[ postmortem #1 | Play the game ]

Thte Last Adventurer is an HTML5 canvas game with Javascript and the GameJS library. My previous LD entries were in python, and I was told if I made a browser game then it would get more plays, but so far that’s not the case. I’ve only got 12 ratings so far, which seems pretty low for a web-based game. Oh well.

HTML5 gets used for a lot of demos, and it doesn’t have a good reputation for game making, so I wanted something way more graphically and computationally demanding than Tetris. My game is still a bit rough around the edges, but that’s completely due to the time constraints. I’m sure that HTML5 is more than capable of making an extremely polished game.

I had  a lot of fun working with transformations and transparency. Transparency is used in many places in the game, including shadows, the selection region, the exit portal, and the boss of level 4. I used stretch transformations for anything circular that appears on the ground (shadows, selectors, portal), rotation transformations for the “knock” animation when a character gets hit, and scaling transformations for the level 4 boss and the “quake” spell casting sequence.

The pièce de résistance is the circular gameplay area. An 854×854 square image is pre-rendered. Then, each frame, it’s rotated by the current angle, scaled to an isometric 1:2 ratio, and its drawing region is clipped to an ellipse using the canvas element’s clip method. No caching of transformed images is done, and I think performance holds up well. You can see the smoothness of the rotation when you press LEFT or RIGHT. I should have incorporated that into the gameplay more, but more about that next time!

First day

LD22 was starting at 3:00 am (MiddleEuropeTime) in my country so I woke up at 8 am , checked the theme and started thinking about it. I knew how I want to do my game after minute or two so I started Unity, Chronolapse and horaaay to work.

At first I created (after 2 hours)  my own moving system ( I didn`t want to use unity basic 1st person prefab) … I had some problems with camera rotation but I managed to fix that. Then I created pistol used at end of my the game.( I thought that I create more action based game but I changed it to mix of adventure – action  :D)

I slowly started to create first room in my imaginary house and I thought up the best way to tell the “story” – by creating floating text meshes. After 12 hours of programming tasks like “switch the light on”,”open the door”, “waaa zombie …RUN!” I found up that I closed chronolapse (I dont know how… so there is 12 hour window in my timelapse :/ )

After first day I created ground floor and some furniture, door animation + first 4 or 5 tasks. I went to bed about 1 am(of second day :D).

Day two

I woke up and realized that I will have really long night. I had something about 30% of my game created. Firstly I started working on roof of garage(I better dont tell you how hard it was to fill triangle hole between ground floor ceiling and roof when you must create everything from cubes ) Then I was working on “zombie trying to destroy door” animation and I created task where you need to collect some items in garage to block the door ( + i added elegant (my opinion :D) timing system for that task … I was proud of myself :D)

The most funny part of that 2 days was creating animation “zombie is jumping trought the window” I really enjoyed that part I realized that my game needs more action so I thought up brick throwing and added scene when zombie broke the garage door and you must kill it with a brick  (+ added dead zombie face texture). Again some tasks like “block the window with long plank”  and I created basic of 1st floor + some furniture. Again task of type “kill the zombie with brick” + added window opening animation.

I realized that I have no time ( next day it was school and that means waking up at 6am… and  deadline was at 3am. It was something about 11:00 pm and I still needed to add balcony, neightbour house , ending scene in garage + tasks to everything….so I told my mum that I can`t go to school next day … fortunately she was OK about that . I catched second breath … had a little rest with stupid smile on my face (it`s not fun to spend about 12-13 hours in front of PC :D) And i knew that it was my last rest of that day   So I was programming and creating enviroment

Do you know what is fun ?  When it is 2:20 and garage door just can`t open for some reason … and when it is  2:40 and they still just can`t open … Somehow i managed to fix it. I added some more zombies and wretched end screen  in 5minutes. I was ready to upload … You can`t imagine how happy I was when I read that we have 1 more hour for uploading .

I was going to bed at 5 am realizing that i can go to shool if I can live with one hour sleep time  … but I can`t  😉

So this was my first LD and it was fun … 2 days of my life that I will never regret

btw. sorry for my english 😉

Looking forward to LD 23 !

+link:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=6198

This is a very short post mortem about my entry Loot Alone.

Good Points

• I developed more than 22 games (as a contract developer), but this is the first time I took part in Ludum Dare and managed to submit a game to the competition! This was one of my 2011’s goals.
• First time I ever did graphics for a game. All the games I worked before were done by hired artists. I could say I was always scared of doing art, and doing these graphics lighted up a flame inside me, that now wants to make me a better artist.
• I came up with the idea in less than an hour after the competition started and I may consider of taking it further and making a commercial game from scratch with this idea.
• When doing 2D with Unity I always used a 3rd party commercial library. Since I took part in the competition I had to come with a solution by myself, so I ended up learning how to “do 2D” in Unity without external help.
• I liked the concept of a linear comics-style navigation I made.

Bad Points

• I worked only 8 hours, I didn’t use the available 48 hours. For this reason, my entry can not even be considered a “game”. Let’s consider it “an interactive short animation“.
• Due to the short amount of time worked, I didn’t manage to make all the scenes: there are 3 scenes; being 2 playable levels and an animation one. The initial plan to make the game “complete and playable” was to have 6 scenes. So we have 3 scenes that are out.
• The rocket cat was meant to be controllable, so you could kill the dragon.
• In the 8 hours I worked, I coded for only 2 hours. That means there are bugs, mostly on the messages system.
• My lack of knowledge in Unity for 2D without a 3rd party library left some bugs on the graphics, mostly due to scaling.
• The linear comics-style navigation can be confusing, since you can end up going to the wrong side.

Tags: kitten-challenge, loot-alone, post-mortem, postmortem, unity, unity3d

It’s been a while since the HUGMONSTER (-O^_^)-O has been around to play your games, but it’s back just in time for the final leg of the voting and it has a few under-played gems to bring to your attention. Remember, let’s try to get every game up to 20 votes if possible, but if you’re having trouble deciding which games to start with, here are a few really nice ones.

One Player Co-Op – by Redbone

In this puzzle-platformer, you can spawn a ghostly clone of yourself that you move simultaneously alongside yourself.  Use your clone to flip switches and stand on plates for you, and use it to reach areas you cannot.  A game this inventive deserves more votes than it’s got right now.

One May Pass – by binarycoder

Much like the previous game there are multiple copies of your character that all run around at the same time as you use the keyboard.  The object here is to use your clones as sacrificial lambs in order to provide stepping stones and/or depress plates / flip switches to clear a path for your chosen one.
Frostbite – by saint11

I may have mentioned this one before, but it bears repeating because it still has so few votes.  There’s a nice hypothermia mechanic in this game that keeps you looking for burning barrels to ward off the cold while you need to find rations to stave off hunger.  Unfortunately, you’re also quite delusional and are seeing ghosts.  Don’t let them touch you!  They vanish into oblivion when you stare at a nice warm fire.  You can shoot them to dissipate them for a brief moment, but mind your ammo… it has to last you until the end.

Since making “Quiet, Please!” for Ludum Dare 22, I’ve taken some time to improve on it and add additional content. I was really happy with what I was able to accomplish in the 48hr time period, but I had a lot of ideas that I was not able to get to.

The biggest criticism of the compo version was its length. This updated version has new areas, new and improved puzzles, an intro and a lot more sound and art assets.

The new version of “Quiet, Please!” can be played in a web browser (Unity) here:

Quiet, Please! Post Compo Version

The original, 48hr entry is here.

Here are a few screenshots from the new version of the game:

I made a post-compo version of my entry, with modifications suggested by commenters:

• added sound effects
• added music (ambient sounds, actually)
• small fixes in walking animation
• small fixes in gfx: exit doors became orange/red, also you see part of the room when the door is open
• gameplay fixes: player health was replenished at the start of a level, now it is maintained through the game

You can play it here. If you want to rate it, here is the original compo entry. Enjoy!

Thanks to  CplMustard,  merthsoft,  jfroco, dr_soda, Thomas, Benjamin for their insightful suggestions!

Tags: extended, Flixel, game, post-compo

Happy new year everyone! I spent a bunch of time working on my Ludum Dare entry… trying to reduce the confusingness while increase the play-me-more-ness. There’s a shop now, which sells sweet upgrades like “Seagull Pheremones”, as well as goats and aquatic-goats known to humans as “fishes”.

I made a little something that eases the downloading and extracting of several games.
You still have to look them up and rate them though, so it’s actually not as nifty as I’d want it to be.
I was planning on making something more easier but I found out about http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=misc_links too late.
I might work some more on it in two days from now.

You’ll need .NET framework 4.0 to run this.

http://www.erasum.com/LDDownloader.zip

You can enter a url (or a list of urls seperated by ‘;’) then download and extract the games (zip, rar and 7z are supported).|
The program will extract each game in its own folder based on the filename.

I’ve taken the liberty to add my own game and some of the games that were only rated 11 or 12 times.

I’ve done a short write-up/post mortem over on my website.

http://www.beercave.co.uk/2012/01/04/ludum-dare-22-post-mortem-alone

Short version :

• It definitely helps to be familiar with your toolset.
• It definitely doesn’t help to go out drinking mid-compo.
• Alone ‘meh, kittens awesome!
• Yay procedural content, more please

If you like my ramblings, I’d appreciate more rates for my game, even if you hate it.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=5206

But who could hate this adorable little guy?

Some said that our game is very difficult to complete. So we’ve made this walkthrough video.

Yes, it is difficult. But that’s all the fun!

P.S. We’ve made ​​twenty seven attempts before we recorded this video.

You can try Stand Alone by yourself.

What I learned not to do in a ld48

Ok, so some of you have found my game and seen that is less than… anything good. I can tell you right now that it is not at all what I had in my head when I started coding. This is just a quick recap on how I ended up with “walkabout”.

Ignore writing anything down

This turned out to be a huge problem for me. At first things were fine because I couldn’t even start putting the game together until I had a way to manage my game data in c++. The problems started when I got just passed that point and wanted to start getting things ready for the screen and the game as a whole. They started… then they got worse as time went on because my ideas changed little by little and I would go back and see that I had started code for an idea that I had several hours prior.  I figured meh.. fix it and move on. This led to me making a huge shift in my game idea Sunday morning so that I could have something. The hammer was a last minute push for something and the game turned out nothing like any of my original ideas.

Change Ideas Last Minute

Another bad decision I made was changing ideas Sunday morning. I ended up with less than I had. It was a terrible feeling come closing time knowing that I had tossed 1.5 days of work for .8 days of work. This one can probably be fixed by just planning a few things out from the get go.

Dont bother with code versioning

This one was not so obvious until sunday morning as well when in my baggy eyed stupor I deleted code for the code in the current version of “walkabout”. I ended throwing it on Github with just the final version. Had I kept my code in the repo from the beginning I could have just rolled back.

Don’t bother packaging code

Another thing I just didn’t do was package the code. In my rushed state I just submitted the source. Sadly this makes it a pain in the butt for the people that want to judge my… I suppose we can call it a game (:

Conclusion…

Sadly I didn’t get to make what I would like to have turned it. I’m still not super confident that I should have entered the code in that I did. I now know what NOT to do next time. On that note.. bring on LD48 in April!

[ postmortem #1 | #2 | Play the game ]

The theme for LD22 was “Alone”. I have two strict rules for myself when it comes to the theme:

• some aspect of the core gameplay mechanic (as opposed to just the dialogue/artwork/whatever) must be inspired by the theme
• never modify a game idea for another theme to make it “fit” with the theme that actually gets chosen

I feel like I put a lot of thought into this theme. It wasn’t enough for me to go with a game where you control one character and have very few or no interactions with an NPC. The large majority of games from any given LD are like this, and they could have filled this requirement with some minor rewriting. I rejected my first game idea because it was like this.

So rather than making another game where you just happen to be alone, I decided to change a game where you’re normally not alone into one where you are. The obvious choice for multi-character gameplay is an RPG. I could have just made an RPG where you only control one character, but that’s not very original, especially for Ludum Dare. So I decided to turn the standard formula around: instead of starting alone and building a party, you start with a party that diminishes until you’re alone. I like this idea a lot because:

• it’s original. I can’t think of any game I’ve ever seen with this mechanic.
• it’s inspired directly by the theme, but a creative interpretation rather than an obvious one.
• it adds an interesting challenge to the gameplay (because you don’t control which characters will leave).
• it challenges me, because I still had to make five different characters.

So I’m really happy with how I used the theme. Based on the comments I’ve gotten so far, most people disagree with me. They say the connection to the theme is weak or forced. I guess a game about being alone is more accepted than one about becoming alone. I think I would have gotten a higher Theme score  if I had only one character from the beginning, like most of the games in this competition (and other competitions). Still, I’m glad I didn’t. I’m not disappointed in others’ games, but I would have been disappointed in myself if I had gone the “accessible but obvious” route.

Anyway, I’m surprised some people thought my use of theme seemed tacked on, because I feel like I probably put more thought into the theme than most people did, even if I came to a different conclusion. Still, I think it’s great that people interpret the theme in different ways, so I’m not upset that the judges have a different idea of what’s a good use of theme than I do. I plan to keep trying outside-the-box ideas in the future, I just hope it’ll be clear that’s what I’m doing rather than ignoring the theme!

So there are only 4 days left to rate. We’ve been trying to rate whenver we get the time, and so far we’ve rated 26% of the games out there. But there are still more! We’re going to keep trying to rate more and more games out there!

And everyone else should do the same! You can start by trying our entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=7415

Good luck to everyone!

Here’s a very late postmortem for my game Leave Black Alone. To be honest, I’m surprised at the fairly positive feedback I’ve been getting, considering that I’m not really too fond of it.

The Good:

• Choosing to use Game Maker. I know a bit of Java, but it would’ve been a nightmare for me trying to make this with it. I’ve spent enough time with Game Maker that I found the coding to be fairly painless.
• The idea, because I think it’s fairly original take on Alone, even if the story was just sorta pasted on towards the end.
• For the most part, I managed to stay focused on the game.
• Getting someone to look at the game from time to time. If not, I might have kept my original graphics, and they would’ve scorched off your eyeballs… Instead, I made a simple and somewhat more pleasing color scheme. My tester also caught one or two bugs that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise. Also, there wouldn’t be a hint button if my tester hadn’t had so much trouble with the puzzles.
• Getting lots of sleep on Saturday, even though I wasn’t very tired. I felt exhausted later on Sunday even with the extra sleep, so I imagine it would have been even harder to actually finish the dang thing.
• Finishing the game! This was my very first LD ever, so I’m really happy that I managed to finish.

The Bad:

• Sound. If you’ve played my game, you’ll notice that the sound effects aren’t that great and there’s no music to speak of. This was my first time ever really messing with music and sound, and it shows. I used bfxr for sound and pxtone for (attempted)music, but I hadn’t ever used bfxr before. Next time, I’ll need to practice making music and sound a bit.
• The level design process. Game Maker’s room editor is nice, but it would’ve helped to setup a small level editor , especially later on Sunday when I was scrambling to make levels. I also didn’t really know what to do with all the elements of the game, which is why I kept adding new stuff even as the last level loomed.
• The tutorial system. I like it, but my tester hardly even looked at it, despite the fact that it’s the only place with any instruction to speak of. If you rate my game, please tell me whether you used it or not.
• I used collision detection for everything, when I really should have used an array. This came back to haunt me later, when I desperately tried and failed to fix a horde of weird bugs regarding the powerups. In the end, I had to design around them, and I hated that. If you see an off center powerup, you know the cause.
• The win screen and story screen. I thought it would be cool to try messing with blender to make a cool win screen, but instead it took quite a while and produced a pretty terrible result. It would have been simpler for me to use the gimp and drawn it. As for the story screen, it was just a tacked on extra, and I really should have either put a little more time into it, or not had it at all.

Tags: postmortem

This past week I have been thinking about what sort of silly little indie game thing to try to make for the sake of making Ludexor Studios something more than just a name and a Ludum Dare entry. One thing that kept popping into my head was “Hey! Everyone over at Ludum Dare likes to make indie games… perhaps they would be good people to ask for advice?”

I hope it’s acceptable to post this little not-so-little post of me rambling about terrible game ideas of mine. I’d love to hear your thoughts, even if it boils down to telling me to never post anything like this again ever.

That said…

If there is one thing I have a new-found respect for after this week, it’s designers who can come up with good, quality game ideas. This shit is hard. I can’t even begin to explain to you just how many ideas got jot down on paper only to be furiously crumpled up and tossed in the general direction of a growing pile that I think once had a trashcan under it. At one point I considered saving time by buying a few notebooks to throw away as is.

However, we’re not here to destroy the environment. We’re here to make games, and damn it, I’m certain if I say that enough it will eventually happen.

So here’s what up. I have three simple game ideas, and I’d like to hear which you think I should put the most effort towards. I’ll probably just work at them haphazardly with about as much focus as an indecisive kitten presented simultaneously with a laser pointer dot, catnip mouse, and ball of string, unable to make a commitment until someone helpful encourages me towards one over the others. Or perhaps I’ll be encouraged toward all of them at once, being driven slightly insane until I lose interest and pass out, just as cats are so prone to do.

Particle Madness

This idea was inspired in part by a school project that I still have laying around. The general idea is that particles would be emitted from a starting point, and you would have to place down attracters, repelers, walls, filters, redirecters, and all sorts of silly things that probably aren’t real words to get them past various obstacles to a correct end point. Color would be a large factor in how particles interact with different objects.

So, in essence, a puzzle game. One that I would insist on making sure looked beautiful and surreal. If you have been following me for a while (which is no one, because I have no friends; you would know that if you have been following me), you will probably notice that this idea is kinda like my Ludum Dare entry in that it’s supposed to be beautiful and particle-ly.

What can I say? I like particle effects. So shiny.

Someone brought to my attention that there’s already a game exactly like what I had in mind: Auditorium. It makes this idea seem rather silly, especially when it looks like Auditorium has already done such a wonderful job. Oh well.

Cuddly Little Fuzz Creature on a Mission

Working title, of course.

This was inspired in part by ilomilo. If you have no played it, do so, because it’s a game so fucking adorable it hurts. The source code for that game probably includes legitimate real live kittens it’s such a cute game.

That said, this would be another puzzle game. The objective? To create a path to help some adorable little creature of cute to its goal, which would likely be a kitty or stuffed animal or something that makes you want to say “Awwwww.” The mechanics of this would probably be somewhere between that of a Rubik’s cube, Tetris, and/or those “Get the car out of the parking lot without just monster-trucking your way out of there like you so know you could” games. Ultimately, it would be whatever ends up being most “fun” out of several different variations that I’m not going to bother to explain just yet.

Oh, and I feel I should clarify on the cuteness of this game: I’m not talking the kind of obnoxious cute that makes you want to produce the most violent upheaval of vomit you can manage for the sake of restoring the cute-to-not-so-cute balance. I’m talking the kind of cute that even men can get behind. The kind of cute that you secretly adore but would never dare tell your girl. Pikmin cute. Chao from Sonic cute. Pokemon Cute. You know what I mean.

Potato Bucket

This game was inspired by a potato in a bucket.

Gameplay would consist of a potato in a bucket.

You can take the potato out of the bucket. Place it back in the bucket. Turn the bucket over and place the potato on top of it as it it were its own buckety throne to its potato empire. You can bake the potato. Take a bite out of the potato. Mash the potato. Tape it back together. Consume the potato, tape and all, then buy a new one, and launch it into space.

It’s potato bucket.

It can do anything.

Whatever one of these I choose to make will be made into an Android game, with a considerable chance of their being a web version created as well. iPhone versions would come at a later date, mostly because making an iPhone version is not a very viable option at the moment.

Oh, and most importantly, the game will be free, supported by ads which I will do my best to make sure are as un-obnoxious as possible. I hate intrusive ads just as much as you do.

So, which would you like to see be made into a game?

This not so much a post mortem, more a rambling of things I want people to know about my game.

My game was created by me, my son, his girlfriend, and two of his friends. (Ages 15-17) I was the project manager and programmer. The girlfriend was the artist. One of the friends was the writer, and my son and the remaining friend were music and sound.

The hardest part for me was to not jump in and do stuff for them.  I think I still railroaded them a bit so that we would have a game at the end of the 72 hours.

It was a learning experience for them of how adding extra characters increases the complexity exponentially. We started with 3 characters and ended up with 7.

Interesting tidbits:

• The main character’s name is “Dude” since nobody gave me what his name should be
• The sound effects of the mini game are me saying “pew pew” and “ow” into the microphone
• The mysterious floating number in the upper left corner is the body count

Spoilers:

There are no spoiler tags so read this at your own risk.

The back story is that the main character is a cyborg and he doesn’t know it.  After the accident, he was cyborg-ed up and sent back to the school as a field test. That’s why he has power armour in his bedroom.  The player is the voice inside the main character’s head. (The main character is going insane.) The accident short circuits something in his brain.  He starts having weird dreams.  Coincidentally, people start getting killed off and they are the people you have talked to the most. The three endings are Kill Everyone and end up alone, Insane Asylum (2 versions) where you are kept alone, or Get Cured and you return to your best surviving  friend.

The big hint to get the good ending: (Select the text to read)

Select from here: Don’t kill anything in the mini-game. Don’t let your insanity get too high. : to here.

Thanks for reading.

If you want to play the game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=5150

Just a note, this is my first LD/Game/Postmortem. Thought you would want to know.
Here is a link to the entry
When I decided to enter this LD I knew it was impossible. I cant make a game in two months much less two days! But since it was a challenge and a lot of people were doing it, that motivated me into trying. Even if the result was a cheap, I wanted to participate anyway.

What Went Right

1. The Idea
   I decided to go for the simplest, most exploitable but also fun concept that fitted the theme(barely, but what can you do about that?)
2. The Tools
   About the tools, there werent many tools. The game was written in C#, using OpenTK for pretty much everything. The graphics were done in some icon drawing program, the audio was done in Sfxr. And the readme file, which absolutely nobody has read, was done in notepad.
3. The Graphic Assets
   The player, the zombie and the bullet sprites were done in about three minutes. That helped a lot later in testing. The city tileset however, took a little longer, but also went pretty fast, mind you its mostly copypasta. The icons, for zombie and brain counter, took a little longer. Since they were larger than the rest and a little more detailed. But that also went pretty quick and the result was fairly good.
4. The Graphics “Engine”
   I used OpenTK, and so OpenGL. The first thing I realized about making the graphics engine is that, I dont have time to make a graphics engine. So, pretty much everything in the game is rendered used the good old immediate mode. Which I love, by the way. For the tilesets and sprites, since they were divided into a grid, I used a single method to render a individual tile from a texture. There was no need for scaling or rotation, pretty much everything was shifted and drawn. For the font, which was just the numbers, there was another method to convert integers into graphics. Pretty simple too.
5. The Zombies
   I admit, at first they werent “going right”. Their “AI” was pretty much forcing then into running straight into the player, and so they all got in the same spot at once. Not very nice. But then I added a little randomness, instead of running straight into the player the zombies run straight to a random point around the player. And in case the player isnt near them, they go after a random point around themselves. I am actually amazed it works so well.

What did NOT went right

1. The Audio Assets
   If there is one thing I learned about sound effects last year is that no matter how cool they sound when played once, when you start playing them 100 times per minute they sound completely different. And because of that I had to keep hitting sfxr export button like crazy. Clearly, I had not time to begin thinking in music. I have no music talent, so there is no way that would have happened. They ended sounding good in the end, or rather “fitting”, because the game looked pretty pixely and the sound effects sounded right for it.
2. The Audio “Engine”
   Ok, I’ll be fair. I never put audio in a single program in my whole life, not even sketches of games. So I had absolutely no idea how to do it. I was even considering not putting it at all. But then I saw that OpenTK also wraps OpenAL, then all I had to do was some shameless copypasta from the audio loading example, about twenty lines, mind you. In the end I got the audio working. I also learned that audio is a lot more problematic than textures. I didnt need any texture class but for the audio, I needed it.
3. The Collision Boxes
   There are none. The collisions are hardcoded, as pretty much everything else is. The main problem with the collision is that the bullets were passing right through the zombies. That was not good. Also, most of the time zombies would stand right before the player and do no damage at all, this still happens when there is only one zombie, but I’m talking about 20 zombies right in your face not chewing your brains off. Thats just wrong. The first fix I could manage was randomize the bullet direction. Then I realized I couldnt do that, because they would go way off the aim, since I was using integers for positions. The solution for bullets was then just placing the start point around the player and not the player center, that would make it easier to hit zombies that were just a pixel off your aim. The city collision is pretty simple, because the whole city is a single boolean array, I just had to divide the position of everything to know whether there was a building there or not.
4. The City
   The whole city, every one of them, is just an abstract grid of buildings that look like a bomberman level in more ways than one. To give some variation I added a random generation factor, that nobody has ever noticed. Turns out the random generation isnt very random, but it works anyway. The city itself is a boolean array, so to make the city graphics I actually have to check each of the four corners of everything and decided in a if-else hell which tile to render. The good thing about this is that I didnt need to design any levels, the bad part? I needed to code a thing that makes levels. And this was the single thing that took MOST of the development time(no joke).
5. The Difficult
   So, you are a blue guy with a gun that shoots red bullets in a violet city filled with green zombies. All you got to do is kill them, how hard could that possibly be? Very hard, apparently. The game only has 10 levels with hardcoded difficult parameters. But nobody seems to beat all of them. Level 6 is the average or so it seems. I also can get to the level 10, but not past it. The bonus level, after the level 10, is there. I know it because I cheated tested the game. In case you are asking yourself “How can I make my zombie game so difficult like yours?” here are a few tips: Make more zombies, make your gun weaker, make the zombies regenerate faster(yes, they do regenerate!), make they bite stronger, make the player brains regenerate slower. There you have it.

The Best Part: I made a game.
The Worst Part:  Not many people played it…
The Also Best Part: THE ONES WHO PLAYED ENJOYED IT! YEAHHHHHH!/strong

Tags: postmortem

We are happy to announce that our little LD 22 game – Alone in the Crane – was published to Android Market and App Store!
So now you can try:
– Android version
– iOS version (for iPhone, iPod and iPad)
– Windows version
– Mac version
and Online version

And here we have some iTunes promocodes for iOS version for you:
KHR9P4PX3RFY
K9MWRLLMXKRH
LTKJM46T3E4X
XXH3A3YJAXLT
KPXWAYNLPMTP
NA4XKYLH376T
FFMWKPM6LJTN
KK96AHAPXW9A
3ETLFW37RJRE
3PPF7HX9YFXA
F4NTMMEPLXXP
FR7T4E49J44M
XLY9F766ARTK
J7TAPMYNT6NT
3KAR3TPJFNN7
EAWF6KN9YA3A
XN3M6JA7JNWF
APMP79EL9XWM
YKKMHPT7XYTF
ATHM7F7AMHF6
NL364AH6MPAY
JLLKLYNXWHMT
L7W7N9LKXA3R
EXKATMLPFLER
NN4K6MTL3YY7

Have fun!

Tags: android, demo, final, game, iOS, LD22, promocodes, unity, unity3d

It’s been a while since the coding portion of the compo, but I think that this will give me a better perspective on the overall picture from the weekend, rather than focusing on the details of it.

My game is“Alone In Space”

Last time (LD21) I did an iOS game. In the process, I spent a lot of time on just the boilerplate to get it working, and then the final product was only playable by people who had the iOS SDK. or a week later by only people with iOS devices.

The timelapse for this one covers the overall flow of creation, as well as the order that I made things.
Alone In Space — Timelapse

What went right

This time around, I decided to focus on game physics/feel before entirely fleshing things out. I think this worked out well for me, because it meant that I would end up testing the physics every time I tried out a new feature I had added; giving me time to hone it a bit more, making it more fun and playable.

After doing a mini compo with some friends; creating a clone of “Asteroids”, I realized a few important things, which I believe I got right this time around. First of all, I got ship physics that “feel” good. The ship has a nice bounce and pep to it that makes it more fun to play. Secondly,

The design of the ship was originally going to be more like this: But due to limitations, it ended up the way you see it. It was only then that I realized that with a very little bit of tweaking, it would look like a kitty. So I went with that. Blue Cat Ship!

This was my first time using an image file as a “map”. Once I got the first one in, it was trivial (sort-of — see below) to add more levels, just by drawing them up in a paint program. It made it very easy to add location-based features to the levels. A+++ WILL DO AGAIN!

I originally wasn’t going to display the map on the board, but after having it up for debugging, and my wife mentioning that it would make it more fun, I left it on there, just tweaking the display a little, to be more “finished” and less “debuggy” ;

I really like the way my “lightning” effect looks. The quick solution on how to accomplish it was spot-on, but my effort was clumsy. (see below)

What went wrong

I wish I had more time for level creation, or at least didn’t have to futz with multiple paint tools to figure out one which would work. I just assumed that Pixelmator would work fine for me, but it was too cumbersome to use for this project. I fell back on Grafx2, which I’d never used before, after Deluxe Paint failed me. Now, i’ve set up Deluxe Paint 3 for MS-DOS in a Boxer/DOs Box, so that’s ready to go for next time.

3 levels i think gives you a good idea about how it works, but isn’t really a “complete” game… whatever that means 😉

As always, I could have used more time for balance. I knew that I wanted to have 3 gauges; red, green, and blue… I’m sure I could have worked out some other concept other than “food” and the way it affects the other two is… weird. I admit, that wasn’t thought out very well.

The Processing IDE is good, but once you get a lot of tags, it gets in your way more than it helps. I think I should have put similar classes all in one .pde file each, rather than one .pde file per class. The software engineer in me wants to have them separate, but the HCI designer in me wants them joined. heh.

Lightning. I spent a stupid amount of time to get the lightning working. I think this was mostly stubbornness on my part. I knew a way to make it work, but I just kept on having misstep after misstep… and after a while, I had devoted so much time to it, I HAD TO finish something just so that the time wasn’t wasted. I ended up coming up with an implementation that I think looks pretty cool.

Summary

In all, I think I did pretty well this time, considering time restrictions (helping care for a 2 year old, other family stuff). I’m happy with the accomplishment, and happy with the game as it is.

Tags: LD #22, LD22, postmortem

“post compo” build here, added an epilogue section.