I haven’t written this yet because ChronoLapse hasn’t been cooperating and I wanted to post my timelapse at the same time. After several days of wrestling with various video programs, I finally got my timelapse video uploaded. If not for the video, enjoy it for the music:

Since I’m sure another wall of text on the front page would be annoying, I’m going to let you hit the break if you want to read on. I’m going to babble on about my life as well, so you are hereby officially warned. 😛

Ludum Dare 22 came at a very interesting time in my life. Midway through fall semester,  I was left with a very now-or-never personal realization: if I don’t get my shit together, I am not going to make it through this computer science program. I got out of high school with a 3.5 GPA, but college is different. For the last two years that I’ve been attending, I’ve been just BARELY getting by in the program. Sure, I would pass some classes with A’s or B’s, but in the spring, for the third time, I will be retaking a class I couldn’t get through the first time around.

Thus, in November, I left my student computer technician job to focus on school. I still didn’t make it through the class I’ll be retaking, but I’m pretty sure I got through my other computer science class. Anyway, the point is I’m at a point where I feel like I need to start moving my life in the right direction, hence my decision to take part in this Ludum Dare. What better way to start moving towards owning your own game studio than getting off your ass and actually making something?

As all of you that have played it are no doubt aware, the game isn’t the best:

• Very little “gameplay”
• Difficult to determine the health of the dudes
• Game becomes literally impossible to progress any further beyond the second evolution in generation 3 due to an unknown bug

Even with all of the bugs in the game and the fact that it is 100% guaranteed not to win, I’m still glad I finished! I tackled this as a solo project, so I did everything myself from scratch:

• All of the code from scratch (C# with XNA but nothing more)
• All of the sounds from scratch via sfxr (it works for LD)
• All of the graphics from scratch in Paint.NET (not the best but this still means I’m working on my graphic capabilities)

Granted, I’m sure none of the stuff I’ve made for this particular Ludum Dare compares to most of the other entries. I’m also fairly certain that next to no one is going to read this. I am perfectly alright with all of that because the completion of this game marks the first “complete” game I’ve made outside of school. However small of a gap it is, I have finally busted a hole in the personal wall preventing me from moving on with some of the major goals in life. There is a very long way to go, but I finally feel like I’ve taken the first legitimate step.

And no, I did not include a damn kitten. 😛

So I finally loaded up Vegas Pro 9 last night and inserted the some 2,537 images that Chronolapse took of my screen during the 72 hour Jam for LD#22. I whacked on some good music, was surprised by how well the tempo of the music and the image changes matched up in places, and published.
My only regret is not capturing Nathan’s screen, as that’s where most of the game’s art happened and a bit of coding, too.

Let’s not regret though, enjoy the timelapse!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5zSoB9fVCI&feature=youtu.be

Here is the postmortem for our LD22 jam entry : Gemclusion.  This was our second Ludum Dare (this first being LD21), and learning from our experiences from the last one we decided from the beginning to make sure to keep the game simple (K.I.S.S.).

Warmup

This time around we benefited greatly from an accidental warmup contest: Game Prototype Challenge.  It’s another for fun game dev contest, but it’s on a smaller scale than LD (29 entries in the last one).  During the GPC contest, we made a point to keep it simple and have fun with the contest.  This is an important thing to remember when doing these contests.  Too often we get caught up in the malaise of trying to make the ultimate game and forget about having fun.  It was after the GPC contest that we happened to remember that the next LD was starting soon.  Once we realized that LD was coming, we started getting ourselves ready.  The next week or so was spent relaxing and waiting for the Theme.

Theme

During the voting rounds there were main themes that we were hoping for.  In particular, I was hoping that we would get more of an unconventional theme (like midgets) … sadly we will never know that greatness that would have been mighty midget magnets … but I digress.  In the end Alone was chosen as the theme.  Once it was announced, we immediately sprang into action and started talking out some game ideas that would fit an interpretation of Alone.  Since we wanted something unconventional, we decided to stay away from any ideas involving a person being or becoming alone.  It was at this time that we came up with a rough puzzle game idea where the goal was to get a single puzzle piece alone.

A small doodle of our LD22 Prototype

Prototype

Since we liked the idea we decided to do a quick and dirty prototype.  It would have no effort placed in sounds, art or guis; instead it would focus just on the Gameplay.  So I went to work with the quickness that is afforded to me by my bearded-ness. [PIC] Within moments I had re-made my doodle in Unity [PIC].  Once the level was in place, I was able to quickly get all everything working for the prototype.  It included moving the pieces with the goal of destroying all the pieces but one.  To destroy a piece, you had to move it through an opening and into an invisible wall.  It took about 2 hours to get the prototype completed.

LD22 Entry - Alpha 0.5

[PLAY THE PROTOTYPE]

Gameplay

Over the span of the weekend, the gameplay was expanded upon a bit.  Most of Saturday morning was spent adding new gameplay elements (warp points, breakable walls, pass-through walls, merging pieces and gate walls).

• The warp points would teleport a piece from one spot on a level to another.
• The breakable walls were special wall blocks that would ‘break’ when a piece ran into them.  The walls could be set to take 1 or more impacts before breaking.
• The pass-through walls looked just like the other wall blocks, but a piece could slide right through them.
• The merging pieces would allow for pieces to be combined and form a new piece.
• Then we added gate walls that would only allow certain pieces to pass-through them.

A small doodle of the invisible walls that would destroy pieces

A list of the various gameplay elements

The  rest of Saturday was spent testing the gameplay and trying to come up with level designs.

Sunday morning we realized that we were shooting for too much.  Here we had several different gameplay elements that we were trying to fit into 20 levels.  It was a much bigger task then we were anticipating.  So we changed directions and decided to cut out gameplay elements that a) were not much fun or b) would take too much effort to get the 20 levels done in time.  During this process we also changed the game pretty significantly.  Originally the idea was to get the other pieces to disappear by having them leave the game-board.  After cutting through the game elements, we ended up where you had to merge all the pieces together.  We removed the warp points, breakable walls, pass-through walls and decided to make the levels closed in.  This turned into a really good direction and helped spark a 8+ hr session where were able to create all 20 levels.

Graphics

Almost all of the graphical work was texture based.  The game only used primitives for the in game items. We didn’t start any work on the GUI / HUD images or the in game textures until Sunday.  We wanted to wait to make sure we had all the gameplay done … after all it’s a game.  While the art makes up 90% of it, that other 10% is very important and often can take more time then the art.

Audio

We originally had planned to make a few different tracks for the game using FL Studio.  Sadly, we haven’t really used it much and we were not familiar enough to get that done.  In then end we used sounds that we already had from a friend and then added him to the credits.

Sleep

We have done several game jams of various lengths (24+ hrs) and several times we made the awesome decision to stay up the whole time.  One time I was awake for 44 1/2 hrs straight … and that includes the 5 – 6 hr drive to and from Pittsburgh (so 10 – 11 hrs driving total) and the time for the competition (it was a 24hr game jam + the time for setting up / packing up + the time for the awards etc).  Nothing I can say will ever describe how bad it sucks to be up for 44 1/2 hrs with all that activity.

So this time around we made sure to go to sleep at a reasonable hour and not try to stay up for the whole weekend.  I can say that it was one of the best decisions that we made this time around.  Some of the better ideas we had with the gameplay came after getting a good nights sleep.  We set clear goals for the day and made sure to get as close as we could before going to bed.

Final Thoughts

So there was our Postmortem for Gemclusion.  Hopefully it was a good read and provided some useful advice to someone for something for some reason … yeah that would be nice :).  Please be sure to play and rate our game.  We are looking for any feedback that we can get that will help improve the game.

We are currently planning on expanding the game and releasing it on PC and/or Android for $1 – $2.  We are not sure how many levels it will have (20 – 50 is probably a good bet) and we are still deciding the gameplay elements (probably some of the originals with a twist + some new ones).  We might also  change the movement a bit to coincide with a phone for the Android version.  Additionally we plan to update the art (both in-game and GUI / HUD items).  It should be a lot of fun.

I will post again with and update when we get things going after the holidays.  Until then have a safe and happy holidays!!

Hey, y’all!

Go and check it out! Here’s the original entry.

Also, here’s my Christmas card to you!

Thanks again for joining in LD22!!! Have a great holiday!

-Phil

Tags: christmas

I have decided to accept bach’s Christmas challenge, so I have edited the sprites/backgrounds of my game to look more like Christmas. I also changed the game’s story.

Play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=6571

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 24th, 2011 at 12:35 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.

As posted on my blog at: http://bombpersons.wordpress.com/2011/12/24/loyds-tale-ludum-dare-was-fun/

So I entered the Ludum Jam last weekend with my housemates. We went in completely unprepared with no libraries at all. We made everything from scratch in those 3 days, including a tile engine, all the art, the level loader T_T. We didn’t get too much sleep  haha. You can play our game here. We named our games character Loyd Hasketh as its the first thing a random name generator pumped out. So our game is called Loyds Tale.

Our game idea was that you played a pirate, rabbit .. thing you finds himself ship wrecked on desert island with a mysterious bed in the middle of it. When you wake up from your slumber, the whole island had lifted out of the ocean and turned into a huge tower. You then have to make your way down the tower in a typical platforming fashion.

We made sure to have no other humanoid enemies, in order to reinforce the “Alone” theme. We did add some birds in there to give it some difficulty however.

We used Tiled as our map editor. It’s free, has a nice and easy to load XML map format, and is pretty flexible to use. We did have to resort to some pretty strange ways of inserting entities into the map, but it still worked.

Post Mortem

Day 1

On the first day we focused on getting the tile engine finished. I worked on the map loading whilst the others sorted out the actual drawing of the tiles. At this point our motivation was pretty high, as the code was still reasonable clean. We also wrote a simple entity system to go alongside the map, and created some sprite for the tiles and character.

Day 2

We fleshed out the entity system and the collision for the player (understanding that this is always a big problem in creating platformers we worked on this a lot). I worked on creating some hazards for the player, like spikes and breakable blocks. As the day went on we got less and less motivated. The code was getting messy as we had to hack things in to make them work, it was dawning on us how terrible our game was T_T.

Day 3

Sill demoralized from day 2, we worked on adding more hazards and designing the level. One of our team members had to leave about half way through the day to go home, so it ended up with just two of us adding the finishing touches. I spent most of the day creating the level. As we finally finished the game and submitted it, we could relax. It wasn’t long after that we realized that the game we created wasn’t *that* bad. You know it was passable considering that we created it from scratch in 3 days.

The Good

1. We got on with it, and finished it within a reasonable amount of time. We didn’t spend to long thinking of the idea and concept.
2. Using Tiled was a brilliant idea, it saved us a lot of time. We wouldn’t have even considered writing a platformer without it.
3. XNA was great. We all knew XNA very well as we all have a lot of experience using it. I would have preferred to use something more portable however =(
4. This is amazing. Bfxr is an improved version of Sfxr which is simply amazing for creating simple sound effects. My friend at university swears by it.

The Bad

1. We weren’t prepared. We really should have written a library to help us create a game in the weeks before the competition. It would have saved us a lot of time and kept our code more tidy. It wasn’t really feasible to do this time because we had a lot of assignments in the weeks leading up to the ludum dare.
2. Next time we do the ludum dare, we will definitely try to steer clear of platformers. They are a lot of work to program the back end to (collision mostly), and it is difficult to create unique gameplay using them (our game is pretty generic haha). We would definitely want to do something different in April.
3. We shouldn’t have resorted to messy code so early. We should have set most of the framework and ideas from the start rather than making them up as we went along. This resulted in horrible code that was painful to debug and lot’s of code repetition.

Other thoughts

Next time we might want to be more active in the community as the we are making the game. Like participating in the IRC channels or creating a timelapse video. Perhaps we will do one of those nextime =)

Re-posted from my blog: http://www.kennygoff.com/post/postmortem-alone-in-a-crowd-ludum-dare-22

Last weekend’s Ludum Dare was, in my mind, the best thus far. For over a year now, I have been trying to get the game development club at my college (SGDC, Stevens Game Development Club) to get together and participate in a Ludum Dare. Well, last weekend it happened! Thanks to a new dedicated room on campus for the club, and me bringing it up at every meeting for a month and spamming our email list with reminders, we had 3 people come by to work on games, and a few other’s come by to hang out and brainstorm. Unfortunately, I was the only one to finish, although one guy made a game on his TI calculator that was pretty cool (he didn’t submit though). Not only that, but I believe this is the best game I’ve made so far in a Ludum Dare, and my time was best spent during the weekend.

The Weekend

When the night first started and the theme, Alone, was announced, I couldn’t think of anything good. I thought of a lonely kitten platformer, but I hated that idea, and wanted to avoid doing a platformer (my fallback game type). I wanted to do something different this time. However, after talking with the guys who were at the SGDC room with me, a few ideas flew around. One being a game where you repulse people, and you have to corner them and make them your friend. Another, where you are trying to be alone, and you have to escape the people following you (basically the opposite of the previous idea). And a few other small ideas came to mind but I liked none of them. It was only about an hour and a half into the competition, and not late at night, so I figured I’ll start programming a simple platformer and make a kitten sprite so I have something to branch off of the next morning. After that it was about 12:00pm EST, and 45 hours remaining. I decided to take the night to sleep it over, as I typically have a better idea in the morning.

I woke up the next morning with a spark that I did not have the night before. It seemed like a more generalized version of the repulsion/attraction ideas. Basically, the game would be top down, with the screen being one room, and the player had to travel through to other rooms, and in each room was a different situation. Each situation would deal with emotions, and specifically for the theme; loneliness, love, togetherness, loss, and some others. I had been playing a lot of Edmund McMillen’s The Binding of Isaac, so I thought of the rooms in the same style as they were in Isaac. One basic rectangular room taking up the screen, with the possibility of one door on any given wall. The difference was, you could not go back through a room you came through.

Once I though of this I immediately got hit with all the different types of rooms I could do. Death, crowds, repulsive to others, getting a girlfriend, and losing a girlfriend were some of the first to cross my mind. I went to go scrap my old platformer and start fresh with this game. I decided to keep everything as different colored squares. This was not placeholder graphics though. I wanted everything to be representational and simple, in order to allow the player to image it all, and put him or herself in the game. Also I’m not that good at drawing top down characters, but I’ll stick with the simplicity angle as the main factor in the decision. The most complex thing in the game was the kitten, who was a small square with big pointy ears and a tail. As I started to put this together I also thought of naming each room something unique and displaying the name of the room on the bottom of the screen (which ended up being the most fun part of coming up with new room … and was totally taken from Terry Cavanagh’s VVVVVV).

I had to take a break during the day because I had a final exam and my roommate and I took a trip to New York City for a couple hours. Once I got back there was just over 24 hours remaining. That was enough time to put together a few rooms, clean up bugs, and submit on time. I ended up with 10 different types of rooms, which are randomly generated when you enter a new room.

What Went Right

1. This was the first Ludum Dare where I prioritized gameplay over art, and made sure to get everything that was needed for the game to be fun before even thinking about art.
2. Chose an idea that was easy to implement and rooms took a very short amount of time to create.
3. Talking to people and going out was an important part in my design process, and the game wouldn’t be where it is without that. I got some good ideas for rooms from my friends in SGDC and my roommate came up with a few good ones, including one of my favorites “Size Does Matter”, where a bigger blue square steals your girlfriend from you.

What Went Wrong

1. Gameplay relied on a lot of content. Although the rooms were easy to implement, I still needed a lot of rooms to make the game fun, and at 10 room types, I think I was short a few.
2. No Sounds… again. I didn’t have time to work on sounds or music, and a simple ominous tune would have sufficed for background music.
3. “The Answer” was kind of controversial, and people seemed to take it to an extreme. That room was a room you could not leave, and had a noose in the center, and when you touched it the game ended with a screen that said “Death: Forever Alone.” This was one of my earlier ideas, and I obviously didn’t think how people would take it. I was not at all trying to imply that I support suicide. It was merely a realistic look at the path some people take when faced with deep depression. I actually planned to add an exit if you didn’t touch the noose after a few seconds and other ways to end the game, including two tombstones if you have a partner, in a room called “Old Age” or something. I simply ran out of time and didn’t have time to implement the different death cases for each setup possible (alone, with girlfriend, with cat).

Looking To The Future

Overall, I think that this was a great Ludum Dare and my best and most unique LD game yet. I want to make a fully realized version of Alone In A Crowd, with a lot of rooms, marriage, divorce, more loss, friends, kids, afterlife, and basically anything in life that could effect a person. I already have 20 or more ideas for rooms, and any time I think about or talk about the game I come up with a new one. The full version of Alone In A Crowd won’t be something I’ll be done with soon. Rather, I’ll be adding to the current version over time, until I feel like I have enough content to release it. I’ll be sticking with doing it in AS3 with flixel, because I think it will be a good online game, and am also considering doing a mobile version, since it is very easy to implement on any platform (and my next few games in mind are going to be mobile and I’ll be in the groove).

I look forward to the future of Alone In A Crowd and the next Ludum Dare, which is the 23rd LD and the 10th Anniversary for Ludum Dare.

Tags: postmortem

I made a post-mortem for my game, “Ghost Town”.

You can click this link with your pointing device to see it!!

Tags: analysis, external blog, ghost town, post-mortem, postmortem

I accepted bach’s challenge and made a christmas version of my game. Enjoy!

Tags: christmas

What went right

• Images, graphic design.
• Focus on game (no distractions)
• Layout of game
• Knew how to use tools (C++ SDL)
• Game Story/Planning
• Timelapse/Livestream

What went wrong

• Not fully compatible with all platforms (Mac, Linux)
• Character movement could of been better
• Lava should have done more damage
• Could have had more levels
• Lots of DLLs and other included files
• Walls should have acted differently (instead of spawning at start of room)

What I will do better next time

• Try a different programming language that is more universal, easier to use
• Have less DLLS
• Graphics could be slightly better
• Player movement could be better

Overall, it was a great experience to be part of Ludum Dare 22.

Timelapse here: http://youtu.be/qUCHPi0LrXw

Get it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=6571

I accepted the christmas-ify your game challenge.
Changes:

• Holiday Graphics
• Christmas Particle Explosions
• Snow in lieu of stars

Enjoy!
download
 

Merry Christmas – Happy Holidays! Just for fun, here is the snowy SANTA version of my LD22 game, Greeble. Can you revive all your Santa Claus clones? Can you find the Christmas Kitty? It was made in HTML5 and runs at 60fps in all recently updated browsers. Enjoy! Hope your holidays are filled with friends, family and fun!

http://www.mcfunkypants.com/LD22/xmas/

Tags: christmas, holiday, html5, post-compo, xmas

I made a xmas theme too for my LD48 entry game.
Check it out: floriaen.fr/thefall

Everyone seems to be giving their Ludum Dare games a more Christmasy feel, and while it might be hard for me to say this unusually warm weather has me convinced the holiday truly is right around the corner, there’s a bandwagon, and I’m sure as hell going to jump on it.

Thus, I present to you Forgotten Memories: Limited Xmas Edition!

Do fractals more festive than these even exist? If they do, I haven’t seen them. There’s so much red and green up in this that it will melt your face off with Christmas spirit.

I seem to recall some sort of agreement to only spend five minutes on this upgrade, and adding “snow” would go over that. Sorry, but not every Christmas is a winter wonderland. Sometimes you look up at the sky, and it’s all cloudy, and you’re all “oh boy oh boy oh boy”, but then it doesn’t stay just quite cold enough, so you end up with some sort of slush that looks all sorts of ugly and threatens to kill you if you dare try to get on the roads before having dinner with the family, which I imagine is what having in-laws is like.

I wouldn’t know though. I’m all alone.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

EDIT: Oh right. You know what helps? Actually linking the thing.

http://www.ludexor.net/xmas.php

Tags: christmas

I’m back with another round of really interesting entries from you!

A Weekend Alone – by NoLan Labs

Did you enjoy your experience making a game for LudumDare?  Do you want to do it again?  Now you can!  Play this LudumDare simulator to balance your need to eat, sleep, and use the toilet and hope you can crank out a finished game for the jam (easy) or the compo (hard).  Easily the most “meta” game I’ve played since Game Dev Story.

Frostbite – by saint11

This game is a really tight package with great pixel art, smooth controls, well-considered level design, and light challenge.  I very much enjoyed the fireside mechanic where you cure your hypothermia and simultaneously stop hallucinating while watching the flames.  An excellent entry and a must-play.

Ah, finally got this out of the way. Was dragging my heels on this post-mortem as I didn’t feel like I had made any significant mistakes this time around, so there wasn’t a ton to reflect on. However, I haven’t had a ton of comments on my entry. So hey, if you’re in the festive spirit, give the gift of criticism!

In between zooming around from NS to NB this past weekend, I knocked out a Ludum Dare game. Neat little randomly generated retro style platformer. Posting this both on the Ludum Dare site and my own blog. So LDer’s enjoy an expository preamble!

Click to play

Preamble

So if you’re unfamiliar with Ludum Dare it’s an online, solo game development competition. They release a theme and you have to develop a game using that theme in a forty-eight hour timeframe.  A large list of themes is created and after a few rounds of voting , the list is culled to a dozen or so final themes to vote on. After the final round of voting is complete, the theme is released and a sleepless, hectic weekend begins. I was rooting for “Randomly Generated” to be selected as the theme and was already salivating at the prospect of making a roguelike.

Over the last few years the only games that really stick out to me as being actually fun and life destroyingly addictive were the new wave of roguelikes. Spelunky, Transcendence, and The Binding of Isaac have taken a mostly inaccessible genre and made it almost casual. If a player can get over how masochistic these games are, it really scratches their drive for mastery. There is nothing that can foster that “Just one more turn…” effect better than these games. But I digress, this is a subject worth a post all on its own.

Spelunky was a harsh mistress

The weekend of this Ludum Dare coincided with a friend’s Christmas party I few hours away. I didn’t want to lose six hours driving back and forth so I opted for twelve hours by train. After packing everything for the trip I settled in and waited for the theme reveal. “Alone” ended up hedging out Randomly-Generated by a few votes.  Even though I was bummed over my pet theme losing, I figured I could still work Randomly-Generated into my concept. What I roughed out, was that you were a monster created by the government, you wanted to escape their pursuit and be left alone. I pegged the gameplay as a platformer with randomly generated level sections. I wasn’t sure about combat and mechanics but I was hoping it’d grow organically throughout the competition. My main goal was to produce something playable that had some random level generation in it.

Could you, would you, on a train?

What went right?

Flixel and Flixel Power Tools

Even with the minor learning curve, Flixel and Photonstorm’s Power Tools were a huge boon. Flixel itself makes blitting ridiculously simple.  Power Tools is so feature rich it covers the majority of your bases. Projectiles, quick controllers, collision, health bars, etc. Really looking forward to having another excuse to play around with Photonstorm’s plug-in, since I’ve only scratched the surface.

Randomly Generated Levels

I feel the time was spent better generating the random levels, than building a few poorly designed levels. As there aren’t a ton of game mechanics the best I could do with level design would have been in the realm of jumping puzzles or a vertical maze. The randomly generated levels toss in a little replay value, and lay a foundation for a roguelike in further development.

In terms of the actual generation it was pretty quick and dirty. Originally I had created a system that would take sections of 5 rows, 10 rows, and 15 rows, each being 13 columns across. You’d pass the length and width (in sections) and it would stitch together the random sections into the full map.

Each section looked like this:

00,00,00,00,00,00,00,05,00,00,02,00,03
 00,00,02,00,00,01,01,01,00,01,01,00,01
 00,01,01,01,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,01
 00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,00,00,03
 01,03,01,01,01,01,01,01,01,01,01,01,01

00 – Empty, 01 – Solid Tile. 02 – Enemy, 03 – Open Tile to Next Section, 05 – Possible entrance/exit door.

Due to the time constraint I wasn’t able to implement the 10 and 15 row sections. It definitely would have made the levels feel a bit more unique, but I think they come across as pretty varied just using the 5 row sections.

Pixel Art

First time playing around with pixel art, probably could have done better with the tiles, as the thick black outline doesn’t work really well. But otherwise everything turned out pretty swell. Animation was a bit of a pain, but I’m content with the results. The choice to make the main character limbless was a big timer saver.

My easily animated friend...

Organic Evolution of Mechanics

Setting out on Solitude my main goal was a Spelunky-esque platformer, but beyond the randomly generated levels I had no idea on what mechanics I’d need. Plopped in the basic melee attack and ranged attack. Bullet reflection when using a melee attack was a happy accident and a great alternative to making a shielding ability. Flight ended up being an accident as well. The terrain destruction was a response to the possibility of there being no direct path to a level exit.

Roguelike Resource Management

I didn’t have any initial plans for energy consuming attacks, but flight and and terrain destruction were easily abusable. Most roguelikes have a few finite resources that you have to manage I feel like I did a good job of integrating this with energy and life. You can only replenish energy by killing troops, and you need that energy to more easily traverse the level.

It doesn’t have a huge impact in the jam game, but I think it’ll be a much bigger deal if I continue on with development. Using a timer to push the player forward and keep the game fast paced, the health and energy trade off will be one of your main decisions.

Music

If I had hit the 48 hour deadline I definitely would not have had a chance to add music to the game, so the running over the deadline was a blessing in disguise. I had a friend put together my music. Ended up far better than what I could have ever produced, and has the perfect pacing for the game.

What Went Wrong

Time

Everything boils down to lack of time. Sparse mechanics, rough art, no sound, having to enter the 72 hour jam instead of the competition. Being tied up with real-life, and travel.

Arguably you could say my scope, goal, and choice of tech that I don’t have solid experience with is the real problem, but I set out to make a randomly generated game, make some pixel art, and learn Flixel. Those motivations went above making a fun polished game.

Difficulty

Seems to happen with every LD entry, but I think Solitude is too hard. You can only breeze through it once you start abusing mechanics. It’s likely you’ll lose interest in the game before you get that comfortable with the game.

It’s something I’m going to have to be more conscious of when pumping out an LD game. My group of friends aren’t the best for feedback in terms of a game’s difficulty. So maybe I should start harassing folks in IRC during the competition…

Conclusion

Unlike other LD’s there isn’t a ton of reflection to do here.  All in all,  really happy with the result of the LD despite my lack of time. Got to play around with Flixel and got to start off a bit of a roguelike. Woop woop.

Tags: journal, post-mortem, postmortem

Merry Christmas to all!

Just in time for the holiday I was able to change my game A Long Walk Home to be all Holiday Themed. I actually really really like the way the snow falls on the level. I thought about making all the blocks ice blocks, but that would be a little too much of a change from the original code base.

Christmas Time!

Enjoy you holiday!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8475

In response to this challenge to Christmas-ify your game, I decided to add some Christmas things to my entry, Duckling.

The ground is covered in snow, the mother duck has a Santa hat and the ducklings have elf hats (including the player), the egg you respawn out of is gift wrapped, and there are other modifications as well. You can play it here.

Now you can admire the Christmas atmosphere as the poor duckling is repeatedly impaled on spikes.

Merry Christmas!

Ahoy all!

Last weekend I made a compo entry called Castaway.

If you speak French, you might want to read my lengthy writeup on Les Forges. Else, here are the traditional bullet point lists :

What went well

• Using familiar tools (custom framework, FlashDevelop, HaXe, Photoshop, Reason, etc.)
• Using project management techniques and tools. I used Asana to handle my ever growing todo list and a mini scrumboard for tracking bugs. Pictures at the end of this post.
• Recording custom sound effects. This was my first time and I’m very happy with the result (especially since it didnt take long). Picture below.
• Testing. Two friends came on Sunday evening and played the game again and again to spot bugs. They were the one writing the scrum post-it and it was very useful.
• Chronolapse. Making a timelapse took no effort and I love the end result.

What went not so well

• Theme. I did not think long enough of the theme and started working without a clear idea of what my game would be.
• Time management. I spent too much time working on animations and art assets instead of making content. Look at this 8 frames walk cycle : . This is wasted time, lots of it.
• Balancing. The game is way too hard ; my testers thought it was funny because of it but I should have considered this as alarming.
• Oops. A critical bug that crashes the game on slow computer was shipped in the compo version. Maybe the test configuration should include a slow computer too.

Pictures

Asana

Bug tracking scrumboard

Sound design tools

Even though my game is way too hard, too short and unforgiving, I’m still happy with what I did. I am satisfied I made some art and music that were not 8bit/chiptune over the course of the weekend and more importantly, I had lots of fun. Next time, I will NOT make a sidescrolling platformer, that’s my objective.

Thank you all for reading/playing/rating !

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 25th, 2011 at 11:33 am 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.

Only a few hours ago did I find out about these christmas changes. So I started working on mine, and here’s the result!

It also includes some gameplay changes that I worked on the day after LD22 finished. Also, the nice thing is that editing the content was very easy, but adding separate textures isn’t possible at the moment, so I had to replace the tileset with a new one. Also, I couldn’t save the old content because there’s no way to choose which you want in a level (which you can’t choose either). So there’s still lots of room for improved mod support.

But anyway, enjoy, and merry christmas!

Direct link

Link to the rate page