I’m in, Matt is going down.

I will be using Actionscript if I manage to learn it before tomorrow night.

Other than that I’m winging it so don’t expect success here.

This is going to be my first game jam. It will also be the first solo game i’ll have released. I’ll be using Unity, going to focus on a web build and possibly make executables. Modeling will be done in Maya and sound design will be done in Mixcraft and Audacity. Some other tools i may end up using are Photoshop, Illustrator, SoundForge, Reason.

Getting excited, but i’m really wary of what the theme is going to be. It seems to be the majority of final round themes are things people voted for just because they make a quick and easy game.  Minimalism, Tiny world, one room all seem pretty boring. Other than Castles in the Sky., nothing really inspires my imagination so the other ones i voted for are the really open ended ones like exploration and growth.

-ben

My first two hours were quite productive. I knocked off some concept sketches which finalized my plans. It also lead to some light narrative development and a title: Beyond Balnibarbi. I then designed a quick title screen and went to bed.

Unfortunately that only yielded  3 quick hours of sleep before waking up and lying restlessly in bed for two hours thinking about my game and trying without any luck to go back to sleep. I couldn’t really get up and start working since my bed is right next to my computer and my mechanical keyboard would make it shitty for my girlfriend sleeping there.

Ill get back to it soon though, and I’ll post my concepts.

Hey guys, here’s some stuff i’ve made so far for my game Beyond Balnibarbi. The screenshot is some place holder terrain i modeled to test the controls. The game will have some simple 3-d platforming and exploration.

You can play it in it’s current state here : www.benswinden.com

And so ends my first Dare. I had a great time, never imagined it would be so exciting or stressful.If you’d like to go play my game you can get it in all different flavours on my site : www.benswinden.com/beyond. It’s got two resolutions for the web version, as well Windows and Mac versions for download. I’d love to hear what you think, please leave a comment here, or email me at [email protected] /* */ or twitter at me on twitter @benswinden.

Beyond is a first-person exploration game. I tried to create a interesting sensory experience with a few challenges, though i had very little time for testing so i can’t say whether it’s easy or hard. There are golden orbs strewn around the level for you to collect. By stepping into one of the blue tubes you create a waypoint for yourself and will respawn there in the event you fall into the endless void.

Well, it’s been a while since Ludum Dare, and looking back I am extremely proud of what I accomplished.

I made a game called In a Lonely Sea of Stars: you send harvest ships from your (tiny) planet out into the great galaxy to harvest energy from stars. Of course you have to defend your ships from space pirates so you build defense turrets, etc. etc.

Pretty colors...

The game

I chose my dev tools well. I enjoyed using cfxr, Photoshop, and even Flash Builder (though I’d have loved to use a Mac-native IDE. Chocolat with working AS3 autocompletion/compiling/debug? /drool)

If you’re interested in playing it, it’s on GitHub:

 | source

So how did I do?

What went right

This was my first Ludum Dare and my second full game. I programmed a game a couple of years ago that was really, really awful so I won’t even mention it here. Oops.

I did begin work on a concept to learn FlashPunk a while back, but “In a Lonely Sea of Stars” was my first real creation. And I am so proud of it.

• Concept. I got the game concept really early on (like 15 minutes after they announced the theme— I was eating dinner so I got the theme a little late) and got into prototyping really quickly.
• Asset creation. It was a cinch. I love pixel art because it’s so beautiful but so simple to create.
• Development. Development was, dare I say, fun! I didn’t run into many fundamental programming errors (because I used a framework instead of starting from scratch) so development just worked.

What went wrong

I may be proud, but I’m also aware of what broke.

• Math.  My worst enemy in game design is not procrastination or overreaching or anything at all complex. Math (which I’m really good at ordinarily) does not work in my head for games. Atan2? AHH! Math.PI * 180? HIDE ME! What clicks every day breaks when I try to apply it in general terms, and math was by far my greatest time suck.
  • Trig. I really, really, really hate trig for games. Part of my code reads:

    point.x = (FP.width * _zoom * Math.cos(_angle)) / (2 * Main.game.zoom);

    which then gets fed into

    x = Main.game.earth.x - 39 + point.x

    I know what it’s doing in theory (finding the x position of an object using it’s intrinsic _zoom and _angle position and then putting it in terms of a different origin… but really? What’s going on!?), so for next Dare I swear I will have a better understanding / predesigned framework for putting things on screen. Jeez.

  • Coordinate Systems. I also hate FlashPunk’s coordinate system. I ended up with code that had so many arbitrary numbers that I just cannot understand what is happening. originX vs centerX vs x vs width. Yah, I totally understand all of that.
  • Formulas. The reason I’m a developer and not a programmer comes down to this. Formulas just throw me; I cannot write an accessible function that throws out a scroll position to save my life. I spent close to 3 hours developing a scrolling system which actually just split a number (36, say) into digits (3 and 6). Then at the end of the day I combined the numbers again. And it’s still buggy. What a waste.
• No end in sight. I wasted so much time on the math that I wasn’t able to complete the ending or write the story I planned. The end goal was to find another life-supporting planet akin to earth (hence “lonely sea of stars”). I was not able to implement that.
• Time sucks. I had a practice AP test to take that weekend (I’m in high school), so I was effectively paralyzed for 3hrs plus the prep time for that exam.

Thanks, y’all

The greatest thing about this compo has been the community. You have no idea (or do you) how happy it makes me to see even the most perfunctory comments on my game like “excellent work for a first timer” or “could be really fun.” I know my game is far from perfect, but this praise makes me so, so happy. Thank you so very much everyone.

So we look to the future

Now I want to see how this game is when it’s finished, so here’s my plan:

I will release three versions of this game, all accessible on GitHub.

1. Original. The Ludum Dare version with all it’s bugs and inconsistencies.
2. Bug fixed. No new features, just playable; tutorial won’t break the game, turrets go where they’re supposed to, etc.
3. Final. This version will be the actual vision I had for the game. It will have some features I didn’t get to put in like a story and endgame.

I will also spend this weekend reviewing games because, by gor, I want other people to be as happy as I am.

So once again, everyone on the net and everyone reviewing games, thank you so, so very much. Thank you for making me the happiest person in the world just by saying “good job.” I worked really hard but it was so worth it, guys.

Thanks.

Tags: postmortem

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2012 at 1:09 pm and is filed under LD #23. 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.

Happy to be participating in my second ludum dare.

This time around i’m going to be working in Flash. Going to be potentially using:

• Code: Flash, Sublime, FlashDevelop
• Graphics: Adobe Flash, Illustrator, Photoshop, Edge Animate
• Sound: Ableton, Audacity

Here’s the first post in my LD27 project. I’m going to be working in 2d for this game, using Unity with 2d Toolkit and 2d Collider Gen. I’m hoping to grab an idea or mechanic early and bring it to some interesting place within the first day. I’d like to spend about a day doing art and sound design so the end product will be somewhat simple but hopefully very cohesive.

There’s something important to me in a logo. It’s always one of the first things I inevitably end up working on with any project. The name is of course equally important. This one is going to be Ochre.

I’ve got most of the basic mechanics that I planned out at the start implemented and they’re interacting in some unexpected fun ways. I’m definitely having fun screwing around with what i’ve made so far which is definitely a good sign. I spent a bit more time than I probably should have on the a simple dialogue system, but I think it will be worth it once I finally get around to design the actual game.

I’ve got all the simple plants implemented along with resources. I’ve just got to implement some more complex plants and then I can start designing.

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to say we are super excited to get started today (US time) on this amazing game jam.

Good luck to everyone!

Ben