After an industrious day I have a feeling that tomorrow will be a really close call.
I got totally stuck between hacking it together and using at at least a little architecture to not lose my mind later on. Half a day wasted on refactoring @_@.
The graphics are supposed to be placeholders, but I have a feeling that I won’t have enough time to improve them 😉
If anyone’s interested, I recorded a timelapse of making my Compo entry Grokh’s Arena (http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=83463).
In total I spent about 30 hours making this game, 27 of which were recorded (I forgot to start the recording yesterday morning).
It’s outright scary to see that I spent almost all time programming instead of working on assets and even scarier to consider how much time I wasted moving code around for refactoring purposes. I guess I should look for a more efficient approach to making games. Or maybe a more efficient language than C++ 😉
I was thinking about writing a postmortem too, but I doubt anyone would be interested.
Tags: timelapse
Since this was my fist Ludum Dare I didn’t have ambitions to make anything unique from the other devs so I didn’t browse the website at all. That was a wise choice as all the quick progress by the other participants would certainly have demotivated me.
Like for many others, the first thing that came to my mind was making a game with a shape-shifting main character. The original idea was to be trapped in an arena to fight waves of monsters while some orc overlord watches and gives snarky comments about how you are doing. As a final surprise there was supposed to be a gigantic kraken randomly crashing on the arena, squishing the overlord and providing a boss fight.
Well, it didn’t turn out as grand as I had hoped for. Time constraints made me abandon the idea of the final boss and I also had to let go of the commenting orc, although you can see his placeholder graphics in the top left corner.
In the end what remained was the core idea: An arena-style fighting game with a shapeshifting hero that had to defeat waves of monsters. Everything got very hurried in the end so I didn’t even have time to color the characters properly and had to go with a minimalist approach.
One of the most important pieces of advice for me was to be prepared. I spent some time getting used to the tools I wanted to use and I would have failed miserably if I hadn’t.
I had never used a game lib before and my choice fell on cocos2d-x since I liked the multi-platform compatibility and it has C++ bindings which I feel comfortable with.
I made a jump and run prototype before LD to try out how things work in cocos2d-x. I found some shortcomings that I could work around in advance. I had a working pipeline for the graphics that consisted of creating a spritesheet with TexturePacker and using a code generator I had written in python that creats C++ code which allows to load the images into cocos2d-x classes. Very convenient, saved a lot of time.
Graphically I feel most comfortable with Aseprite and decided to go with a very low resolution of 160×100 since art is not my strong suit.
When time started running out, sfxr helped me out a lot and allowed me to add simple sound effects in a very short time. Initially thought as placeholders, they remained in the final game.
About the music, I like to use Reaper and the free Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra VST plugin which allows me to write symphonic soundtracks on a midi keyboard. I like the outcome but I have to agree with some of the critics that it clashes too much with the retro visuals.
All in all I second the idea that drinking a lot of water, sleeping sufficiently and not binging too much on sweets kept everything together, especially since I rarely ever had as much stress as I had in these 48 hours.
For all the good things, there were a lot of issues that didn’t go over that nicely.
First, a beginner’s mistake: I didn’t stock up on food before, so I actually had to go grocery shopping in the middle of the compo. Super annoying.
Then of course, time management. While I think I made the most of the allotted time, working 30 hours of the given 48, it still wasn’t enough so I had to cut some corners, and it shows. No colours on the sprites, no awesome final boss, no details on the arena. Worst of all though, no victory screen. The game just quits on you after 10 rounds. Luckily the difficulty is just high enough so that only one player reached the end so far.
One very important thing I learned in this compo is not to worry if your code isn’t nice. I made a timelapse of making Grokh’s Arena and it becomes clear that I spent most of my time in Visual Studio.
That by itself may not have been so bad, had I not lost about 3 hours on the first day when I felt the need to refactor my whole code. Bad idea. I guess it’s not easy to maintain a balance between hacking it together and keeping it clean enough not to invite stupid bugs, but I certainly spent too much time worrying about good code architecture.
Another thing that I did too late was adding debug visuals. I had some nasty collision bugs that I only found out much too late when I added hitbox visualisation.
Then there are shortcomings to the tools that I used. Cocos2d-x for instance only allows wav audio in Windows projects. Really? Uncompressed wav in 2016? Maybe there is a way around that but I haven’t found it so far. Another thing is that it forces me to ship a lot of dlls that are not really used, like libmpg123.dll or websockets.dll. I may try to statically compile the libs into later games so that I would only include the code that I need, but I may run into licence trouble there. All these libs felt much too big for a little retro style game (We’re talking about 16MB of dlls against 11kB of graphics assets).
So yeah, I learned a lot, I am eager for next time and I will be prepared even better. For this game though, I am planning on doing a post-LD version with improved graphics and maybe I can get the boss fight in at the end like I planned.
Tags: ld35 Postmortem
Wubba lubba dub dub!
Taking part in my second LD after my family was nice enough to organize a trip to friends so I can have the house to myself.
Switching from Cocos2D/C++ to GameMaker Studio, hopefully spending less time coding and more time creating.
Good luck to everyone!
So One Room it is eh?
I threw some ideas out the window and returned to my initial one which is not too creative but I felt most at home with it. It’s Escape Room meets Mega Man where you have to fight different bosses to get their abilities and the main hub of the game is a single room that gets transformed to accommodate each of the Boss’s traits. You can only escape after you defeated all the bosses.
This seems pretty ambitious, and I’m going for the Compo, so wish me luck.
Alright, so I’m 3.5 hrs into the game and have some initial game mechanics in place.
Controller support was much easier than I thought (love ya, Game Maker Studio) and it plays much better than with keyboard input.
I hope I will be able to replace the placeholder graphics with something better, but progress is slower than I had anticipated, so it might be a tight race.
In case anyone is wondering, that weapon is a golf club.
17.5 hrs of work into LD37 I have my second monster in the game (on manual control)
Got confused with Game Maker’s coordinate systems when switching between walls. Still not perfect but good enough for now.
Next up: AI and attacks.
Excuse the crap all over the gif, that’s my screengrabber messing up the recording.
I made a list of things to do in order to get what I originally intended (rather than two disjointed monsters which don’t really explain the theme), and it looks like I’m going to switch to the Jam. Hopefully I can use the extra time to add a third monster, a final boss and some voice work.
Still trying to stay within the compo rules though.
So here is the main hub of the game. From here you start your adventure.
After deciding to switch from Compo to Jam, I hope I can squeeze another fight into this game and not run out of time.
Third monster scripted on manual. AI still missing.
Alright, so the hub works and I have my third boss on AI:
The game is almost complete.
Some crucial parts are still missing though:
– Music
– Sfx
– Start and Ending Screen
– Some major tuning
I’ll take my remaining 10 hours and try to squeeze as much as I can out of this.
Looking good!
Henry Snackleworth’s Weird Day
Phew, it’s been quite a ride. I can’t imagine why I had the idea to get all of this into the compo, I should really learn to set more realistic goals.
At times I wasn’t so sure that I would be able to make it even in the jam but here we are 
Play it here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-37/?action=preview&uid=83463
Time Lapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8wgT_gukds
I finally managed to fix some issues in my Jam entry Henry Snackleworth’s Weird Day
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-37/?action=preview&uid=83463
v1.1 Release Notes:
– fixed a lot of hitbox issues (most players had trouble with those)
– fixed fridge jump path so the player is not hit immediately when it jumps
– extended player range a little
– some HP balancing
– fixed attacks sometimes not being triggered correctly (especially the painting’s acid attack)
– moved cursor away from objects in the bedroom so a level is not immediately triggered after losing a fight
The fixes are most important for the boss shown above, but the other two bosses still benefit from the changes.
When brainstorming my LD37 entry, I had scrapped two ideas that I’d felt were beyond my skills design-wise.
So far, I haven’t found any of these actually executed by other people, but I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody came up with the same idea and made a neat game out of it. Naturally I am very interested in playing someone else’s attempt of what could have been my game.
So, the first game I am looking for is…
A puzzle game with floor plan aesthetics, something like this image. Maybe built around the idea of rearranging furniture.
The second may be a little weird, so I wouldn’t bet on someone doing exactly this, but maybe someone did something remotely similar:
A Sim/Action game where you play an anthropomorphic house that catches and eats people who are then having a party in its living room.
Any help finding something along these lines would be greatly appreciated.
For anyone interested, this is what I made instead.
Hey all.
Being a sucker for rhythm games, I wondered if there were any good entries from that genre.
I found The Library (very good!) and Rhythm Rink
Are there more anyone would recommend?
So with this, another exciting Ludum Dare comes to a close. I’m almost done playing all the games of people who commented on mine, so I’m making one last post before LD37 wraps up for me.
It was great participating again this time, although I missed the Compo deadline. With all the stuff I learned, I’m really looking forward to next LD.
Thanks a lot to PoV for organizing everything even if the plan to switch sites didn’t work out in the end. Good luck for getting everything off the ground next time.
Thanks to all the Tubers and Twitchers who made the effort to play and review so many games, especially to mirta000 who was kind enough to play my entry.
And of course thanks to all participants. The bar has been set very high again this time around.
For anyone still wanting to play Henry Snackleworth’s Weird Day, go right ahead
I’m in for LD38!
After mismanagement forced me into the Jam for LD 37, I will definitely try to go for the Compo again this time.
I might also try my hand at MiniLD73 as a warm-up. I always wanted to make a rhythm game and I always got frustrated when I had to throw together some lackluster music at the very end of LD when my brain had turned to mush. So, yeah, perfect opportunity to test different music making tools!
Alright, it seems like making a round little planet game was a little too obvious, but I’ll stick to that idea anyway.
I want it to be an exploration based game with a day and night cycle of actual celestial bodies moving around the planet. You have to find items to explore further. Let’s see how far I can take this concept. I hope it’s not too ambitious for 48 hours.
Alright, off to grab some food.
The first Ludum Dare where I didn’t plan out everything in detail but just rolled with it. Feels good!
Graphics are pretty much placeholders and most game mechanics are still missing. I want this to be about exploration, so let’s see what I’ll come up with.
I have been using ScreenToGif during my past two LDs but it’s causing crappy artifacts in the final gifs.
What tools do you guys use?
Making progress. Now adding a texture to the night proves to cause much more of a headache than I anticipated.
