My submission for LD 22 is Flod Embarks. You are a little robot with the strange name Fraxtol Flod-Pirno S’nint. You’re lonely and very cute. Somehow you ended up in a part of space that appears most lonely. But can it be true? Are you all alone out here? *sigh* You gather all your courage and board your old spaceship to explore all these thousands of sparkling planets in the hope of finding some cute friends for yourself, somewhere.

There’s not really much to the “game”, but at least it is in its own way something like a complete package… Adding more stuff, I could turn this into a real story based rpg, or procedurally generated rpg. I started very late because of various reasons, one being me not having any ideas. At some point I just started with my half idea and just embarked on this mission to find out where it will take me. With not much of a story or gameplay in mind, only the basic mechanic of flying to planets and visiting them, I tried to put a proper dose of cute into it, at least.

Tags: easter-egg, kitten-challenge

Flod, my LD 22 entry’s protagonist wishes you all some relaxed and peaceful days:

Happy Holidays

So, it’s christmas, I think, and I finally have some time to write a little about my experience with LD#22. My entry isn’t that great, but still, for what it’s worth:

At first I wasn’t even sure if I would participate, due to several reasons, too little sleep in the weeks and days prior to the weekend being one, and an important 30th birthday on saturday night being the second. I usually don’t have a problem with all-nighters and actually can produce results in 20-hour coding stretches with 4 hours of sleep in between, but this time I was just completely burnt out the night when the theme was announced. I tried to stay up until midnight, take a 2 hour nap to recharge my drained batteries and then start crunching once the theme was announced. I failed. I woke up to my alarm, feeling really dizzy and decided to get some more sleep and start in the morning.

Saturday 11 am: Wake up, ouch, it’s late! Check the theme, check IRC, see what people are brainstorming or making, start thinking… 9 hours until I have to go to the party… some time, just need an idea.. alone, lonely. Actually I don’t feel really creative – its so late already…. Mood is very important to me in a game, “Alone” seems to be a theme that can be supported by mood very much. Music! Ages since I composed stuff. Time to try Greasemonkey’s Autotracker. Run it a few times, awesome. But: happy! Not very alone. All I know about python is that shouldn’t mess with the indentation. Mess with autotracker until it produces a sad tune: all minor, less drums, drums pitched down, slower, fiddle with song structure a little. Great, a kind-of-sad tune!  A bit dramatic with the drums kicking in, but I’ll make that fit somehow. Still not many ideas. Let’s draw a little guy, a robot. A lonely robot in space. Walking animation, here we go. It’s really tiny, I’m running out of time. Let’s scale it up by 4: wonderful. Still no real ideas. Maybe I won’t have a submission. Oh, it’s late, time to go to the party!

Sunday noon: Wake up, ouch, it’s late. Need to start on something soon – will have to go minimalistic. If I decide on something now and follow through I can still make it. So far I have awesome sad music and a sad robot. He’s alone in space, maybe he’ll have to find friends. Really no time to make dozens of worlds to get a huge universe for him to feel lonely in… Suddenly: Star Trek The Old Series… they had one cheap studio but with lighting and different coloured ground, rocks and sky created hundreds of possible planets. An idea starts to form in my mind: An “overworld” where you navigate between hundreds of planets, and then planets that just like in star trek are simple stages, where with a combination of sky, background and ground tiles I can create many worlds with drawing only a few tiles. I draw 8 sets of skies + 9 sets of ground, code a state to combine them: works! I have 72 different possible worlds. Wonderful!

Can I make a quick space-overworld? Let’s try, draw a couple of planets, 13.. will do. Draw a spaceship with thrusters on and off. Start coding “SpaceState”. Need stars/space debris to indicate the current velocity of the ship. Easy but… can FlixelPowerTools’ StarFieldFX do the job? Yes! Place 2000 random planets on x/y coordinates between 0 and 50,000. I want the ship to orbit planets – Hmm.. Sir Isaac Newton, what was that again? acc=mass1*mass2/distance^2.. something like that. Will only use gravity from planets near to the player… Works! Nice, have orbiting ship. Need something like a map to help the player not get lost in space. Little dots pointing towards the nearest 3 planets, works, a little buggy, can’t find the bug, bad luck, no time now to fix it… Teleport animation, done. Let’s allow him to teleport down to a planet and up again. Wonderful. Pretty lonely though. A few hours left, I have a universe and 2000 planets you can visit, but nothing else. Finding friends on some of these planets will have to do, since I don’t have any other ideas. Draw some cute aliens. Put one on every third planet. Now my robot can find friends. Oh! I can use one of autotrackers happy tunes to set a happy mood when a friend is found. Great. Let’s put a little more cuteness into it – add “disappointed” animation when youre on an empty planet, head hanging low, works! Cute, wonderful! Check time: 1 hour left! What’s left to do? Menu, name for the robot/game, little bits. Add an over-ambitious title/menu screen.. Need a name for the little guy! Strain my brain to come up with something. Half an hour left, make Flod (the robot) and his friends dance, hihi cute, fix the music code a little, so the sad tune don’t start over all the time, done. T minus a couple of minutes. Perfect. Screenshots, submission, Done. what did I make? It’s not really a game at this point, but it’s interactive and cute. Not gonna win any awards with this but it’s somehow complete in itself, I’m content.

In retrospective:

What went wrong

• Timing for the LD weekend – Even though I was really looking forward to it, I managed to have my starting conditions screwed up. Had been working full-time during the day and writing an important paper I need for starting my business at night. For the last 4 weeks, every Tuesday night was writing only and no sleep at all, followed by a day of work and an important date. I was really sleepy on friday.. Also this birthday party I just had to attend was well.. bad luck for timing. In the end, the timing issues though helped to produce something focused and minimalistic, since I tried to make something achievable within this limited timeframe.

• No real ideas – I blame it to myself being really burnt out from the last weeks.

What went right

• Putting it all together and making something inspite of these limiting factors – Once I somewhat knew what I was doing, I pretty much was crunching away without running into major blockades or bugs. The simple concept of course helped with that, but also my familiarity with my toolchain: Flash Builder, Flixel, TileStudio.

Where I got lucky

• Autotracker – Without the mood set by the happy tune I got out of the unmodified autotracker and the sad one I abused the program to produce, my entry would have been far less complete and cute.

Overall: Great Fun!

Can’t mention it enough: Thanks to Gresemonkey for Autotracker!!

// empty planet
if(Flod.mood == “happy”) {
Flod.mood = “sad”;
FlxG.playMusic(Flod.SongSad);
}

Good luck and shitloads of fun to everyone!

I finished my game. It’s an adventure. A little too tired to say more right now, except: I’M SO HAPPY.

Here’s my mini-post-mortem:

This time was even more chaotic than last time My game Flyspeck turned out to be a point&click adventure and I’m rather happy with it, but my original plans looked different:

My original idea was to make a small sim/civ game on a tiny 3×3 world. There would be a very limited number of structures to build and a set of resources to harvest, products to turn those into. The tricky part for the player would be to handle the limited space and resources most efficiently to have a thriving civilisation and conquer space.

So as it has turned out to be my LD-workflow, once I somehow had a visual idea, I started to make tiles, to do some low-level brainstorming and fermenting in the back of my head while pixeling away. I somehow couldn’t think of an interesting balance of buildings resources, and I tried to investigate other ideas I had, that would still allow me to use the tiles I was making. One idea would have been a simple dialogue-based (or monologue-based) point&click adventure happening in a tiny world – probably not the most fun to play, but something I had been wanting to do for a while. A possible twist on this, slightly re-uniting this idea with the sim/civ idea would have been to have the various dialogues influence the development of the nation/world around the player. For instance the mayor would ask “Shall we research astrology or anstronomy?  We only have resources for one of them.” The decision would alter the look of the world but also lead to other possible developments, there would be either mythological temples or universities, future developments could be the search for either alien life or for gods… That sounded like a somewhat interesting concept – adventure with tech-tree –  very ambitious, but so what, I could always scale it down to a simple adventure.

So I started to make the engine-parts for a point and click adventure, walking, dialogues, characters.. etc but I was soo tired. My time was consumed by sleep somehow. I knew I had to scale down and come up with a minimalist version of the plan…

I sat down to write the dialogue and interactions with pencil and paper and something like an adventure started to emerge. It was more time-consuming than I had thought, though. So I continued, taking turns scripting and implementing, always an eye on the clock, in order to adjust the scope to the remaining time. I had decided to go for the 72 hours in the jam, because sleep, sleep-deprivation and real life had really gotten in my way. Unfortunately I had to dump all ideas about a tech-tree and multiple solutions, but I was kind of happy with my micro-adventure I had laid out in pencil before me and which was coming to life in code. At about 11pm – roughly 5 hours before the end of the jam I was finished with a version that felt somewhat complete and I decided to call it a wrap instead of desperatly trying to cram more stuff into it.

Again, this was an awesome experience. I’ve gotten quite positive reactions, which made me very happy.

The beginning is a little hard, but since there is not that much content in there, I think that’s ok. Also, being one myself, I’m aiming for old-school adventure players…

I had a great time, thank you all for making awesome games!

You can play mine here.

~ Amodo

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