it so you could hear it over the background music.
– The Damage system and spells
We knew exactly what we were going to so that helped alot of the spriting side… Having the image in my head I went to work on the fireball… Saturation up, glo up, make a tear shape and paint it orange… done, next the Ice blast spell… Simple ball of blue, add glow… add lgow…add glow (etc x20) and voila! The acid and lightning sprites produced by gabe forplaceholders but were so good we just kept them.
– The theme and storyline
Here, we developed it as we went although we had a good overall story planned. We didnt want to try to develop a story without first knowing the theme so we decided to wait until it started before developing. Fast, effective and easy to implement, our story was also very manipulative.

Things that went… meh:
-The Wall sprites and floor sprites
I did these fast and they were the first thing to do… Not making a Spritemap was the worst idea ever and I may just go back and fix that in a hotpatch in the near future (it’s just a lot of effort on my part) so … yeeaaah
– The Level Select Buttons
These were mass produced by me in 5 minutes, I wish I had spent more time making them fit into the background, possibly having them be constellations or something, though it is not necessary at all
– The Achievements
also made these extremely fast but they came out a little better than the level select buttons. I wished I had made them a little lager and more intricate but whatever, I enjoyed them anyway.

Things that went wrong:
– The wall sprites
ugh… I did them to fast and I wish I had made a sprite-map as  I stated before. These were everywhere and made things look amateur and messy and so I give my apologies in that respect.
– The original Gargoyles
We needed a static enemy that didn’t move but still attacked the player.. In a castle what is there to shoot you? Gargoyles! The original grgoyles were hideous, tiny and just overall bad. So I redid them and they look a lot better when I spent more than three minutes on them…
– My body
After the first 23 hours my body decided to just stop working… off to bed for a half an hour and then Gabriels mother woke us up so back to work… It was good though, then 20 hours later my body was just screaming at me to stop… nope, i stated, not happening… it happened. About 6 hours later got up again and blasted off the rest of the game. Slept very little last night as I am not screwed in the inner clockworks. :/ it’ll fix itself eventually, till then I’ll work on the game more!

-Wishes
I had hoped to have some interactive rooms, such as levers/buttons/gates that opened stuff to give it a more moody setting as, currently, it is a dungeon crawler with waves of enemies and a boss… fun but repetitive 😛

–( Overall )–
Our product, Nightmares of a Wizard, overall excelled our first standards and hopes. The appearance of the game could have gotten a little more working on but we were stressed for time and it was “good enough” for me. The coding was beautiful

PS: I really loved messing with people

[-]==+——————————————————————————+==[-]

Gabriel Silvarredonda  – @gabotun – Programming and Design

What went right?
 --Programming went very smoothly, I figured I would have more bugs then I really did, and I only
 ever got stuck with a couple of strange changes I must have made by accident and did not notice.
 --I really have to give credit to Chris for all the spriting here, he worked fast and efficiently
 and we got all the stuff we needed by the deadline, my 1920x1280 desktop is still full from the
 70+ sprites he made in 72 hours!
 --The mood ended up working very well, we feel the tone of the story flows and the cutscenes
 allow it to really be what it is.
 --Jacob really pulled through for us as well, we originally had other ideas for music, but
 after some problems with that Chris and I asked him for the best songs he could come up with and
 the end result was spectacular. Stick around for the credits to hear my favorite of his pieces!
 
 What went wrong?
 --Making this as a dungeon crawler style was a good idea, I had originally hoped to implement
 more boss battles however, but time began to run short near the end so we ended with simply
 polishing the 9 levels we got done.
 --We had some awesome voice acting for the different achivements, but in the end only had
 time to polish and implement the main story voice overs, which was dissapointing.
 
 In conclusion, NoaW was a lot of fun to make and I am very glad the theme wasn't kittens! xD
 ----ACHIEVEMENT GET: [Y U NO KITTEN!?]---- 

 
 PS: I know this is a Repost but I wanted to make it was seen, it got bumped off rather
 quickly last time it was posted but now that everything has slowed down, I'm reposting
 for the lulz :D 

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=8347

Here are some thought on my first Ludum Dare:

The Good

• Timing – never really felt that I was running out of time, or that I’m going to finish too soon. I felt I was about ready when there was 2 hours or so left.
• Learning – I was familiar with the tools already, but I have never made a card game before, and I tried out a couple of new techniques, which taught me a few valuable lessons
• I was really inspired by the community – the progress reports, IRC and live feeds (Notch seems to have some mad programming skillz/routine)
• File size – Web versions .unity3d file ended up just over 1MB, which is nice (Windows standalone is over 7MB zipped)

The Bad

• Sounds. Not very good with them, and spend very little time on them, but at least I have them
• Screen resolution isn’t very ideal (though shouldn’t be a problem on Windows standalone version)
• The game rules are a bit obscure, I’m afraid too many players will lose intrest before ‘getting’ the game

The Ugly

• Code – not enough routine or planning so ended up doing many things poorly or inconsistently
• Poorly optimized, realized at the last minute that I have a ridiculous amount of draw calls and did some hasty optimizations to bring them down from ~250 to around 35, which is kind of ok, but I know I can do better
• Graphics – I’m really not an artist, and as a result most of the graphics suck, though I am pleased with couple of the characters
• The info screen is a bit messy, I have no idea if it’s of any help to anyone

Conclusions

• A little bit of planning goes a long way
• I was pretty close to the sweet spot between trying to do too much/difficult/new things and doing too easy/familiar. Maybe I should’ve tried something a bit more ambitious, but just slightly so
• Maybe next time I pay a little more attention to accessibility and try to stay away from obscure/unfamiliar/abstract game mechanics
• I liked the end result, and will make another iteration of the game soon with better graphics and improved gameplay
• That was fun! Will definitely participate again!

Solitaire of Solitude development screenshot

I’d appreciate it a lot if you could give my game a try and give me some feedback about it.

Phil’s made a nice gameplay walkthrough video for our game Braille:

Tags: CSharp, LD #22, xna

Blurry, stupidly sped up, and crazy alt tabbing so you can’t see anything. Enjoy.

LD22 Timelapse

Tags: alone, dare, LD22, ludum, Ludum Dare, timelapse

Last weekend was Ludum Dare 22: Alone, obviously why else would hundreds of people gather to make no less than 891 games not including those that were not submitted?  I took part of this awesome gathering for the second time, with Ludum Dare 21: Escape being the first.  During that entry I had the following postmortem of which after reading I realize I didn’t put in all the things that went wrong.  I feel to that list should have been “pick a smaller idea”, although I suppose that previous idea was very flexible in size.

What went right:

I had the weekend to myself, with no interruptions or responsibilities.

I picked a framework I was familiar with, and had tools to do what I needed.

I followed the theme well with a simple idea of taking a team sport, and playing alone vs the other team.

I spent little time debugging issues, crashing, etc.

I added sound effects and music early on.

What went wrong:

The idea was far too big for a weekend project, too many little rules.

The idea never turned into a game really, despite a win/lose condition; It was too hard, or too repetitive if the player managed to learn the patterns.

Some art; the player/ai characters, was completely temporary and never replaced with something better.

I spent far too much time programming.  My framework needs to allow me to manage/do less, if it is to be useful in LD.

What was learned:

I need to spend more time on art/music and content.  To help with this I am rewriting/adding to my framework so that it will manage more things for me.  Instead of loading a sound, and remembering to unload it, I should just be able to PlaySound(“Yada.wav”).  It would go a long way in reducing the time I spent programming, or at least the time spent programming “needless” things.  An idea for a 48 hour game must be small.  I went into this compo knowing I needed to aim to be complete with my game by the end of day 1, yet the idea I chose was far too big for that.

I am waiting for the next LD, where I hope I can shine through and get this done right.

Play and Rate: 10 Yards Alone

elo..

this is my 1st post mortem so i dont really know what to put or start with..

i DO know that i really enjoyed talking to like minded people for once and being part of the great community

what went right:

i was quite happy with the overall gfx side of everything.. ideally i would of tried to get some more effects etc in there but time and all.. i was pleased with the droning BGM aswell… just borderline annoying as to still in your head hehe

what went wrong:

i spent far too much time trying to get the sound working better as the game should rely heavily on this part but i just couldnt seem to get certain sound libs to perform glitch free and had to spend some time trying to learn others quickly and in the end i just decided on a simpler approach.

ideally i wanted to have the pitch/pan and gain to reflect how far and which direction to sonar bounced off a wall etc but it was forever crackling and not working properlly (it probably down to me not understanding to libs fully)

what i learned:

i had a good few i deas for the theme but quickly realized they would have taken alot longer than i had so had to scrap them and think of a simpler but diff concept. i realized im not that bad of a programmer and if pushed can produce things quick enough gfx/sound especially (not in a big headed way just in that normally i constantly put myself down and never think im decent at anything..anyhoot ;p )

like i said previously i enjoyed it thoroughly (and still am with the community side) and i do like rating games altho i do think it would be better possibly if each entrant was given 20 random(least ranked) entries to rank (not knowing whos game you were ranking) to stop people going straight for their favs ?! maybe after the 20 random then it would open up and let you rank further entries ?

ahh i duno heh

well anyhoot thanks to every1 who puts on this comp and to all the ppl ive met since ..until next time my like minded  loons

biNAry_giRL

p.s heres mine if u dare murhahaha

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=8824

Hi I thought I’d post a quick message to say I have repackaged my game “Fernands War” for Mac now as well as PC (it’s a java .jar file), you can see it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=5349

I didn’t change any of the code btw, just added the mac dll’s to the jar package so I think this is within the rules. Hope you like it!

gratuitous kitten shot (in the face)

La Biblioteca Móvil Digital es operado por OverDrive – un líder de servicio completo distribuidor digital de libros electrónicos, audiolibros, música y video. Fundada en 1986, la compañía tiene su sede en Cleveland, OH. El proyecto está destinado a promover libros electrónicos descargables y audiolibros de la biblioteca a los miembros de la comunidad. Se erige en una persona las bibliotecas públicas en apoyo de sus servicios de descarga. Artículo recomendado por Comprar Ebook

Due to the fantastic packaging advice post now stickied to the page, I created a web applet wrapper for my game so that it could be played in browser, for those who don’t want downloads cluttering up their desktop.

I tested it in Chrome and in Firefox, please let me know if another browser is having trouble.

It is a little buggy because it is just a wrapper and is still trying to process the executable code, had I had this in mind from the start I could have segmented it better.  Something to keep in mind for the next one.

“Lost in the Woods” entry page.

Tags: applet, java, LD22, Web Release

Flod, my LD 22 entry’s protagonist wishes you all some relaxed and peaceful days:

Happy Holidays

This was my very first Ludem Dare and also my very first original game!

Read my detailed postmortem to see how a novice approaches game development for the first time. I’d love to get real feedback and advice from some of you more experienced developers. Thank you Ludem Dare for pushing me to finally do something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time.

Tags: first game, html5, javascript, web

Finally I am getting around to writing a postmortem for “Into the Dark for You”.  ITDFY can be obtained here. It is recommended that you play it, if you can, before reading too far as I’m just about to ruin the whole game for you.

Theme

The theme for Ludum Dare #22 was Alone. I actually had no problem with this theme. A lot of people in the IRC chat hated the theme (a second theme of kittens was adopted unofficially), but Alone was one of the three final themes I upvoted.  I hadn’t spent any time thinking about the theme beforehand (I fully expected that randomly-generated would be the theme).  When the theme was revealed, I sat down for about an hour and the game concept came to me.

My thought process for the theme was that with a theme like Alone, I wanted to tell something of a compelling story. Further, I wanted to make sure that the story wasn’t totally depressing. After all, the theme was Alone, and I knew that people would make a lot of depressing games.  I had previously made a simple board game for teaching the concept of loss to children (a challenge for Ian Schreiber’s Game Design Concepts class a few years ago).  The game was about a group of children growing up and becoming independent, as the mother goes further and further away from their lives. I basically took this same idea and turned it backwards for the game concept. The focus was on the mother this time, and the child was slowly leaving the nest.

For my warmup week game, I made an entirely text-based game about a person grasping with a realization of one’s own madness (or something like that). I spent so much time working on the text system for that game, that I decided I wanted my game to be devoid of any text. I also wanted to keep scripted events to a minimum, just enough to let the player know what was going on at the start and guide the player a little when it wouldn’t make any sense. I wanted the actions the player was doing to tell the story, and I wanted the player to make up the story.  The result was something of a bare game. At times it felt silent (even with the music I included). Other times it felt loud and obvious.  Still, I think it worked, or at least I hope it did.

The Good

• This is the third game I have finished this month. I don’t know what is going on, but I am loving how productive I have been.  Finishing a third game that I really like feels just wonderful.  Further, this is the first full game that I programmed from scratch. There was a lot missing from my weekend warmup game and I don’t think that could be considered a full game. ITDFY is a whole game, and I made it in C++. This is an achievement!
• I have music and sound.  This is the second game I had music at all, and the first with sound effects. The first game I needed music because it was important to the characterization in the game.  In ITDFY, it was optional, but I managed to get it working.
• I told a good story that has an emotional arc. I told it using expression and game mechanics, not exposition or lengthy cutscenes (although I have some scripted scenes in the game).
• I love my little exclamaition point people.  Part of my problem was that I am not much of an artist, so I needed easy-to-draw characters, as well as characters that I could show changing over time.  Exclamaition points could be created programatically, so it was easy to animate them too.
• I felt like I knew what I was doing, for the most part.  I didn’t try to tackle a new language at the last moment.  I didn’t set out to make a game way beyond my ken.
• I got done early.  I was actually finished at about the 40 hour mark. Everything needed was in the game.  The last 8 hours were spent adding in extra things to make the game better.

The Bad

• I’m worried that the game isn’t really much of a game. It’s a maze. It tells a story, but there isn’t really any challenge to the game.  I pushed this off with the idea that the challenge was understanding what to do next.
• The game is a bit punishing. As you walk through the forest, there is a day/night cycle.  At night, the tiles are barely visible, if at all (water and stone a re visible, everything else not at all). This prompted me to add “sparks” to the game, which lit up the forest one level when used.  Sparks are the most game-like mechanic, being that they can be used as a score. The more you have, the better you were at the game. But the sparks don’t really fit the game very well.  The complete darkness was pretty punishing. What I should have done, instead, was reduce the visible squares at night, so you can only see a little bit of the forest depending on the time of day.  This was suggested by a commenter (nate427), and I totally agreed with it.  It would have greatly fit my game’s concept and title.
• I wanted to do more with sparks.  At the end, I was considering making it so that a spark was consumed each night like food, and you could lose the game if you ran out of sparks.  I don’t know how I felt about this, though.  I’d also wanted sparks to be littered about the forest, but I had a really hard time getting them to randomly generate about, so I scrapped the idea.
• I wanted to have obstacles, or at least something that required a bit of thought or skill.  The child was supposed to play a part in this, somehow.  This was a feature scrapped early on in the process, as the system I created really didn’t allow for it.
• The game is shorter than it should have been. It was supposed to have four areas, the last of which empties directly into the child’s house.  I didn’t have time to make two more areas, mostly because adding in those two areas would have changed my tile set around (Tile Studio seems to put the most used tile first).  The child, as it is, does not reach full development (he’s only at stage three growth at the end).  I also feel that players wouldn’t have played the game as it is with two more levels.  The back-tracking would be just silly.
• I’d wanted better movement in the game.  It’s square-by-square at the moment, but I really wanted free movement. I think square-by-square looks bad and feels old and gam(e)y.
• The music isn’t the best. It doesn’t fit the game at all.  I’d wanted to use this music, but Wolfram’s terms meant that I couldn’t myself distribute the file. I ended up using AutoTracker-C, which makes great music for games with technology or action in them, but doesn’t really make good ambient music.  I spent hours tweaking the output in OpenMPT, trying to get it to sound at least decent (I don’t know that I succeeded). I might have been able to track my own piano/pan flute music, but I really didn’t have that much time.

Overall, I enjoyed making this game, and I have some great ideas as to where to take the game from here.

Tags: finished, postmortem

Hi there,

first of all, congratulations for all contestants, you made a good job :). Now, our post-mortem/discussion/reflexion about our game.

Well, this is my first LD and I want to thank @ReikVal, my friend, game designer and co-developer of our first game. It is not perfect, actually it is full of bugs, inconsistencies and poor gameplay. But, it’s not bad after all :D.

We learnt a lot in this contest, we learnt how to develop a game from scratch, designing the game, creating a micro-engine and developing game features. While we were developing we found a lot of problems.

First, we start developing our engine without any experience. We lost a lot of time doing this task and we don’t invest enough time on game development. But, if we are positive, we developed a cool engine with the following features:

• Loading textures using a TextureManager improving our memory management.
• Handling mouse input using GLUT with a InputManager class.
• Using a SceneManager we can switch between two different contexts, using a nice interface for our Scenes.
• Cool Sprite class for handling sprites animations.
• A TileMap class for loading the map
• Three useful GUI classes for Buttons, Selectors and TextInputs.

The first time I heard about Ludum Dare was a few days before LD22, and I took my decision to participate only a few hours before it started. So I had absolutely no preparation, and I’m quite proud I actually finished something. Also I’m glad my girlfriend let me spoil so much week-end time Here’s the result, an HTML5/Javascript/canvas game:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=8588.

Looks like postmortems are popular here so let’s jump in.

Good stuff

• This wasn’t my first accelerated game dev thing, I took part in the Global Game Jam in Paris last January (link) and learned a lot from people there. This surely helped me to plan and get things done without lacks of sleep and horrible headaches.
• I wasn’t sure if I would go for a Flash game or an HTML5 one; finally I went for the second option even if it’s far more limited. I’m glad I did because what I’ve learned could prove valuable to me later on. This wasn’t my first HTML5 experiment either (first one here), so I managed to get a good basis at the end of day 1: basically a moving character and fleeing enemies.
• I also managed to get enough time out of day 2 for polishing, notably the gameplay. This way the game won’t finish if you don’t play (as it did at a point… maybe that would have fit the theme… somehow.. the game playing alone…) -but it will resist you for a minute.
• My first idea was that the kitty would evolve somehow (turning into err… well, play the game and you’ll see, let’s not spoil), and that the environment would become more and more colorful while you progress. But I figured out soon enough I had no time for this. Instead, my game is just a very simple run, but finishes with a little joke. So I had to sacrifice a bit of my original idea, but it turned it into something that still makes sense (a bit).
• I can play a 15-seconds song on a crappy flute, what a musician!

Bad stuff

• I wasn’t really happy with the theme, actually “kitten” sounded real fun to me. A great opportunity for disrupted cuteness and mass murder. So as a fallback I did a game about a kitty that is alone, but meh. There’s hundreds of entries like this, of course, I should have anticipated that. So next time I’ll try spending more time on finding something that really plays around the theme, like this entry by Ludexor Studios. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this was a bad theme, just that it didn’t inspire me that much.
• Maintaining decent performance was an issue too. I was testing on two browsers (Firefox and Chrome), and they had trouble drawing all my sprites. I had the idea from the beginning that the kitty would be surrounded by a glowing light, so I took advantage of this to render only the visible stuff, and clear things around with a few black stripes. It did the trick, and the game’s running at 60FPS on Firefox, and around 45-50FPS in Chrome. But still, I had to restrict the number of enemies and I wish I’ve had a bit more time to optimize all this. I’m sure there’s some Javascript library around that does sprite blitting in a much more efficient way that I did (please comment if you know any).
• The biggest mistake was with sounds. I could play music easily with the HTML5 brand new audio tag, but it would loop only on one browser and not on the other, so I had to drop looping background music. And the SFXs I wanted to add a few hours before the deadline became real hell. The browser support for the HTML5 way of playing sounds is really poor, sometimes they’ll play, sometimes they won’t, sometimes they’ll stop my music, sometimes they’ll scratch… Really, proper sound playback for games is not there yet, or maybe I did it wrong and didn’t find the simple way that works, but next time I’ll probably rely on some good, working library, that I’ll test beforehand.
• This would have helped if I’ve had some good Javascript libs for vector math, collision handling and sprite animation. I had to do some tedious coding instead of creating actual gameplay.
• I had no time to check if Internet Explorer would run my game. Turns out it doesn’t, but IE9 is supposed to handle HTML5, so I’ll try to fix this in a near future (EDIT: done). Also, I discovered at the last minute that zooming on the webpage would crash the game with Chrome, maybe I’ll find a fix some day (EDIT: no problem with a recent version of Chrome, so nevermind).

Conclusion

Democracy hates kittens, but game competitions are great. Thanks to the admins for organizing such a great event, and cya!

Tags: postmortem

All right! Our LD22 Jam Entry Aloneasaurus is live in the app store, just minutes before the holiday shutdown.

Go get it, it’s a free download on the app store and try it out! Ratings and comments are much appreciated, both here and in itunes. Thanks!

Aloneasaurus in the App Store

Thoughts and planning already underway for a post-compo version with better tuned gameplay.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 22nd, 2011 at 7:58 pm and is filed under LD #22. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.