So I see the stream of “I’m in” posts increasing as the date approaches. I guess since I already requested Jam-Monday off from work, I should declare. I’ll be in the compo. Unless I’m not, then I’ll be in the jam. Unless I’m not. Failure most definitely is an option, for if I don’t make the deadline, I still come out better than I started. Disappointment is temporary, improvements to skill and design are permanent.

I’ll be using XNA (shush, I’ll port to HTML so you don’t have to install it) plus a library of helper code (sprite handling, collision handling, tile map rendering, etc) I’ve been working on for a while now. I’ll declare the library later, as I’m actively developing it as part of another game. Offline tools include GIMP, Tiled, autotracker-bu, bfxr, OpenMPT, and whatever else I find I need as I go.

I’m running through the Slaughter and I notice a pattern:

• If Wishes Were Horses
• Past Prologue
• Move Along Home
• The Storyteller
• In The Hands Of The Prophets
• A Man Alone
• Emissary
• Captive Pursuit

Maybe I’m just showing my own biases by noticing a pattern here….

(Edited to add another that just showed up)
(and another)
(and another)
(some more)

Potato’s results are in:

Whether you voted for potato, voted against potato, or voted meh potato, potato has the most voter turnout for any theme in Ludum Dare history* Long live/Death to/I don’t care about Potato!

* well, technically I only looked back to LD 21, but back in those days we’re only talking a few hundred participants rather than thousands.

I declared my in-ness a couple weeks ago, but I still need to declare my library usage:

• Compilers: Visual C# Express, JSIL
• Libraries: XNA, SpiridiEngine
• Editors: Visual C# Express, Notepad++
• Debuggers: Visual C# Express, Chrome developer tools
• Graphics: GIMP
• Map/Level editing: Tiled
• Music: autotracker-bu, OpenMPT, and possibly Abundant Music
  
• Sound Effects: bfxr, possibly my iPod classic + microphone
• Sound other: Audacity
• Whatever else I need as I go.

Also, I guess I should throw fuel on the potato pile. Uh, potatoes contain poisonous solanine when green, have a famine named after them, can be used as ammo in cannons, and are starchy. Potatoes are extremely dangerous and should be banned! Therefore, potato is a wonderful theme for LD!

Argh, what an awful theme….. Except, I’ve got an interesting concept for a game. Dunno if I can pull it off, but I’m actually excited.

I’m trying to make an audio-centric game, but XNA’s positional audio doesn’t work like I had hoped it would. Plus, it’s not JSIL supported so no web version. Pondering faking it with 2D audio so I can control more aspects of it and get JSIL support.

Here’s a screenshot of the only screen that’s not developer-only at this point.

Something horrible is happening!!!

Something horrible and delicious!

Tags: food, foodphoto, ptotato

It’s almost halfway and and my game logic is kinda sorta there. I just got done recording a pile of sound effects, since the majority of my content is audio in nature. I need to sort through them and edit them and then I can actually get into the meat of the game.

The biggest disappointment so far has been JSIL. I tried using XNA’s positional audio, and JSIL didn’t like it. Luckily neither did I as it wasn’t giving me an effect I thought would work. I implemented my own positional audio using just pan, volume, and math (thanks Serilyn for knowing trig better than I). Unfortunately JSIL hasn’t implementing panning either, so for right now this game will strictly be a Windows game. I’ll try to use the porting provision to see what’s involved in getting panning working so there’s a javascript build too.

Tags: screenshot

I wrote a game titled Conversion, after the condition known as Conversion Blindness. You cannot see, so you must complete the game using only your sense of hearing and sense of touch. It’s minimalist by reducing your senses and distilling the environment down to the remaining senses. The game is intentionally vague about what’s going on in an attempt to immerse you in the confusion of someone who just had a traumatic event trigger blindness.

That’s already a bit of a spoiler, so if you don’t want to be spoiled further, go rate Conversion and come back. We’ll wait.

Theme Selection

I did not like the selected theme one bit. At all. I hated it. Everyone is just going to do “minimal crappy graphics” I thought. It took me a couple hours of pouting before I decided to take the “minimal graphics” idea to it’s ultimate conclusion – no graphics. And since text adventures are a well defined genre that just left audio-only games. It still took me another hour or so to refine what I meant by audio-only – a game where you hear sounds and have to walk to them to get the next bit of the story.

Implementation

I knew I needed positional audio and I knew XNA (my chosen platform) could do positional audio, so I went to work creating a simple tile map and player actor to interact with. And then I heard it. And it was awful. XNA’s positional audio is so far from precise that you’d be bouncing around the map trying to locate the sound. You can’t tell front from back, and the zone where the sound was equal volume for both ears was so wide that the sound could have been coming from anywhere. And JSIL doesn’t support it. So I went about implementing my own positional audio using just volume and pan. I was able to narrow the area that’s considered “in front of you” and I made “behind you” quieter than in front. Both cues that’ll help you find your goal.

Problems

There were plenty. I was not prepared to build an audio centric game. Though I had the tools available, I didn’t remember how to use any of them. But when the muse strikes, you don’t say “sorry, no tools” you just plow through.

• Audio recording. I have a Belkin  TuneTalk. They’re supposed to be good at recording good quality audio. Unfortunately they’re noisy as heck. I spent a lot of time cleaning up sounds and re-recording them. I need a new portable recording solution (or just a better mic for this thing).
• JSIL, the XNA to javascript compiler, doesn’t support audio panning. I’ve since taken a whack at trying to solve that, but my first attempt failed, possibly because I don’t understand the Web Audio API. I’ve got a bug filed against JSIL on this and I’m still continuing to look into it so I can provide a web build. The game plays completely fine in JSIL otherwise. But imagine being blind and deaf in one ear trying to track down that damn leaky faucet.
• Content. There was supposed to be a lot more content. This is largely a problem with my engine primarily being for arcade/action games, there just wasn’t any support in it for pre-determined events. With time running short, I only got the win/lose condition in  literally just before the compo ended. The “intruder” you chase literally teleports between two locations because my event triggering system doesn’t allow for the spawning of actors with actual AI. I lost a lot of time because the feeble triggering solution I had kept breaking every time I needed to add another type of trigger.

Surprises

I completed. No, that really is a surprise. Literally 15 minutes before compo deadline Serilyn can attest to my giving up. I literally had no end condition. You couldn’t win or lose. Somehow, cobling together a lot of hacks, I managed to make the gun fire a bullet (instead of just making a sound) and have that bullet kill the intruder and have it trigger a player death if you use too many bullets (yeah, cheesy, but I needed a lose condition). Thank God (and the LD admins of course) for submission hour.

Conclusion

I love the concept that I proved. I hate that it’s so short and that the neat story I had envisioned was completely lost. I plan to do a post-compo version, though it’s going to have to compete with my other non-LD project for time. Luckily both projects make use of the same engine and use exactly the same mapping tech under the hood, so I can advance both titles simultaneously for a bit.

For those interested, I use Mercurial for revision control and did multiple commits over the course of the compo. The repos have been mirrored on Bitbucket. Compo source. Engine source. I tagged what was released for the compo so that I can continue committing post-compo code.

So now that you’ve read this, please rate Conversion. Tell me what you liked. Tell me what you’d like to see. Tell me what you didn’t like.

Thanks!

Many many thanks go to Kevin Gadd for implementing panning support in JSIL, despite my feeble and failed attempts at implementing it myself. And not only doing it, but doing it in three days! You can now play Conversion in Chrome at least. It may work in Safari (I do not have a Mac to test it on). It does not work in Firefox.

So for anyone who skipped this amazing(ly short) audio experience because it required Windows and XNA, go rate it now! Unless you’re a diehard Firefox or IE fan who refuses to use any other browser, then, err, have a puppy.

Tags: port

When I thought of minimalism, I thought of removing the entire visual experience and leaving only sound – essentially making you blind. It turns out I wasn’t the only one who thought of minimizing graphics to near non-existence without going the text adventure route. Here’s a rundown of the games I’ve found so far in which limited vision play a role. Feel free to link in the comments more games in which limited vision is a mechanic, I’d love to play more takes on this!

• You Must Escape
• Out of Darkness
• Blind
• Come No Closer (this one’s a bit on the edge, since you do get a flashlight and there’s no downside to using it)
• The Blind MazzzZZZZe of Colors
• Blind guy Vs Zombies
• BatWorld
• BlindSight (another flashlight game, but the flashlight does play into the mechanic)
• Escape
• Conversion (my game)

It’s just after midnight here so there’s 18 hours to go! I have two of my ten required encounters in. The encounters are hard to get a screenshot of since they only last 1 second, so here’s a shot of the title screen. Yes, I know the text is a bit hard to read over the trees. That’ll be fixed… Time permitting.

Snap Encounters Title

Oh, seems I failed to say “I’m in”.

I’m using C#/XNA, SpiridiEngine, with a port to HTML5 via JSIL after compo end. The game code itself is pushed periodically to bitbucket in case my desktop burns down, takes my file server with it, and I have to continue working using only my underpowered laptop.

Tags: screenshot

Game
Could the theme “10 seconds” be interpreted as 10 individual seconds? Could a game be made where something interesting could happen inside of 1 second? From those questions came Snap Encounters, an RPG with no RPG elements due to lack of time.

Was the experiment a success? Feedback so far is pretty unanimous: 1 second is too short to make a real decision and there’s too much text.

Too Much Text
Since this is a story-based game, that’s like saying an FPS has too much shooting. Since reading is a free action and isn’t timed, I’m not sure this is a valid criticism or just an issue of wrong target audience. I can certainly tweak it a bit since my writing does tend toward verbosity.

1 second is too short
As implemented, a player must examine the 32×48 pixel encounter creature, examine their two 48×48 pixel choices, interpret all that, and pick a choice appropriate for the encounter. All within one second. Since there’s no HP, making the wrong choice means you die and have to slog through the same encounters all over again (or give up and go play a more fun game).

How To Fix
I think 1 second can still work, but there needs to be a lot less for the player to process for each encounter. My tentative idea is to remove the randomized choices entirely. For each encounter you get the same three choices: fight, flee, or fraternize. The tutorial part of the game will teach these to you, so that by the time you need to make a snap decision, all you have to think about is “oh, that’s an ogre and I’m level 1, RUN!” instead of “That’s an ogre, my choices are, uh, let’s see. Oops, too late, I’m dead.”

Also, the sting of making a wrong choice will be reduced when the RPG elements are introduced. Instead of “oops, I gotta go through all that again?” it’ll be “ouch, I hope I find a health potion soon.”

Play it!
If you want to see how hard making a decision in 1 second really is, go play Snap Encounters, it’s HTML5, so should run just about anywhere that has web and a keyboard.

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem