Finally I think I’m ready to enter for the first time.

tools:

flashdevelop (I’m going to make the game from scratch)

gimp

lmms

notepad/tiled for maps, probably going to be tiled just started using it and its amazing

and camstudio hopefully I will be able to timelapse the whole process

so far i finished collisions, level loading, sound, etc now to design the full game and get it done 😀

so after I finished collisions things just started to get real easy, finishing up font stuff and then on to more gameplay stuff

2 tile layers and an entity layer, the black box is the player

adding inventory and info

pretty much finished with all background stuff just working on gameplay now!

Timelapse of making in delusion

game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=11098

So the game didn’t turn out exactly how I wanted, had to cut out most of the ending so a lot of things are unexplained. For my first Ludum Dare entry I just wanted to see if I could do it from scratch, and I did mostly, so I’m happy 😀 I also wanted to do it as a forced as3 learning experience and I gotta say, I learned more in the last two weeks than I did in six months of trying to learn as3

Tags: timelapse

So today I’ve finally reached 100 titles rated, and out of all of that I’ve picked my 10 favorite games.

(in no particular order)

the most humorous game so far is:

To What a Mountain?, not much gameplay but a very funny game.

the most innovative games:

Phobius, the melting mechanic is  very nice.

Tiny Tim and Big Bill, playing 2 characters that rely on each-other, great idea

Recluse, probably the most original idea with the window control, I’ve never seen this done before.

The games I spent the most time on:

Tiny World, Big War, there’s no end to this game but it’s pretty addicting.

Tiny Domination, RTS, time consuming, addicting fun.

Electron Cloud, funny gameplay, socially awkward atom.

Greed Wars, I think I played this game for 4 hours or so, very fun and polished.

The most relaxing polished games:

Another Kind of World, nice pace, fun, great graphics.

Zephyr, addicting, calm, very nice graphics.

all these games are great and if you haven’t played them yet please go and try them out.

Post-Mortem:

In Delusion 

So it didn’t come out nearly as good as I thought it would, not because the ideas were bad, but because I didn’t have enough time to put them all together.

This was my first ludum dare so I wanted to try something I’ve never done before and thought, “Why not make a game from scratch?” this way I would learn new things and test my quick thinking abilities. Unfortunately my ideas for the game were almost completely incompatible with the way I was making it. What I did when the theme got announced was sit down and think for a bit. I wrote down a list of ideas that immediately came to my head and then when the list was complete, I crossed them all off.

I wanted to make something original, so instead of using an idea that first popped into my head I did the opposite. Anything that first popped into my head I didn’t do, because those are probably the same ideas that are popping into everyone else’s head.

The funny thing is all of the ideas that I wrote down/thought of were used. Every time I played a game that was on my list I chuckled a bit because I was surprised  how many people came up with the same ideas.

Anyway that was the big reason I wasn’t able to finish in time, after writing a list of what  not to do and after coding some base game logic I started writing down new things and came up with a rough outline for in delusion then I wrote a more detailed outline. At this point I was designing a heavily story based game for my first “2 day game engine”. Those ideas definitely do not fit together.

What went right:

Almost nothing, the only things that somewhat came through were the mood and the graphics.

What went wrong:

I had to redo collisions 3 times because I kept getting sidetracked writing story.

1 slide was unintentionally  being skipped at the end(Bill’s slide).

the slide idea was a last minute idea to broadly fit together as much as possible because I didn’t get to finish pretty much the last 75% of the game.

the inventory system randomly decided not to work properly after I put the slides in at the end.

What I learned:

Don’t expect a huge story to fit in a tiny “game engine” in 2 days.

Being original is good, but don’t get too carried away.

What’s next:

Right now I’m making my own flash engine and a remake of In Delusion is going to be the first game I make with it. This time I’ll put everything I planned in it and then some.

if you haven’t played my game yet, you can play it here

Tags: game reviews, post-mortem, postmortem, review, reviews