This package was suspicious.
If I don’t find a way to increase the fun of the actual gameplay, it’s gonna be the most boring game I’ve ever made (and this is quite an achievement).
Anyway, everything is working as intended. Tomorrow I should do art and sound and try to create some challenge.
Some space vector station.
I’m entering the last phase of LD, the one when I’m just a sleeping zombie trying to press a button after another.
It still remains so much to do (what ? you don’t like my fantastic unicolor vector art ?), but for now, it will be the music theme writing. It’s usually a bit relaxing.
I hope everyone is doing great and keep going.
More fun than “firefighter simulator“, with more adventure than “farming simulator“, you can now live the daily routine of a space postal service agent in :
A one button game :
Creating an easy usable interface is surely something really complicated, therefore a one button game was quite a challenge for me. I wasn’t really inspired by the theme and when I though about a one button game, the conveyor belt came automatically in my mind.
I think the result is correct since I succeed in not trying to put too many actions on that unique button, but instead I’ve created various situation changing the purpose of the few actions.
A meaningful decor :
During the first brainstorming, I had planned to put all the info needed by the player in a sort of big display in the background. And to put in the foreground a dummy control board with fake lights and displays. When I start to really designing the scene, I realized that it would give some stupid result to concentrate all the data in one angle and to drive away the attention of the player with a lot of useless items.
It was way more natural to use the control board for what it should be, and I reckon it works pretty well.
Coding graphics :
My weakest point will ever be the graphic part. One of the unique way I can create graphics is by code (drawing is not for me). On one side, vector coded graphics are quite easy to modify when they are done, but on the other side they are really long to write and they are not really nice.
As a result, I really lost a lot of time writing every assets, I wasn’t able then to add all the graphics I wanted (I’ve planned some explosions and particles effects), and the overall graphics are pretty bad.
Difficulty curve :
Since my second LD, I’m struggling with difficulty curves, I’m always doing it wrong. That time wasn’t an exception. I’m always divided between making something challenging, but not too difficult since LD audience doesn’t have much time to play a unique entry. The game results really easy at the beginning and the last level is too hard. The player misses the feeling of progression, of improvement of its skills.
Not in the mood:
I know it will sound impossible, but I wasn’t really motivated for this LD, and it had an impact on the game. The direct consequence was that I was less efficient, it took me more time to do things. Thanks to my past LD I know a bit how to deal with time management (I found LD is an incredible way to learn about time management), therefore I succeeded in finishing my game, but it’s lacking a lot of stuff (animation, descent graphics, descent sfx, descent intro/outro).
Here is a personal selection of games from this 28th edition:
Compo
Jam
I’m in!
I woke up at 05:30 (GMT+2) and saw the theme, I immediately got an idea and wrote the whole project on paper, then I went back to sleep.
Now I’m about to start and I’m browsing other jammers posts while taking breakfast, it seems that space and planets isn’t such an original idea 😀
Language: Haxe
Framework: OpenFL
IDE: FlashDevelop
Graphics: Code (GIMP/Inkscape if needed)
Audio: Reason, Soundforge
Timelapse: Chronolapse
basecode: here
Space travel seems so easy when planets are connected
I shouldn’t have skipped the last LD, I lack practice in writing fast code and I’m making a lot of stupid mistakes which results into a significant loss of time.
Anyway, basic interactions are working, I’ve started the data structure, but the main game mechanic is still far from being ready.
Ludum dare is always a great time, although I reach a certain point where I feel some frustration about submitting an unfinished product. But the main responsible for this, is obviously me.
Fuga: a game about space, chemical elements, and music.
For this edition, it was like someone had asked me to make a selection of the biggest mistakes a jammer can do.
↓ READ THE REST ↓
Never validate an idea before breakfast
I woke up at 05:30(GMT+2) and I started to think about the theme. I quickly came with an idea of exchanges between planets (a lot of us had the same kind of idea). It sounded cool, I drew some sketches for the GUI, I already had some melody in mind, and I had some ideas about some cool GFX I could have experimented.
I went back to sleep, and I started to work immediately after a short breakfast, without rethinking the project at a high scale for the whole day.
At the end of this first day, I had my “engine” and some graphics, here I asked myself a question: “what exactly is my game ?”
I just realized that my game was barely one. I completely forgot to check if actions made by the players were fun, if the goal proposed was motivating. I freaked out a bit, and found some safety solutions, which implied to cut some of the mechanics I had already worked on and to reform the code structure. And here comes the second point.
Time == code == bugs == loss of Time
Those changes, which should have brought some more life into the game, they also brought some errors (modifying a weak code can be dangerous). In addition, due to distraction and exhaustion, I also create some stupid bugs. I had the feeling I spent my whole day correcting stupid things.
This was not really cheering me up, furthermore I was loosing a lot of valuable time. As a direct consequence, I had to make some cuts – you usually make cuts during a LD – but here I sacrificed important things, such as clarity, coherence and fun.
(Re)Doing everything from scratch
To start from nothing is interesting in term of creativity. I don’t feel limited by the already existing code, I think I’m more creative in those circumstances. So it’s quite positive.
But redoing everything each time, this is really absurd, boring and time consuming, especially when talking about GUI elements. The problem is I don’t know If I will ever find the courage to make those damn Buttons and DialoguesBoxes in a nice reusable way. In conclusion redoing everything is a serious loss of time when you have only 48 hours.
A nice LD afterall
Even with all this dark forces playing against me, I still managed to have a fun and nice week end. My game, even if not what I had in mind, is unique and playable. I’ve spent some nice moments staring at my code and solving some problems I never encountered before. And now, I’m playing some fantastic games and meeting kind people.
For all of these reasons, it’s ok for me to not make a great Ludum Dare game.
tl;dr
Thought of a game idea, but not of a complete gameplay.
Had to make late changes which creates bugs and errors.
Run out of time because I use it poorly.
I had fun making this game and I spent a nice week end 😀
Tags: LD30, post-mortem
Here is a personal selection of games from this 30th edition:
Compo
Jam
