So pumped to have finished my first Ludum Dare entry! (And first real finished game project period!) It was down to the wire time-wise but I was able to implement nearly all of the features I wanted. I even had enough time to make a font, some passable sprites and backgrounds, and bang out almost 7 minutes of actually decent music, the latter done in 5 hours on Saturday night – no huge technical hurdles code-wise except for a few XNA SpriteBatch quirks. Somehow I made a fully playable, fun, challenging game! Hooray! Timelapse video forthcoming.

 

Edit: I also put up the soundtrack if anyone wants to check it out!

What Went Right:

Time Management…?
I was able to plan out most of my time pretty well, so thankfully I was able to implement nearly all of the features I wanted, with just a few minor ones going undone. I spent about 5-6 hours on audio, probably roughly the same on graphics, and the rest coding, which is about what I expected (and planned) going into the weekend.

Audio
I was already pretty experienced in making this style of music (and making music in general, which I’ve been doing since 2004) so it wasn’t too horrible of a prospect to make a bunch of game tracks in a short amount of time. Having done a whole ton of album-a-days (http://crapart.spacebar.org/aad) helped on that front too – thanks Tom 7! Trying to come up with a variety of original material was probably the most creatively difficult aspect of the whole weekend but I’m really happy with how the music came out. And of course, working with bfxr was a pleasure.

What Went Wrong:

Game Balance/Playing My Own Game
I think the biggest issue with the game as it stands is the balance or difficulty – depending on how you play it, it’s probably either way too easy or way too hard. This wasn’t really obvious to me until around Sunday when I little else to do but play my own game and do lots of polish. It’s kind of funny to think that I didn’t spend enough time playing my own game in a 48-hour game dev competition, but it actually makes sense, especially considering the sort of game I was going for. I’ll try to keep this one at the forefront when I do my next Ludum Dare.

Slight Unfamiliarity with Tools
This wasn’t too much of an issue, but I had to look up a few XNA-related things to implement certain features, particularly graphics-related ones. I also struggled with GIMP a bit, which is probably understandable to anyone who has ever used it.

All in all this was an awesome experience. Can’t wait for the next challenge!

Tags: gameplay video, LD22, postmortem, timelapse

(quick game link for reference: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=7860)

Since ours was a team-based jam entry we got 3 postmortems for ya. spacemars/mroushey’s first:

Just finished up my second Ludum Dare, and my first time in the jam version of the competition. Myself and two other darer’s ( adhesion, and emarcotte ) joined forces to take on LD23′s theme: Tiny World. Pretty much all of the first day was spent coming up with ideas. After 4 hours of tossing ideas around we boiled it down to “Escape from MiniMars”.

You are a robot that finds himself on the surface of mars (well, minimars… but its the same damned thing ) and must escape. For all intents and purposes it is a mario style platformer. We loved the idea however, that there would be tons of tiny people in this tiny world that love the shit out of robots. They chase after you and jump on so they can hug you! Killing them was to be incredibly easy as youre… a goddamn giant robot. The difficulty is such that the people can never really kill you (except in maybe one or 2 areas) so its more of a way to kinda color the world and just make you chuckle a little bit whist mowing all these tiny dudes down with supercharged eye-lazers.

Now since this was a JAM entry, we had a team. Emarcotte adhesion and I all programmed it up.  (although they did most of the work, I just tweaked jump arcs and stuff like that XD ) While Adhesion rocked his chiptune magic and I was free to spend pretty much the entire weekend making art assets.

Tools: 

For the art and level design I used a combination of Photoshop, Graphics Gale (http://www.humanbalance.net/gale/us/), and Tiled ( http://www.mapeditor.org/). The game was programmed using MelonJS (http://www.melonjs.org/) (a html5 canvas game engine).

I really can’t say enough about Tiled. It’s a map editor thats incredibly easy to use and can export data in a buncha different formats, one of them being XML.

All you do is import your tileset, and start to paint. You can have multiple layers of map tiles, setup entities within the level, as well as setup your collision maps. Flash’s Flixel and MelonJS both have native support for this guy. It’s a must in my opinion.

Graphics Gale is a pretty nice freeware pixel animation app. The interface is a bit clunky, and the Layer stuff can be a bit annoying, but It works really well for animation.

Photoshop is an obvious choice, but it pretty much blows for animation. XD If Graphics Gale’s UI was better id never close it~

MelonJS is pretty easy to work with.  You can make a platformer basically out of the box. The engine is pretty high level though, I found that you have to hack in even the most basic of additional features.  I also have some pretty large complaints about html/js games and javascript in general, but that is a rant that will go on and on and on forever. :/

JAM vs COMPO :

Last LD I did the compo and I must say, it was brutal. I didn’t get to put as much time as i wanted into either programming, art or.. cough cough sound. (if you saw my last game, the music was actually playing a randomized selection of notes. ) With the jam, you get more time, and more manpower. I really do like both, but I think the jam comes out a little bit ahead in my book. I got to work on art to my heart’s content (and drawing arm’s discontent) and got what i feel to be quite a bit of stuff done. I think i will do the compo for my next LD competition, but the JAM was damned fun.

and now adhesion’s postmortem:

I’m very pleased with how this LD went overall – we made a solid game, didn’t overextend too much, and learned quite a bit about HTML5 game engine issues & melonJS. I’m super proud of what we accomplished.

what went right:
Music/sound – I was really happy with how both came out. I was so pumped to actually hear them in game; audio just makes a massive difference in the overall experience. I ended up doing the music in 2 separate chunks of time (thanks to the extra time of the jam), which felt a lot better than the one giant slog when I did the LD22 compo – that got a bit frustrating at the end. The tools I used, Ableton Live & bfxr, worked great as expected. I focused more on FM synths for the music which made it all the more awesome.

Graphics – I obviously can’t take credit, but I have to point out how much of an intense badass roushey is, and as such his art is amazing as usual.

Coding (mostly) – Despite being not all that familiar with Javascript, and despite all the horror stories I’ve heard about its awful innards, I found it quite easy to use – didn’t have any huge (core JS-related) bugs, and I was able to figure out the built-in data structures and such without too much trouble.

what went wrong:
Time management, again – was an intense rush at the end to get the final polish done, particularly the RADMARS intro screen (waaaay worth it though :D). It was also hard to be productive on saturday before a lot of the art assets were done, which is kind of a weird side effect of melonJS providing a lot of the core gameplay functionality very easily. Plus, I had to work on the Monday the jam ends and ended up miscalculating how much time I would have to work on it that day which didn’t help.

Code framework, a little – had some major memory/memory leak issues right at the end which was really frustrating to deal with. (Wish I caught that earlier, it kinda drove me insane for a while.) I managed to fix it but more familiarity with Javascript, melonJS & browser debugging tools would’ve definitely helped. Struggled with a multiple collision issue for a while too – in retrospect it was pretty obvious, hopefully I’ll wise up to this stuff as I do more game dev stuff. Otherwise I’m pretty satisfied with melonJS in general.

Whew! Overall LD was a great experience again. I’m so glad to have the opportunity to do this sort of challenge and have something awesome to show for it at the end. See you in August!

and emarcotte’s:

– Dedicated time would definitely help, coming in and out of the project is frustrating and anti productive
– flexibility of javascript makes time very productive, melon’s tool integration is also very flexible and simple.
– asset pipeline is still a mystery to me, roushey just does magic and we consume it…
– polish is 90% of the battle. the rest is easy.

Extra bonus stuffs!!:
Timelapse:

Soundtrack:

http://adhesion.mu/sic/Adhesion-MinimarsOST.zip

Tags: mars, postmortem, timelapse

For this LD, team RADMARS attempted to make a puzzle platformer where you have to die in order to progress. It was a big challenge, but I think we managed to make something pretty awesome. Check it out here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=7860

We have postmortems for 3 out of the 4 members of RADMARS for you today (and timelapse videos for two of those). Up first is roushey, who decided to write a very lot for some reason:

This Ludum Dare went surprisingly smooth. We started off Friday night cooking up a bunch of good ideas and finally settled on the concept that every time you die, you gain a new ability based on how you died. We then spent the rest of the night fleshing out all the abilities you would have, flagging them as necessary, nice to have, and eventually cutting some. After that we had a pretty solid plan to always tab back into and check where we were at. We also put TODOs for art, programming, levels, etc on the doc as well so we could quickly see what the other team members were doing without pestering them.

 

 

What went well:

First and foremost we bumped up team RADMARS to four people, by adding brendo. This helped quite a bit, as he spent basically all of his time on level design. The biggest thing we learned from Escape from Minimars is that the level design needed much more love this time around. The biggest complaint (from us, as well as the comments) was that the game felt stale by the end. I really liked the way we created and ‘painted’ the levels for DDE as well. (as opposed to minimars) Brendo designed all the levels just using colored squares for all the different elements. ( red bricks for solid ground, green for platforms etc)  This way, we had all of the levels designed and playable before we even did the art for what the environments would be like. The only real direction we had was that we wanted to have 3 areas. ( as adhesion was going to make 3 music tracks ) I wish we’d spent a bit more time thinking about it, but we settled on: forrest, caves, and ‘nature-punk’ future-ish kinda thing. It was really nice to have the levels built before I pixeled the map-tiles as I had a much better idea of what kinds of tiles to make. Minimars was the complete opposite, where I panted a buncha tiles and just had people make random shit out of those. Both work, but I like the former much better. Working with MelonJS was also pretty awesome. The creator, Olivier Biot, has been really active about updating it. We had some feature/bugfix requests after minimars pretty much all of which were fixed in the next version. So awesome! Tiled ( http://www.mapeditor.org/ ) is fucking boss. I can’t recommend it enough for working with a tiled maps. Version control! We used Git (still not quite used to it… I’ve always used SVN) and its pretty much invaluable when it comes to working in a team. Voice chat & live streaming! All weekend long we had all 4 of us in voice chat (mumble) so we could quickly ask for things and get status updates (as well as dick around and make bad jokes, and complain about… well everything really. complaining is fun) I had a stream up on twitch.tv which makes it very easy to show what I’m working on with the team. I can demo animations, brendo got to see people play testing his levels, etc. really awesome. I highly recommend it.

 

What went not so well:  The major thing that went wrong was scoping. There was a lot of detail and polish that (i think) is pretty important that we just didn’t have time to do. The biggest of which would be the main character’s sprite never changes. We wanted to have the character change for every different ability. The changes would only be minor, like a stripes, boots, a spiked hat but the fox squirrel red-panda thing had quite a few frames of animation. this makes creating overlay elements that much more of a pain in the ass. I’m gonna rant for a bit here so sorry ahead of time. Perhaps I’ve just not found the right tools, but the process for making animated pixel-art characters is not so fun. Photoshop is probably the best tool to use for pixel art (that I’ve worked with) its just got so many features, and they’re all highly tuned and polished to make it as painless as possible to actually make stuff. The biggest problem with this of course being… animation. Photoshop’s animation features are basically garbage, but that’s not what Photoshop is for so thats completely OK. The biggest problem though is exporting the animations to a sprite sheet. Doing it manually is obviously… terrible. I’ve tried using pretty much everything from scripts to Photoshop actions to try to make the process as painless as possible, but none of the solutions really fit well. I do realize that at the end of the day, its actually not *that* big of a deal, but I see it quite a bit like an IDE having re-factoring tools. If its a hassle or a pain in the ass to make changes, (at least for me) the ‘fuck it’ impulse flares up and the changes never get made. This is of course made worse by the fact that the drawing tools in most other pixel drawing apps I’ve used just feel very immature compared to PS’s ) And the more complex your animations get, the level of pain-in-the-assery rises exponentially. I used Graphics Gale for all of the particles (explosions, splashes, smoke poofs, etc) because in terms of making simple pixel-art animations, it’s really awesome. Its fast, you can go back and forth between frames easily, constant playback preview, and it can (at least reasonably well) export to sprite-sheets. The problem with Graphics gale is that the way it handles layers is really clunky. If it wasn’t for that, id be using graphics gale… pretty much all the time. Selection, copy & paste, are also really clunky and can be a bit weird. I’ve tried to use gimp, and Paint.NET as well. They’re pretty good Photoshop alternatives, but if  you’re already using Photoshop they really don’t bring much to the table as far as animation is concerned. /rant  Phew. sorry about that *_*; Process:  Map Tiles & Parallax backgrounds: All pixeled in photoshop, grid, guides, selection, cloning, painting tools all make my life so much easier. Maps: Painted (tiled) using Tiled map editor. Characters: sketched and painted in photoshop, pixeled in photoshop, exported to sprite sheet using a photoshop action.

Particles, explosions, and effects: Directly pixeled in graphics-gale, no real sketches or anything like that.

‘At the end of the day’ Now that I’ve had some time to sit back and rest, I’m really proud of this game. There’s a lot of stuff I would like to go back and change like the shameless pallet swap of the background in the third area, and the additional states of the avatar. I’ll get to em uh… eventually! for now, Go Team RADMARS! (Also, all of the other LD submissions keep getting better and better each time.) Can’t wait to do LD25 And his timelapse:

Up next is emarcotte, for whom brevity is the soul of wit:

“Yeahh same as usual I need more fcking time. Knowing the tools helps. Having a person per area helps.”

Indeed. Last is me, who falls somewhere inbetween:

What went right

-Well-defined roles: It was great to have brendo as the designated level designer, which freed the rest of us to work on our respective tasks. On the coding side, even though there were two of us we were able to switch off on what we were working on so there weren’t any weird merge issues that might take up time.

-Time to polish code: I was lucky to have all of Monday free to pretty much only do playtesting and fix small bugs, which was great. I also had some time to do some subtle sound tweaks (like the running sound) which I think really helped as well.

-melonJS: a very good game framework which has even had some specific bugfixes related to issues we found when doing our previous game. Not quite perfect yet, but the few issues I had this time were not showstoppers by any means and I was able to work around them relatively easily.

What went wrong

-Feature creep: Our concept, awesome as it is, lent itself to a sprawling amount of features. A good number of deaths->abilities got cut as we realized we would have no time to actually implement them. Cutting these was difficult but we decided we’d rather have something polished and more focused rather than something very ambitious that fell short.

-Time management (to an extent, again): I felt like I ended up spending more time on music & sound as I did last time, but came out with about the same amount/level of quality. Majorly subjective though. Also, again it was a bit hard to get going on Friday/early Saturday but once we got the core features set in stone and some art assets done my coding gained a lot of steam.

Overall this Ludum Dare was hugely satisfying, and we made an even better game than last time. Look out LD25!

And my timelapse:

And of course the soundtrack, which I’m very proud of: http://adhesion.mu/sic/Adhesion-DDEOST.zip Whew! Hope you liked all this stuff – we’d love more feedback, so drop by our game page and leave a comment!

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, timelapse

4

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 9th, 2012 at 9:27 pm and is filed under LD #24. 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.

https://adhesion.bandcamp.com/album/radjams-vol-1

Hey all! I've been doing music (and sound design, and programming) for team RADMARS since April 2012, when we started doing Ludum Dare, and we've done almost every LD jam since. As part of our 5 year anniversary of participating in Ludum Dare I decided to remaster & release a compilation of the music from all of our games - featuring tracks from smash hit megajams such as Death Death Evolution (3rd place overall, 9th place audio LD24), Micromancer (8th place overall, 15th place audio LD33) and Super Kaiju Dunk City (4th place overall, 2nd place audio LD38)!

Check it out on bandcamp here: https://adhesion.bandcamp.com/album/radjams-vol-1 it's pay-what-you-want but feel free to put in 0 for the free download, I won't tell :wink: Thanks for checking us out! :skull: :dragon_face: :muscle: