Ahoy !

I haven’t had the chance to record something for the “I’m in” video but count me in anyway ! This will be my first Ludum Dare but I’ve already made a game in 48 hours for a competition two years ago ; I remember it was great fun and I hope I’ll be able to succeed again.

My weapons of choice will be FlashDevelop (IDE), HaXe (language), Bacchus (custom framework), George Kilian’s (beer), Photoshop (for teh artz) and Propellerhead’s Reason (for the bleeps and shrieks).

I’m in !

Started 3.5 hours ago, I’ve got a mockup and bit of code. Now I’m HUNGRY !

This was my first (but certainly not last) Ludum Dare participation, and it was a real blast. I had already made a game in 48 hours but it didnt have the same thrilling atmosphere I found on the IRC channel and on this blog. I think it was quite epic (in the original sense of the word) to see hundreds of people struggling against time to get their games (or website) running before the deadline. Thank you all that was great !

And now for the Post Mortem. I kept a text log of my activities so it should be pretty accurate. I got up on saturday at 10, 6 hours after the beginning of the compo and the theme did not inspire me much. I tried to think over it during breakfast and shower but it didnt bring much of an idea. Three quarters later, I ended up deciding I would make a somewhat conservative platformer featuring vertical gameplay in procedural levels to escape from rising water. My scratchpad also had a few notes about a science fiction game involving unlocking gates before some ship autodestruction, but that’s probably because I was listening to Farenheit Project Part 6 at that time.

I spent the rest of the morning in photoshop, producing base graphics to get me started. I know most people like to start coding right away and make games with red and blue rectangles, that’s probably a more reasonable thing to do but it doesnt motivate me as much. By lunch, I had the most important assets of my game : Ernest, a jewel, three platform tiles and two water tiles (none of them animated). I think that’s about the time I posted my journal entry =)

The afternoon and evening were spent coding the core mechanics (platforming, dying, changing level) and animating the graphics. I gave up procedural generation quite early because I found it would take ages to get it to make interesting levels. I think I avoided a major pitfall there. After that, I ate tons of food (as in 400g of pasta + sauce) and drank enough beer to get motivated for the rest of the night which was spent level designing until 5AM (I made the first 10 levels in that period. Yes, this also means I got the idea of the balloon level around 3AM after lots of beer).

Since I did not have a map editor, I set up a crazy workflow (image below). I made an “editor” image in photoshop which was simply a big file with grid enabled and some measurements added on the sides. I drew my levels in this file, then measured everything and hardcoded the data in the game.

At that point, I was too tired to make more levels so I made the title screen instead. It had an artwork but it was so awful I trashed it away (that’s the only thing I did not keep for archives’ sake). Then off to bed for 5 hours.

I woke up at 10AM again and I felt more motivated than ever. I’m sure the neighbours loved my speakers and I blasting WHEN I’M UP I CAN’T GET DOWN, CAN’T GET DOWN !” super super loud. Designing the last five levels took me a while and they were done by 3PM. I made the end game content ((terrible artwork), congratulations message, credits etc.) and from this moment on, the game was playable from start to finish. I was still considering the addition of more levels but I had basically run out of ideas around level 11 or 12 so it didn’t happen.

At this point, I thought I should start making music but I really wanted to add torches in the background. So torches time it was. I quickly made them in Photoshop and started adding some torches to the first levels. the problem is that I had not saved some of my photoshop level sketches and that it was very hard to guess the coordinates where I should put the torches. I came up with another dirty trick for this : I made a debug build where the character had infinite jumps, could not die, and would output his position to the debug log when I pressed “T” (for “Torch”). I flew around the levels and hit “T” everytime I was on a potential torch position and then I got all the necessary coordinates from the debug log. The entire process took only half and hour. Pfew.

I spent the next few hours making the end game music (which was supposed to be the title screen music at this point) and the main music. Then a friend of mine popped in and I tied him to a chair so he would play the game on and on, reporting bugs while I was fixing them. Since I still had a bit of time, I made a different music for the bonus level, changed the title screen, added the oxygen gauge someone suggested on IRC and polished a few things. Of course, the huge collision bugs (falling through elevators) started showing up 1 hour before the deadline and I hastely hid them the best I could by slowing the elevators and called it a night.

After submitting the game (20 minutes before the deadline), I laid back on my chair, removed the cap on my very last beer, and there was a huge grin on my face. I felt a fantastic sense of accomplishment as I was leaving the almost trance-like state this competition (and beer) put me in. The game was far from perfect, but I was still baffled by how much content I had made in comparison to my previous 48h competition.

What went well :

• Having a dedicated tester. Having someone spending more than a couple minutes testing the game was very very helpful because it saved ME lots of time and brought to my knowledge some bugs I would never have seen. Hanging around IRC was also very helpful.
• Bacchus. This competition was a great occasion to try using my custom HaXe game framework and see if it was really usable. Turns out it is. It never got in my way and provided lots of useful features and some useful error messages.
• Sticking to an idea. Almost all of the work I did ended up somewhere in the game. The only things I wasted are a shitty artwork, 30 minutes of code trying to generate procedural levels and a crackled tile.
• Rushing art. I consider myself a very slow artist, I like to polish things for hours. The competition made me rush things and I think it doesnt show too much. Picking colors super fast turns out to be a decent alternative to carefully selecting them, it did yield surprisingly good results.

What could have been better :

• Theme and game idea. I did not make much out of the theme and my game is very classic. I had the same problem last time I made a game in 48 hours so that’s something I’ll try to improve next time. Thinking outside the box is a quality I envy.
• Preparation. I had problems making Chronolapse work and gave it up. If I had done that a few days before I would have a sweet timelapse by now. I also did not do the weekly shopping before the compo so I ended up starving on Monday night. No good. Also, I should have borrowed a screen because making a game on a single 15″ screen is not very comfortable.
• Spaghetti code. My code started nice and clean, but as time went on, I allowed myself more and more dirty hacks. It’s still ~readable (at least by me) but definitely NOT pretty. I would probably have had the time to notice and fix the remaining bugs if I had been careful all the way through.
• Level design and balance. I’m still in the process of collecting feedback but most of the issues raised so far related to level design and difficulty. I agree with that and I think a few levels are very uninteresting. There are a few ones I like a lot though.
• My favorite bug. If you listen to the end game music, you’ll notice that the lead instrument doesnt play in your right speaker. Here’s the reason why :
  

TL;DR : I love you and I love LD.
And here’s my entry.

Resources used :

Ahoy all!

I’m glad to say I’ll be entering LD22 this weekend, this is my 2nd LD and I hope it will be as much fun as the previous one. I am already super tired but it will hopefully help me having creative ideas =)

Here are the tools I will be using :

• Asana
• HaXe (with FlashDevelop )
• Bacchus 0.2.2 (personnal framework) – download here
• Adobe Photoshop CS3
• Propellerhead’s Reason (and possibly Records)
• BMFont (if needed)
• Tiled (if needed)
• BFXR (if needed)

I have already done the mandatory junk food shopping, I have created a new Bacchus project, tested BMFont and prepared a web page ready to be filled with release notes. Now I need to clean my desktop and tune my guitar before I can take a nap.

Good luck to you all!

I removed 3kg of dust from my desk, it feels so good <3

Ahoy all.

I’m not sure where it’s going but here is a Work in Progress of my entry. Photoshop only so far, will being coding as soon as I get a sharper idea of my game.

I hope you like it =)

Ahoy all!

Last weekend I made a compo entry called Castaway.

If you speak French, you might want to read my lengthy writeup on Les Forges. Else, here are the traditional bullet point lists :

What went well

• Using familiar tools (custom framework, FlashDevelop, HaXe, Photoshop, Reason, etc.)
• Using project management techniques and tools. I used Asana to handle my ever growing todo list and a mini scrumboard for tracking bugs. Pictures at the end of this post.
• Recording custom sound effects. This was my first time and I’m very happy with the result (especially since it didnt take long). Picture below.
• Testing. Two friends came on Sunday evening and played the game again and again to spot bugs. They were the one writing the scrum post-it and it was very useful.
• Chronolapse. Making a timelapse took no effort and I love the end result.

What went not so well

• Theme. I did not think long enough of the theme and started working without a clear idea of what my game would be.
• Time management. I spent too much time working on animations and art assets instead of making content. Look at this 8 frames walk cycle : . This is wasted time, lots of it.
• Balancing. The game is way too hard ; my testers thought it was funny because of it but I should have considered this as alarming.
• Oops. A critical bug that crashes the game on slow computer was shipped in the compo version. Maybe the test configuration should include a slow computer too.

Pictures

Asana

Bug tracking scrumboard

Sound design tools

Even though my game is way too hard, too short and unforgiving, I’m still happy with what I did. I am satisfied I made some art and music that were not 8bit/chiptune over the course of the weekend and more importantly, I had lots of fun. Next time, I will NOT make a sidescrolling platformer, that’s my objective.

Thank you all for reading/playing/rating !

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 25th, 2011 at 11:33 am and is filed under LD #22. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Ahoy!

I’m glad to say I will enter Ludum Dare for the third time (I was in for LD21 & LD22). My tools haven’t changed much since last time :

• HaXe (programming language)
• Flash Develop (IDE)
• Bacchus 0.3 (personal framework)
• Adobe Photoshop CS3
• Propellerhead’s Reason
• Asana
• Tiled (probably)
• BMFont (probably)
• BFXR (probably)

I still have some preparation to do (clean my desk, buy junk-food, reinstall audio software and keyboard, prepare boilerplate project etc.) but I’m already super excited about this LD. My personal challenge this time is to NOT make a sidescrolling platformer.

(nothing coded yet)

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 25th, 2012 at 4:27 pm and is filed under LD #24. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Love the crazy GUI <3

Ahoy all!
Here is quick post-mortem about my LD24 entry called Deep Sea Fish Loves You Forever. The game is about piloting an underwater exploration robot and analyzing oceanic wildlife with a pink sonar.

What went well

Tech & Engine
I used the same technologies as I did during my other 2 Ludum Dare and this is really paying off. I am now very fast when it comes to prototyping and testing things in Bacchus (my custom game framework written in Haxe). The only tech problem I had was due to a recent rewrite the audio part of my framework, more about this below.
I don’t think I fixed a single engine bug during the whole weekend.

Timing
My schedule was similar to last time.
1. Do graphics on Friday night (I hate using programmer art so I start with gfx)
2. Write the core game mechanics on Saturday
3. Make a title screen and winning/losing conditions on Saturday night
4. Add audio, polish gfx and playtest on Sunday

I think it worked quite well, except that my (few) testers did not find too many bugs so I ended up submitting early. I could have added more species to the game but I was afraid to break the balance (which I thought was good (it’s not)).

Iterations
Testers were very useful not for finding bugs but for highlighting usability issues. It is thanks to them that there is a species counter in the GUI. This feature makes the game’s objective a lot more explicit, I’m really happy someone came up with it (thanks Phil!).

I also used them to improve the opening tutorial. My first testers didn’t understand much about the game because the tutorial had too much text and some of it was not explicit enough. I had enough time to redesign it and then to improve its texts later on. It went from this to this:

Assets creation
During LD#22 I wasted a lot of time doing pixel art (and an 8-frames long walk-cycle!). This time I painted things with basic Photoshop brushes and scaled them down. I think it looks quite good and it took a lot less time. The only thing where I worked on the pixel level is the GUI but it didn’t take too long because it’s very geometric.

Audio was a pleasure to make using Reason and my Akai MPK Mini. I had not done anything audio-related in 6 months so I spent a few hours reading and watching Reason tutorials the day before to get back in the mood. It was my first time writing some Electro-ish music and that was a lot of fun. I used a morse signal sound for the main the track intro (just for fun) and I was inspired by The Future Sound of London for claves’ sounds on top of the beat.

I didn’t have a microphone this time around so I made all the sound effects using synths, but this was ok because most of them are mechanical anyway.

What went not-so-well

Theme & Concept
Evolution is not one of the themes I was looking forward to and I had a hard time coming up with something. As always, I was very stressed at the beginning and settled for a vague idea quickly. I thought I would make a game where you play as a bacteria and evolve from species to species by consuming radioactive pills in order to solve environment puzzle (think Space Station: Sillicon Valley on the N64). Of course there was no time for that so I scaled it down from top-down to underwater and side-scrolling. Then I started doing art, without any other ideas in mind. By the end of the night I had drawn all the fishes that are in the game (and a radioactive barrel which isn’t) but I didn’t have any puzzle or gameplay ideas to accompany them. It was supposed to look like the following picture. I think this scale looks a LOT better than the one I ended up using but I didn’t want the player ship to be 5 pixels big. Maybe I was wrong.

The next morning I realized this was not going to work because I would never have the time to do environment puzzles, animations and gameplay programming for all the species. The challenge became to find another game concept where I could use all this art while keeping the evolution theme. After half an hour of panicking, I came up with the final concept. As a result, it doesn’t fit the theme too well (esp. in its gameplay).

Computer
My computer did shut down without a warning twice during the weekend. The second time it did, it decided not to turn on again so I went to bed. The next morning I had to open it and replug the hard drives, I think the SATA cables were twisted too hard or something. That was very scary and I thought I might have to go finish my game at the office (it was under version control so I wasn’t afraid of losing any work).

Food
I put some barbecue sauce in my sandwiches and omitted the eggs. BAD BAD mistakes.

Performance
I heard the game was very very slow on some computers =(
I didn’t pay any attention to performance because everything was running at a solid 60FPS on my machine. Some obvious optimizations could have been done to improve that. Not drawing a 2000 pixels tall half-transparent gradient on top of the screen would have been a good start.
Also, I found out that the new audio work I had done in my engine was painfully slow so I added a dirty one line hack to bypass it.

All in all, I had a lot of fun and I’m very happy (and proud!) I made this game, even though it’s far from perfect. Thanks a lot for reading and for being such a friendly community!

Tags: post-mortem

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2012 at 3:08 pm and is filed under LD #24. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.