My first Ludum Dare, time for a post!

Framework: Ren’Py

Music: Not quite sure yet

Visual: Gimp/Paintnet + photocamera

Right. Seeing as how I live in a different timezone and I cannot get Joror to wake up before 9 this morning, we start on this game a wee bit later then normal. I wake up to see an e-mail in my inbox, the theme!

The theme is minimalistic. Right. Of all the beautiful choices it had to be that one. Initially I am dissapointed, but when I start packing my stuff (I am staying over at Joror’s place so we can motivate each other)my mind starts  going over the options. Minimalistic in what? Graphics? That’s obvious, and any Ludum Dare game will most likely have minimalistic graphics, simply due to time constraints. But what about audio, gameply and story? Slowly an idea starts to form about a minimalistic game that’s still interesting. It is said that all growth lies outside your comfort zone, so I guess I’m glad a theme is chosen that’s not my favourite.

My planning for the time I have:

• 6 hours design
• 6 hours implementation (yes, that’s not much. Basic stuff only!)
• Some sleep
• 12 hours content generation and polish

And with whatever time is left, I will be sure to fill in whatever gaps I need.

Let’s go!

(Also: Vangelis blasting in the background. Awesome!)

My design is coming along well. It is going to be a mystery-solving game with a very minimalistic interface and graphics, as well as a using the theme minimalism in the story. No clue if I’m going to manage to do everything I want with it , but let’s see what happens.

Onward, oh great design-muffin!

Doesn’t look like much, but I managed to get a lot of work done, and learn a lot about Ren’Py in the same time. I spent the morning doing design and coming up with a storyline and game functionality. Thanks to Joror to listening to me talk about my crazy ideas!

The basic idea it’s a horror story: a young man buries his girlfriend but sees her walking around the city. Mystery and horror unfold as he tries to find this girl that looks so much like his deceased beloved. And there’s much, much more afoot than what seems to be lurking around the surface. The main gameplay is discovering clues and progressing through the story without dying too much.

I gave myself the rest of the day to create the rest of my functionality: linking events and clues to other events so the player can progress through the different layers of mystery. Tomorrow I will get on my bike and go through the city shooting pictures as well as photographing my friend’s eyes. I’ll be using them to display characters. Wonder how that will turn out.

So far I’m pleased with my progress. I guess the real crunch comes tomorrow, when I will have to fill the framework I have built with content!

Well, day 1 is done. Decided to take some time to wind down so some sleep can be had. I honestly feel wide awake and like I can work for another 8 hours or so, but I get the feeling it’s a false wakefulness.

I’m pretty pleased with my progress, even if I didn’t reach my planned milestone. I think I wasted quite a bit of time making possible locations on the map conditional. It worked, but cost me a lot of time. Gladly I had some great help from the Ren’Py community (thanks Pytom!) which saved me a lot of time in the end!

So tomorrow it’s finishing up the automated postprocessing of events and then: content content content! I’ll be writing, taking pictures and trying to fill this thing with a story! I think it’s been good to seperate function from content, if these two would have mixed I wouldn’t have gotten anything done.

Goodnight y’all. Don’t forget to commit.

Obligatory foodshot

A healthy breakfast! Had about six hours of sleep after stopping around 3.30 AM yesterday. Took about half an hour to wind down from the activities and talk through the day with Joror about his advancement he had made that day. He had a rough time around dinner yesterday, but he adapted and overcame!

I´m doing well so far, slightly behind on schedule. I woke up with the solution though, I was making things much too difficult for myself! I am going to make a schedule to make sure I keep it, but so far I have the following activities for today:

• Finish up event postprocessing
• Writing scenes! Write write write!
• Shoot pictures of eyes
• Shoot pictures of locations
• Figure out which characters there are, anyway
• Define items
• Write the introduction
• Write the endings
• Music + SFX (kinda overlooked this. Didn’t really think this through. I might hum something ^^;)

Good luck on the second day everyone! Kick some ass and make something that’s at least playable!

Obligatory food pic. Having noms with the mighty Joror, who put up a vidja!

I spent a lot of my time running through my city and taking pictures for my backgrounds. I _love_ how the effect turned out, the art-style is reallly starting to come together now.

I have my material, I have my character-eyes. Now I just need to write my scenes and add images where necessary. Easy.

Dear god, how will I buy extra time?

My game entry can be found here!

Well, here it is. My first Ludum Dare entry. I got about 33% of the content I wanted to have in the final game. However, it is a finished story. When I looked back I was a bit surprised at  how desperate the tone is. I was aiming for Cthulhu-esque but somehow overshot and went straight into the first Die Hard. Ah well. I hope everyone likes it and doesn’t stumble over the insane amount of typos I know I must have made.

I enjoyed the Ludum Dare. I am looking forward to playing all of your creations!

Man, this was fun!

So this is in no way the proper order to do this, but I wanted to create an opening screen just because I’ll be seeing the damn thing ever time I boot the game and wanted to see something nice.

Here we go!

Just imagine that’s a real gun lying there, ‘kay?

Right, 10 seconds it is! Obvious jokes about my love-life aside, I’m pretty psyched about this theme. Joror totally called it yesterday.

So here´s the obligatory coffee and breakfast picture!

Breakfast with Joror

After breakfast it was time to choose between my concepts. Decided to work out my concepts some more and make a choice, but it turns out making a choice is really, really hard to do between two concepts I like equally. Damn it.

Choices, choices…

And right now I need to choose and choose hard.  At least with minimalism I was grasping for ideas and was happy to have one.

But right now I am choosing for the option that I am sure will be able to tell a coherent story: “Love you more”, the last ten seconds of a crime story.

While writing my code comments I just realized what I wrote. I guess it’s really telling this is a Visual Novel, huh?

What are your best code comments?

Well, I got my storyline neatly worked out. For a certain value of neatly with a value of ‘OhfuckhowamIgoingtomakethiswork?’ :).

Note the kiss kiss bang bang reference

But hey, I got a movie-reference in my design document, so I am happy.

Back to work!

I have fifteen scenes to write today. After some quick calculations I realized that I have half an hour per scene. What was I thinking?

Damn. Better get to writing.

Mental note: try not to let your Visual Novel turn into a bank-robbery simulation. Okay?

Also, doing some quick research on that gives me some awesome trivia! The bags the robbers in HEAT were carrying should’ve weighed about 80~100 pounds per bag!

Reached the end of day 1 with quite a good feeling. I managed to get all my Must-haves in for mechanics, 80% of my story content and some sound effects. Also a title screen, with a colour scheme that I really kinda dig.

Tomorrow’s going to be finishing up the story and taking pictures for backgrounds! I also hope to get my first should-have into the game, some additional mechanics. But I really need to do a proofread and my scene transitions before that. Right now there’s a lot of flashbacks and very little to make them different from the current time.

Ah, choices, choices. It’s bedtime for me now, so I’ll leave you with my title screen. G’night!

Tags: Ren'Py, Visual Novel

I am not good at writing arguments. I have, however, just filled one scene with nothing other than one big flaming row.

Thank god that’s done. Now to wrap the story up so I can go ouside and shoot photographs!

Tags: drama, Ren'Py, Visual Novel

It´s become a ritual that I bike through town like an idiot and take pictures of buildings and places that will become backgrounds. I´m very please with the almost garish, 70´s, Miami Hotline-esque colour scheme I got as a result.

But I’m nowhere near done and Joror is whipping his chair. For sound effects, he says. It’s… disconcerting.

For all of those that are still working: Keep on trucking, there’s plenty of time left! Here’s some music to keep you going:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYkhNWIdra0

My second Ludum Dare, done.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=20442

Once again, it was a huge kick to finish something and see it all come together on the second day. Very late on the second day, too. Once again, there were tons of concrete points I wanted to tackle but which I just couldn’t due to the time constraints. I believe I prioritized right, though.

More on what I experienced later, right now it’s 4 AM and I’m dead tired, proud and happy. Ludum Dare is great!

Tags: Ren'Py, succes!, Visual Novel

To the Lone Wolves and Bands of Brothers working in that final day before the Jam deadine:

Kick some ass! Give us all some really awesome games to play, I’m looking forward to see what all of you are making!

Need some motivation? Try listening to this:

http://grooveshark.com/s/Adagio+For+TRON/4waE6z?src=5

Now stop reading the blogs and get back to work!

I’m in for LD 28! Looking forward to another weekend of going into overdrive, staying up too late. Also wondering if I designed the game right, if the story makes sense and if I planned enough time for testing (respectively: yes, maaaaybe, no).

Once again I’ll be using the Ren’Py framework for my creation. I often wake up at night, screaming, bursting into wakefulness from the nightmare of the Ludum Dare community finding out that I am not, actually a programmer in any meaning of the word*.

Last time I spent all my time on content and layout and nearly none on game mechanics. This time I’m planning on switching things around: Basic story, more intricate game mechanics. I’m not going to drop the story completely (it’s the category I scored the best in. Even made the top 30 last time**. Also planning in some time to work on music and sfx.

Other than that, I have no clue what the game is going to be. I hate to do too much planning before I know the theme. Instead I’ll let the theme guide me, create about three ideas and then pick one.

The list:

• Framework: Ren’Py (based on Python. Hurrah for Python!)
• Camera: Samsung Galaxy II
• Recording: Samsung Galaxy II
• Music & SFX editing: FL 11
• Graphics: Paint.Net (I should really learn GIMP)
• Food: Proper dinner and breakfast. Really, do yourself a favour and take the time to eat a proper meal during LD.

That’s pretty much it. Let me wrap this up with a picture of an Emperor Pinguin:

That will be all. I hope everyone has fun, I know I will!

-Jod

*Slight dramatization.

** Apologies for the shameless self-promotion there. Still a little bit giddy whenever I look at that list.

Fun. Simple three-letter word. But it means different things to different people. The games I like, you hate, or vice versa. But there are games that are liked by a lot of people, and disliked by a few. Apparently, these games have some kind of broad appeal that talks to a lot of people. But why?

I’ve spent a bit of time thinking on what makes a game fun. The best Ludum Dare entries I’ve played have not been the most graphically polished (although it helps, of course), but they were the ones that were just a lot of fun to play.

One of my friends pointed me towards the blog of a Magic designer Mark Rosewater. He posted an article with ten points on making a game. Of course his column will always have a Magic-bias to it, but I think there are some interesting points to think about when creating a game. And fun is just one of the ten points, most of it is about good design. Hmmm…..

http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/mm/174

Is this the end-all to what makes a game fun? Of course not. I’m not even sure that creating a game that counts as fun for a maximum amount of people is even a good idea. But I do think that being aware of what you are making and making conscious design choices will make for a better game. Hope the link above can inspire some people to think about design and make conscious choices!

Tags: design theory, fun, LD28