My first Ludum Dare! It’s a lot of fun, and I’m really glad I’m doing it.

I’m working with a friend for the jam, who shall remain anonymous for now… He’s doing the art, and I’m doing the programming, so far. Check it out!

Also, Flixel and FlashDevelop for the win!

Here ends the second day of the Ludum Dare jam, at least for us. We’re pretty happy (or, depending on who you ask, amazed) with how much we’ve been able to accomplish so far, thanks in no small part to Adam Atomic’s awesome Flixel v2.55 game engine. 😀

But given that we both have to go back to work at our real jobs tomorrow, we’re not too confident that we can finish this game to our satisfaction in time for the Ludum Dare jam deadline.

Most of what happened today was on the graphical side of things, along with all the little fixes and tweaks to the simulation that are hard to describe or notice unless you’re looking for them. As you can see, we have a bunch of new tiles in the game – it actually looks like a school now!

Since we didn’t want to try learning any new tools, like DAME for making tilemaps, I had a fun time enhancing Flixel’s basic image-to-tilemap conversion to support multiple colors for different tiles, and not only that but also autotiling at the same time. Fancy!

Here you can see the image that is interpreted as the tilemap for the game. All the pretty colored pixels are for the goodies on the walls like lockers and doors and such.

I’m looking forward to sharing my clean, beautiful tilemap code with all you other Flixel devs out there. Soon, soon! 😉

We’ve put the final touches on The Love Letter and sent out an email to a bunch of friends for private beta testing!

Get ready for The Love Letter on February 14th, Valentine’s Day! 😀 We’re looking forward to it…

We did it! 😀

The Love Letter is all polished up for Valentine’s Day! You can play it here:

http://axcho.com/theloveletter/

Happy Valentine’s Day everybody! <3 We hope you love the game! 😉

Spread the love! Don’t spend this holiday ALONE…

Ha, see what I did there? :3

Hey, this post is going to go on the notgames blog! Cool, huh?

On Valentine’s Day, indie game developers axcho and knivel released a little game called The Love Letter. It’s a free, five-minute experience, a slice of life as the most popular boy in school. But things aren’t so easy at the top, especially when you find a mysterious love letter in your locker and you have to read the whole thing during passing period without any of your so-called friends catching you.

“It’s hard for me to say where The Love Letter fits in the spectrum of game to notgame. The purpose is to get across a particular five-minute experience, not to make it about a challenging game with a lot of replay value,” says axcho, who wrote the code for the game.

While there are no points, achievements or levels to be found in The Love Letter, it is possible to win or lose. Getting caught by another student while reading your love letter results in a cute but painful shaming in front of your peers, and a quick trip back to the title screen to try again. If you do get to the end of the letter without anyone seeing you, you are rewarded with an awkward but adorable encounter with your secret admirer, and a satisfying “the end” that makes it clear you’ve met the game’s expectations.

Still, there is a balance to be struck. You could call it a casual stealth game with only one level, but that would be missing the point.

The Love Letter was originally a 72-hour creation for the Ludum Dare 22 game jam, where hundreds of participants all over the world spent a weekend making games inspired by the theme of “alone”. The game’s author knivel says that the brief development time encouraged him to try making a short, scripted experience that really explores the competition theme rather than simply trying to make a fun game that people would want to play over and over again. It lasts for five minutes because that’s as long as it needs to be. It’s not particularly deep or profound, but it stands on its own for five minutes, without all the gameplay fluff that would be needed to sustain a longer playing time.

As one player mentioned on the notgames forum,

“What made this for me was the fact that the game didn’t try to ‘challenge’ me with levels, achievements, or points. It could have been more ‘fun’ and earn more flash portal money if you went that route. I can imagine myself adding more challenging level design and mechanics to this until the game ends up as this soulless fun machine.

But you sir, made this with the notgames mindset and left me with something pure and sincere. Thanks for that.”

We’ve all seen shallow themes stretched out to hours of gameplay, whether in killing monsters or clicking cows. But while some developers choose to reach for lofty heights with themes that deserve such extended introspection, others like axcho and knivel simply take something sweet and fresh and give it all the time it deserves. Five minutes.

This quote says it best:

“If Dear Esther is the main course, The Love Letter is my dessert.”

You can read more about The Love Letter’s development on axcho’s blog.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 18th, 2012 at 9:39 pm 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.

The Love Letter is now on Newgrounds! Not only that, but it has been featured on the Newgrounds front page! 😮

We added ten achievements (Newgrounds medals) for you to earn, each with its own little icon and vaguely amusing name. First time I’ve ever added achievements to a game! I’m pretty proud of them.

No new plugin this time, but that might not be a bad idea – something to make tracking achievements easier?

Maybe next time… 😉

Anyway, check it out!

We finally declared The Love Letter to be as finished as it will ever be, and I just lifted the site-lock from it this evening. Anyone can host the game on their site now.

You can download the game pack here:

http://cdn.mochiads.com/c/g/the-love-letter.zip

Not only was the game featured on the front page of Newgrounds, but Kongregate just gave it a badge and The Love Letter is now featured on the front page of Kongregate too! None of my other games have ever gotten this much attention, so I’m pretty excited.

It’s also been reviewed on Jay is Games, and recommended by Egoraptor (and I’ll pretend that I knew who that was before this…).

Also, kittens…

The Love Letter has been settling into its long tail and finally broke 500,000 views recently, so I thought it was about time to make good on my promise to release the source code.

So I did. Get it on GitHub! 😀

No guarantees, but I am tempted to join in the competition this weekend. I won’t be able to spend the full 48 hours on it, but I may have just enough time to make something really simple. The biggest challenge for me will be the art and music, as I am better versed with code. I’m sure I could cobble something together given enough time, but of course, I won’t have enough time. We’ll see.

I’ll probably be using Flixel and FlashDevelop, as those are the tools I am most familiar with. If possible, I may reuse code from The Love Letter – which is publicly available here, in case you want to use some of it too.

Good luck all.

Wow, I was not expecting this theme at all!

Well, I’ve had an incomplete idea for an evolution game that I’ve already written about here, and I’ve been spending the last several hours trying to figure out how I could possibly create the AI for the creatures in the game and have it evolve along with their physical characteristics. I think I may have something that could actually work, finally. But it’s still way too much for 48 hours, let alone the time I actually do have available this weekend.

Do I forge ahead and end with something unfinished, or do I keep spending my precious hours trying to come up with an easier idea?

I wish I knew…

As we reach the halfway mark of our 48 hours, I have finally figured out (on paper) a simple but powerful AI system to control the behavior of the evolving creatures in my (at this point hypothetical) game. It’s a combination of a utility-based AI like the one used in The Sims, and an emotional model using a subset of the basic emotions described by affective neuroscience.

My hope is that it will turn out to hold up well to mutation and recombination, while also providing enough flexibility and intelligence to create interesting behavioral strategies for the evolving organisms.

So yeah, I’m practically done. All I have to do is just code it up now. 😉

…

Okay, you’re right, there’s no way I’m going to finish on time…

Urgh.

I’d never really done any sprite animations before, so this took me a really long time. Walk cycles are hard…

But yay, I’ve got animations for running, jumping, sliding, blocking, punching, kicking, and shooting. All thanks to the awesome Pickle editor. Because I could see the animations looping over and over again while I edited them, I could use trial and error and ended up coming up with some pretty nice stuff. You’d never guess by just looking at a still frame.

Maybe I should start writing some actual code about now?

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2012 at 1:42 am 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.

Okay, realizing that my last idea, while awesome, was way too ambitious, I have miraculously come up with a new, brilliant, much simpler idea that I’m still excited about!

I won’t waste my time describing it here, but I’ll just say that it is inspired by this previous project.

If only I had this idea 24 hours ago… :/

I spent the morning coding up this awesome platformer engine in Flixel! 😀 It’s got the best platformer controls I’ve made yet, with variable-height jumping, wall sliding, wall jumping, and even punching and kicking. No shooting yet, but that can wait.

If this were Friday night, that would be great, and I could go to sleep ready to start coding the actual game on Saturday. However, it’s Sunday at noon and I have less than five hours to go…

Shooting is in, yay. There are two bullet types – a small one, and a big charged shot that goes through enemies, which you can see in the above screen shot. If only there were actually enemies to shoot…

Also, “Shoot, there are only a few hours left in the competition!”

Particles are awesome. It’s amazing how much better it feels to shoot an invader when it explodes into a pile of little dots.

Wow, I’m still awake working on this? Yep, and I still have to get up to go to my real job tomorrow…

This is fun, though – I haven’t worked on a game like this since The Love Letter.

I don’t think I’ll be finished to my satisfaction, even for the jam. I’d have to stay up all night or skip work tomorrow, and that’s not going to happen.

I’ll post a build soon. I’m just finalizing what I have so far…

Yeah, so I didn’t make the competition deadline. I guess I’ll still go for the jam. Maybe that means I could get someone else to make the music. 😛

Anyway, as you can see, there are actual space invaders to interact with now. No goals implemented yet, but messing with the invaders isn’t fun yet either, so I’m working on fixing that up first. Shooting needs to be a lot easier – right now you can only shoot when you are standing still, and you can’t fire very quickly, so it’s annoying. Really I should make this feel like Cave Story – that would be fun.

And you can punch and kick the invaders to replicate them (and send them flying). Death and reproduction, the two most important tools in evolution’s inventory.

Oh, also, I have an awesome, terrible name for this game, but I will wait until I finish it before I unveil it to you all.

Wow, I really did stay up all night. The sun is coming out already…

Anyway, I added a title screen, and a nifty little tutorial in the background thanks to the awesomeness of FlxScript, making its second appearance as an extra after its starring role in The Love Letter.

Also added music courtesy of SineRider… But of course you can’t hear it in the screen shot.

I guess I might as well submit a build. The level design could really use some work – I just kind of scribbled it out – but maybe that can wait…

So, the awesomely named Ninjural Selection is now playable here.

You know, like natural selection, only “ninjural”, because it’s selection by a super awesome ninja of death (that’s you). Kind of like Thor, with his two-ended hammer of life and death, you have two attacks of life and death. Shooting from afar with your gun brings death. But when you kick and punch an invader from close up, you hit so ninjurally that you hit eggs out of it, which hatch into new life.

It kind of works. The main issue is that the line between fun and frustration is very dependent on the particular level layout, and I haven’t yet figured out the sweet spot. Right now there’s just one predefined environment (though eventually I would like to have them procedurally generated) which gets the idea across, but could be better.

The tricky thing is that there are several layers of consideration, and an environment has to do well by all of them in order to be fun. First of all, the invaders move like Goombas, like marbles or water flowing perpetually down. The way the platforms direct this stream and funnel it is key to how you experience the environment. Secondly, the environment is also a means for you to navigate the space with your ninja-like abilities of running, jumping, wall-sliding, and wall-jumping. Platforms have to have enough vertical space to allow for big jumps, but close enough to jump from one to another above. And you want enough vertical surface for wall-jumping. Lastly, the environment is also a means for lining up shots with your gun. A long, flat horizontal platform is where you’ll find a lot of invaders bunched up together. If there is another platform at the same height, it is easy to stand on that platform and pick off invaders as you choose, or take the whole row out with one charged shot. But if not, you have to awkwardly jump, or go to trickier locations where invaders fall too quickly to get a good shot at them.

Anyway. Something to dream about, maybe. I mean, literally – I haven’t slept all night. I think it’s time to take a break, before I can do any more damage…

Later! I’ll be back.

I made it so when you punch or kick invaders, they turn into little eggs, which then hatch all together, each one a slightly mutated clone of the one you kicked. They’re a lot more fun to kick now, since they’re small and they don’t get trapped by the platforms. Invader eggs fly pretty far when you kick them. 😛

I think the basic invader interaction is finally solid. What’s next? Maybe goals and scoring, maybe sound.

It looks like I am staying up all night, hmm…