Hey everyone, this is my first time around in LD.

OS: Debian (Linux)
Coding tool: Intellij IDEA (a better Eclipse)
Language: Java 8
Graphics: Gimp
Sound: Home piano, possible sfxr as well

Game plan:  Take nap Friday afternoon.  Await announcement at 9 on Friday (Easy Coast, woo!), begin sketching immediately.  Use power acquired during nap to stay up late and begin coding if a good idea comes along.  Eat and sleep intermittently, while simultaneously improving my game and lowering my standards, until they eventually meet in the middle, hopefully before Sunday.  Add crappy graphics and music along the way if I have time.

Happy designing!

Tags: game, Ludum Dare

I have finished the basic structure of the game: the player’s paddle, the screens she can traverse, and the level-world that starts a level when you enter and lets you out when you’ve finished it

Next on the list is creating a text format for the levels, so I don’t have to hardcode a class for every single one.  Also, trophies may become a thing if I have time.  And a friend of mine has alerted me that Z and X are terrible controls on the German keyboard, so I will try to add an option to change them.

I’d have a little video showing my progress, but none of the file formats I can convert to are permitted on the site :/

Did you know?  In the game zx you can change the two buttons to be any two letters you want!  Just scroll to the left one screen with ‘z’ after you download the jar file…

Before

After

Coding: Java

Graphics: GIMP

Audio: Direct recording + Piano + sfxr

Strategy: Put real effort into designing the concept, and keep it simple!

Last LD I failed because I hated the concept I was working towards and I spent too much time getting an unimportant detail right.  This time I’m gonna stick to things that won’t require so much time to get right, and find an idea I love before getting started.

First of all, I refuse to call this a post-mortem, because post-partum is so much more appropriate, and no one died (this time :P).

After my failure in LD 35, I came back more determined than before to finish a game.  And since my LD 34 entry didn’t have any music, I decided I wanted music in it this time.

What went right:

+ The music!  It took some hours of screwing around with my recording device and with various Java audio interfaces, but I got my music to play in-game, on loop.

+ The gestalt — unlike last time, I managed to implement several different aspects of a game without getting distracted by one while working on another.

What went wrong (or could be better):

+ The art — it wasn’t so bad, I just didn’t enjoy making it.  I’ll probably make a more abstract game next time, or else find an artist and enter the Jam.

+ The clicks — in a rush, I made it so that when you pick up an item, its upper-left corner, not its center, follows your mouse.  This made it hard for players to put the items where they wanted, since they were probably aiming the center of the item where they wanted it to go.

+ The difficulty — without spoiling too much: one player noted that the game can be finished by trial and error, i.e. without actually solving the core puzzle.  But, others enjoyed the more tangential challenges.  Next time I’ll work on making every puzzle, or at least the important ones, harder to finish without actually solving them.

What (nearly) went ugly:

The very first two comments on my game, which I read before going to bed last night, both stated that they couldn’t run the game.  I went to sleep thinking I had some huge problem that I’d need to solve, woke up stressed, and went immediately on LD.com to see if anyone had posted more details on the problem…only to find that other people had no problem, and that one of the two original commentors had realized the problem was on their end — their JVM needed to be updated — and fixed it.  The other seemed to have unpacked the .jar, which was itself the runnable game, thinking that a different .jar would be inside.

I’ll still probably write the next game in Java 7 and put it in a .zip with instructions, though, just to make it silliness-proof

Lione’s Letter

Lione’s Letter can be played here.

This shall be my fourth LD.  My tools:

Development – IntelliJ Idea (similar to Eclipse: pure Java).

Audio – Garage Band or possibly raw recording from my actual piano.

Graphics – GIMP.

You can download a game about my in-ness over here: link.  It even has original music!

Code: Java (Intellij Idea) Graphics: GIMP Audio: Either GarageBand or my actual piano

Have fun everyone! :)

What went right:

Illustration -- Surprisingly, I got some not-awful art this time around (compared to last time). As I was creating the assets I thought “huh, maybe I should try doing some shading”. Turns out, shading is the 20% of effort that gets you 80% of the results. Happy surprise there!

What went wrong:

Time management -- Yeah...I didn't spend enough time working on the game to make it shine. There are still a handful of features I wish I could add – music being the biggest – but not enough for me to want to enter the jam instead of the compo.

My laptop -- On the flipside, a lot of the wasted time was due to my laptop being part-fossil. During the worst hours, it was overheating after 15 mintues of work and needing 30+ minutes to cool down. The only reason I had anything to submit was that my brother suggested I put ice under the hottest part – that kept it alive long enough to get the critical components implemented.

What I'll do differently next time:

Make a schedule! -- During the early hours of Day 1 (the morning after I got no sleep because I stayed up late not working on the game … okay, that's an exaggeration, I got sleep) I told myself “alright, let's get this core mechanic implemented by lunch time.” Then I went to lunch. Then I finished the mechanic. And went for a bike ride.

Here's a better idea: as soon as I have the idea figured out, write a schedule for all of the features. Include lots of break time, but make sure to get the important stuff on there. It doesn't matter if I tick every single box, I just need a motivating force telling me to get to work.

Closing thoughts

This LD was not a success for me, but it wasn't a total failure either. I learned about shading and procrastinating; I hope to use that when I (hopefully) come back for LD39. Happy gaming!

The game

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/$19528