Boo for previous themes and things close to them.

Cellusious introduced me to Harmony, and it’s now in my toolbox, too.

I had an inspired LD poem right before bed last night, which I tweeted.

And I had this in response when I awoke.

So I changed my Afterlife vote.

Also, I reserve the right to use Pygame for sound. I’m about to start learning Pygame on live stream, if anyone wants to check me out.

Curry meatballs and lettuce-less salad!

Tags: foodphoto

Well, I was prepared for a crazy weekend and didn’t even have to worry about going to work on Monday because it’s a holiday. Then… the game kinda wrote itself. A bug showed me the way to greater fun and my game was done in less than 12 hours.

Now I just need to figure out how to get pyinstaller working with a virtualenv… that or just buck up and install pyglet in the default python directory. >_> It’s not like I really need a virtual environment. Any tips?

But now? Now is bed time. I shall listen to more of my Mistborn book while I lay out my futon for sweet, sweet sleep.

Tags: pyglet, python

Looks a lot like yesterday’s ludus dinner. xD

Tags: foodphoto

Frustration in my title? Why yes. I got my game done in less than 12 hours on Saturday and then proceeded to spend all day yesterday completely unable to get it to compile into .exe format.

Expectations

This was my second Ludum Dare. I went into LD25 in December with no ability to do graphics or sound and came up with a text-interface simulation game with which I was very, very happy. I went into LD26 confident that I could succeed, as I had done so before with no clue what I was really getting into, and with the ability to make graphics a thing that would happen. I also went in feeling like having the ability to do graphics wasn’t necessarily a good thing — I’d come up with something so unique last time because I’d had few options. Could I pull that off twice, or would having graphics at my disposal result in an inferior game?

Dat Theme

Minimalism?!

It didn’t seem like a bad theme… my objection to it and the reason I voted it down every time I saw it was because it was too close to a previous theme, Minimalist. I hadn’t at all thought about what I might do if this theme was chosen, and so I started out LD26 making my Twitch viewers watch me read up on Minimalism on Wikipedia. I came up with several ideas and discarded them all because they either weren’t unique enough or didn’t look like they’d be fun.

But the real issue I was having, the reason I had trouble with coming up with an idea, was that I know nothing of Minimalism. I didn’t have enough information floating around in my head to make it work. LD25’s theme, You are the Villain, jived with me quite well. I consider myself to be something of a connoisseur of fine villains; a good villain can make a story and a bad one can break it. Combined with my studies in Sociology and remembering a board game a friend of mine had told me about ages before, I quickly had an idea. This time, though, I struggled.

One idea that stuck in my head was that of a minimalist potato in the form of a simple brown oval with human eyes on it instead of a potato’s normal eyes (English-centric, I know; please forgive me, non-native speakers). Whatever game I did, that was something I wanted in it. Eventually I decided to make that potato the focal point of the game. I wanted the eyes to be interactive with the player somehow, and in the end I thought of, “Stick a needle in my eye,” from some children’s rhyme and this game was born.

It wrote itself for the most part, and with minimalism as the theme I didn’t have to spend too much time on art. I’d been all prepared to use my decent drawing skills that I only realized I had last weekend, but it wasn’t really necessary. The coding was fairly straightforward and went well. The game even told me how to make itself more fun… a bug turned out to make the game far more fun than I’d originally planned, so I went into the code and started shaping it around that idea on purpose.

In the end, I found myself with something playable and mildly amusing, but not spectacular. Indeed, I am happier with my game from LD25. I’m not unhappy with this game, though, and I’m pleased with the fact that making the game took me less than 12 hours, including spending two hours agonizing over what to make.

Time Zones and Twitch

I am in Japan. That means that LD26 started at 11:00 AM on Saturday for me. This has its advantages and disadvantages. The most notable disadvantage, I think, is that the competition carries on into Monday. This time, my work was not impacted as Monday is a federal holiday in Japan, but I learned in LD25 that I really should request LD Monday off. As advantages go, starting in the middle of the day means that I get two full sleep periods at normal times with a chance on that final morning to do any last minute stuff with a fresh mind. Even though that’s an advantage I haven’t needed for LD26, it’s still there and will continue to be as long as I have this job.

I streamed Saturday on Twitch, from right after I got dressed (people got to watch me make breakfast and stuff — testing the stream and getting pysched, wot wot) until I was done with programming for the day. This was fine, though when LD26 started, I found myself feeling pressured to make my whole thinking process available to the people watching my stream. I feel like that was stress I didn’t need with an unfamiliar topic as the theme and I am not sure if I will stream the start of LD again next time.

Building .EXE Files

I got Pyinstaller working for LD25. It will not work this time. I spent all day Sunday trying to get it to work, on Mac OSX and Windows 7, with no success. It will not import pyglet into the game no matter what I do on either OS. Py2app fared no better and didn’t tell me why it was having trouble, so I abandoned it pretty quickly.

This has been extremely frustrating, not the least because I know the game will be played less if it can only be played from source. At this point, however, it would be a waste of energy to keep caring.

Takeaways

• Expect the unexpected.
• Take your time figuring out the theme if you’re unfamiliar with it.
• Consider not thinking about the theme while livestreaming.
• Check your .exe builder programs with the libraries you intend to use during warmup weekend instead of assuming it will work smoothly.

Tags: final, postmortem, screenshot

Voted Temperature down because hot and cold are contrasting and so could theoretically be included in Contrast, which I think is a far better theme, in general.

Tags: themes, voting

Clearly I liked the themes in round 1 better than round 2.

Tags: themes, voting

Tags: theme, themes, voting

Tags: theme, themes, voting

I said before that I am in and will only have 36 hours and am using JavaScript/HTML5 with enchant.js, plus a few content creation tools.

These things are all still true, but I would like to add the caveat that since I live in the future and can’t just call in sick on Monday (and the dates were announced too late for me to request it off), I reserve the right to turn in my game for the jam instead of the compo if I decide that it’s not done enough by the time the compo ends.

That is all. Carry on.

I’m not one of those people who chooses one theme to rule them all and downvotes the rest. I don’t think doing so is a bad idea necessarily, but that’s not my way. I have cast my votes, though, and here they are. Now I go to eat, drink, and be merry, hoping that tomorrow will not leave me wishing I’d been a bit lighter on the drinking.

My game is a working thing with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It needs balance and a score display and a way to reset when you lose. It will have at least two of these things by submission time. :/ But right now? Right now, I am following my coding brain into that great purple abyss we call dreaming.

P.S. — Oh, #!@&… What am I naming it?!

Tags: progress, screenshot

I’ve been fiddling around with HTML5 and JavaScript with enchant.js as a way of making games since LD26. I have two other HTML5/JS projects in the works, one of which was created purely for learning what I am doing and the other of which I intend to be a free-to-play educational game for learners of English as a second language. I spent most of last week reading into the gritty inner details of JavaScript and learning about design patterns in preparation for this week, and in some ways I leaned pretty heavily on those other two projects to figure out what I was doing, at least to get things started.

In spite of looking at my previous code to remember how the library worked, I feel like I started from a more knowledgable standpoint this time than I did either of the other two times I participated. The first time, I couldn’t do graphics and had to make my simulation game using nothing but text; the second time, I was using the pyglet library for the first time and then had trouble compiling with it.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how the game turned out, even though I didn’t get to implement everything I wanted. And it’s got a bit of a bug. I feel like I hit on a good game idea, like I did during LD25, but had decent graphics and entertaining sound, like I did for LD26. ^_^

What Went Right

My only screenshot from when my game was going to be something very different.

• Not streaming while coming up with ideas. The pressure to share my random game-planning thoughts made LD26 harder, and I’m glad I axed it this time.
• My first idea was going to be a boring game, so I canned it and started over a few hours in.
• Studying JavaScript’s innermost workings and design patterns last week paid off, though I still managed to make messy code.
• I planned my time well enough that I had my game in a good-enough state before bed on Sunday night — living in UTC +9 and working on Monday made that pretty important. I only had enough time this morning to throw in a couple of things that I didn’t get around to before because I knew I could implement them quickly. Namely, a way to restart the game from the game over screen and an on-screen display of how long the player had survived.
• Placeholder graphics FTW! For a long time, the gauges were ugly fuschia boxes that just had number values in them and the warning triangles with exclamation points were just plain triangles. At that point, it was hard to tell what was going on if you weren’t me (and most of my playtesters were not). When I got the real graphics into place the game instantly became easier to understand and the players instantly started having more fun.
• On a related note: I’m rather happy with my user interface. I feel like all the important details are pretty well conveyed, though if I’d had more time I would have added a flashing red background to the warning triangles. My few playtesters who played both early and late versions really appreciated the changes from placeholder to actual graphics.

What Went Wrong

Placeholder graphics! It’s so much prettier now. ^_^

• Messy, messy code. I used the design patterns that I knew, but I wasn’t careful enough about encapsulation and by the end all the little things I’d been lazy with were coming back to bite me in the backside.
• I have a game which is a survive-as-long-as-you-can game, but which has a bug such that if you survive long enough, you can’t lose. I know what’s happening to cause it, but since I only learned that the methods I’m using to pull it off exist just yesterday, I don’t know how to fix the problem.
• Browser compatibility issues. Even with them, I think I am still reaching more people than with my Mac OSX Python games, but… still. I’m working on ironing out bugs relating to playing in different browsers.

Conclusion

Not bad. Not bad at all.

I’m going to make my next LD game in HTML5 as well, I think, so learning more about enchant.js is to be my goal. It’s an open source project, so I’m planning to contribute — the team creating it is Japanese, and so all the documentation is in Japanese and only half of that has been translated. It’s good that I can read Japanese, but if I help them translate the documentation then I will learn more about the library and it won’t take me as long to look things up next time. 😀 Laziness FTW.

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

N0_Named_Guy has been doing live reviews of games for people on his Twitch channel. He did one of mine, which was awesome. If you want to see it, it’s right here. My game wasn’t as understandable as I thought. Not terrible, but could definitely have been better.

The final look of the game. Can you tell which panel affects which dials? Most people can’t.

One of the things I said I thought I did well in my postmortem was the user interface. After that, though N0_Named_Guy did a video review for me and then feedback started coming in on the entry page itself on top of that and told me I was wrong. It wasn’t terrible, and it was certainly better by the end than by the beginning, but it wasn’t good enough.

The real problem, I think, was that I didn’t get enough testers. I should have pulled in new testers when I thought I was done, people who hadn’t seen the game at all yet. Without realizing it, I had the same people play the new version, and their praise about how much better it was lulled me into a false sense of security. >_> Oops.

The original placeholder graphics.

If you want to try it for yourself, go here. I recommend you actually read the wall of text at the beginning, even though that, too, was apparently a bad idea. I read other people’s walls of text, so it didn’t occur to me that most people wouldn’t.

I’m really happy with the idea and am working to flesh the game out. Once my code refactoring is complete and the bug is fixed, I’m going to start implementing the feedback I’ve been getting. Aside from improved understandability, balancing the game better, and adding more levels, I want to make it playable on touch devices.

Tags: postmortem

I have no clue what tools I’ll be using. I had planned to use warmup weekend to dive into Unity, but that didn’t happen. So… :S

I’ve been doing a terrible job of keeping up with my voting posts this time around. Here are my votes for 2, 3, and 4. Yes, I am proud of upvoting downvote me.

I decided to come down hard on round five, refusing to give anything a neutral vote. I gave a few the +1, but I really want You Only Get One to win.