Hi everyone! I just finished submitting my first Ludum Dare submission, for LD48-23: “Tiny World”.
I built my game, Bactarium, in Game Maker 8.1 Professional.
I blog about game maker, game design, programming, and my other projects over on my own site, csanyk.com. Drop me a comment if you played my game, and let me know what you thought!
Tags: LD #23 - Tiny World
I’ve written an extensive 3-part postmortem on my web site, narrating my thought process as I worked through the weekend on my compo project, and describing in detail some of my programming techniques (no code, download my source to see that).
Here’s the uber brief synopsis:
What went well:
What went wrong:
What I’d like you to know:
Tags: Bactarium, Chris Sanyk, postmortem
Ran through the game again and noticed a few bugs, which are now fixed:
If you’ve already downloaded it and played it before, it’s worth downloading again and trying it out with the fixes. Gameplay should be a good bit more challenging than in 1.0.
Tags: Bactarium, bugfix, Chris Sanyk
I’ll be participating again this LD48! Really looking forward to having a productive weekend and spending time with my Cleveland Game Developers friends at our site. I’m curious what the theme will be this time around.
I see other folks have user pics. I can’t seem to find where to add mine. How do you do this? I would haev thought it would be under my WP profile, but I see no options for it there. I’ve looked for instructions on the wp help pages, and have given up trying to find it.
If you know how to do this, please drop a comment. Thanks!
Update: Solution is to use gravatar. Thanks to everyone who posted an answer!
A few months ago, I started a wiki to try to organize my notes and thoughts about audio and music in the context of game design/development.
What I have up is currently quite limited, but I hope to add and develop it in time. And since it’s a wiki, it’s easy to help contribute.
I’m at the space for the Cleveland Game Devs LD Summer Jam, ready as I’ll be for Theme.announce();
Got a while to wait yet.
I’ve had an idea for a game in the back of my head since winter that fits the evolution theme. I’m going to try to implement a mini-version of it in 48 hrs. May end up taking 72, will see.
Tags: evolution
Oooonnnnn second thought, mmmmmaybe not.
Still thinking.
It’s not much at all yet, but I have an alpha build of my entry for Ludum Dare 24: Evolution up and running in HTML5.
It’s not really playable yet, at the moment I’m just working out some motion and object prototypes. Graphics are all placeholders. You’re always in the center. Move with the arrow keys. Left/Right turns, Up moves forward.
Somehow, I’m doing another game with a microorganism theme. LD#23 was Bactarium, LD#24 will be called Karyote. You control a single celled organism that mutates as you play.
I still need to figure out what exactly you’re doing in the game, but I have some ideas that I haven’t implemented yet, so I’m a little further along than it looks as far as the concept goes. I’m designing as I go, mainly this is design by fiddling around. That’s a dangerous way to go on any project, but when I don’t have much of an idea to begin with, I find it’s one of the most reliable ways of getting me going. Hopefully I’ve learned enough lessons from previous projects to avoid messing up the code architecture, so debugging and feature changes don’t turn into a nightmare toward deadline.
Tags: Chris Sanyk, Cleveland Game Developers, evolution, Karyote
It’s still too basic and not yet the design I’ve settled on, this is just some elementary building block behavior that tests basic functions enough so I can keep going.
Getting closer to being ready to attempt to implement a little AI behaviors and start linking them up to create evolutionary behavior. I hope to be able to replace the shitty placeholder sprites with something real once I have core gameplay up.
Tags: Chris Sanyk, Cleveland Game Developers, Game Maker Studio, html5, Karyote
Development has been going slowly. Haven’t had a clear vision for my game concept or design, so things are nebulous.
Also, I’ve attempted to implement a non-intuitive motion system for my project, which allows me to have an effectively giant room very cheaply, but makes complex motion pretty confusing. Or maybe I’m just not used to thinking this way yet. I like the fact that I’m pushing myself to doing something I haven’t tried before, but it means I can’t work quickly, which is rapidly eating my project scope.
I also spent too much time messing around with creating a particle system. I got it figured out and working, then realized that, due to the way I’m handling motion, I can’t use them for what I wanted to. I may end up doing something else with them, and in any case I am interested in doing more with particle generators in my other projects, and have been meaning to play with them more for a while now, so I’m glad I am getting to now. But it’s looking like this is going to be more of a Learning Dare than a Ludum Dare. I’m hopeful I can still produce something that feels “complete” if small.
I’ve posted a postmortem of my LD48 #24 project, over on my ludumdare.com journal.
After poking around for my old journal entries on ludumdare.com, I think they may purge content, so in case that’s true I’m mirroring the post below, after the cut:
I’m not super happy with the way things went this time around, I’ll just say that up front. I don’t want to be too negative, and any weekend I spend doing game development is better than just about any other weekend, but I was hoping for a lot more, and I’m just disappointed in myself.
Not a whole lot.
I did finish and submit my game 5 min before the compo deadline ended, thereby salvaging a weak type of “success” at the end. I could congratulate myself, but the outcome just wasn’t what I had hoped, and I’d be bullshitting myself if I said I was satisfied with the outcome. I could have just decided to make this a Jam entry instead, and used the additional 24 hours to make the game closer to what I think it could be, but realistically I won’t be able to do that since I have work tomorrow.
The last 5 hours of the compo were intense. I finally got into the zone and was able to focus, but I’m afraid it wasn’t enough to do more than be able to say I managed to make a game that didn’t feel incomplete, even if it did feel like a weak and junky game that I didn’t like very much. I would have had a much better compo if I could have felt this way from the very beginning.
I did get to put music into a game. I spent a couple hours with iNudge.net creating a really simple loop in a really easy to use sequencer that doesn’t have near as many features as I wish it did, but was easy to use. I had to record the music as it was playing, rather that do a cleaner, better quality export directly out of iNudge, because lol they don’t have that feature. But it’s really easy to click a few random cells in the sequencer and generate a loop that sounds like weaksauce synth music that’s not too annoying on repeat play and takes zero talent to create. This is encouraging, because I really do have zero talent when it comes to music, but unfortunately I still feel there’s a wide gulf between me and being able to create anything better than this kindof “random junk when looped sounds like it could be easily mistake for music” approach to making a BGM.
Lol, just about everything.
I was not thrilled about the theme this time around. Last time I wasn’t very inspired by “Tiny World” either, but in comparison I was at least able to come up for an idea for my Tiny World game in the first three hours, and spend the rest of the time working on building it. This time, I had a couple ideas, but they were too big to fit into a weekend. Evolution is a big, complex thing, and not easy to fit into a 48-hour game.
Additionally, I kept banging up against the fact that if you try many of the obvious ways to gamify evolution, it stops being evolution. Evolution is not:
Idea 1 was a concept for an RTS I came up with last fall, but haven’t worked on at all yet, plus some features that make the game units more evolution-y. This was way too much to attempt in 48 hours. I’d first need to create a simulated ecosystem, then make it into an RTS game, and then add genetic algorithms into my unit spawning code… Yeah, that might be a multi-year project.
I still want to do this game, but I’m not sure that Game Maker is well suited to it, so it may need to wait until I feel comfortable enough in a different framework to try to pull it off.
Idea 2Idea 2 was a series of encounters between your creature and a randomly generated creature. You choose to fight or mate. If you fight, whoever wins is the “fitter” and survives. Regardless of whether “you” win or the other creature wins, you control the winner of the fight into the next round. If you mate, your traits are combined with the traits of the other creature, and a new creature is created, which you then control in the next round. This seemed like a pretty interesting idea, but again, I didn’t feel I could fit it into 48 hours. Just coming up with a decent random creature generator would have been a lot to ask for. If I’d done this, I would have made the fighting abstracted, not controlled, like a stat-based text + flashcard graphics game.
I might still try to implement this idea, who knows. The more I think about it, the more promise I think it has to be a fun game, if done properly. It’d be kindof useful to have a creature system and a random creature generator under my belt. If I didn’t have to worry about controlling the creature and animating the graphics, it seems reasonable that I could complete it in a short time. Maybe that’ll be my next mini project.
Idea 3Idea 3 was the one I ended up going with. But what I ended up completing isn’t quite the Idea 3 that I started out with. My initial concept was to make a game where you’re a single-celled organism, and you go around eating food. When you eat enough, you mutate into a new creature, based on the types of food you found/selected. Once you’ve mutated, your old form becomes available as a AI-controlled enemy in the game. This idea had cool potential in that it allowed the player to kindof design the game as they played, and also as they got better at the game, it would challenge them with their own built-up character.
I wanted to do something that would generate new graphics as you play, so that when you mutate, you never know what you’re going to see, and it would always be a fresh experience for the player. Creating new sprites on the fly isn’t too difficult in Game Maker, but coming up with drawing methods that would result in controlled randomness was a hard thing to wrap my head around. I wanted to have the game draw a random shape and attach it to the existing sprite, and I couldn’t figure out how I’d determine where the edge of the existing sprite was, or how I’d know what the new sprite’s size would need to be in order to incorporate the new shape, and so on. I also needed to come up with some way of creating an AI that would learn how to use a randomly-generated creature in a manner which was reasonably effective and challenging and fun, pretty much no matter what the random generator came up with. That’s a lot to ask for for 48 hours, and I quickly saw that it would be well beyond my current abilities as a programmer to do something like that. I believe I could figure it out in about a week, since that’s about how long on average it takes me to figure out how to do something I have never tried before to do in Game Maker.
My fallback position was to a character who mutated, not graphically, but in terms of abilities. Unfortunately this is not too uncommon in videogames whatever their theme. Most games have a progression that you go through, gaining power and abilities as you go on. Thus, simply doing this would not feel sufficiently evolutionary. To make the mutations feel less like standard videogame power-ups, I decided to make them random, such that you might get better OR you might get worse in a given trait. Also, I made the mutations depend on the type of food you ate. So if you eat a lot of the thing that gives you Speed, your speed attribute will change by a wider margin; if you eat a lot of the thing that gives you health, your health will mutate more wildly, etc. I came up with this idea toward the end of the compo, a few hours before deadline, and it was the only thing that I implemented where I felt like I was “in the zone” getting things done at a fast pace and knowing what I was doing and what I wanted to do next. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a strong enough association between an enemy type and what it does for you. I don’t really feel like I have a good “system” of attributes, either — all I got done was max health, speed, and turn speed. I would have added more attributes if time had allowed, possibly Attack, Defense, some kind of shield or different attack modes beyond ramming. I wanted to get a bare minimum done to have a viable proof of concept, and that’s all I ended up accomplishing.
Sadly, not communicating the mutation graphically to the user is really disappointing and makes for a counter-intuitive game. You mutate, there’s a sound, and your abilities change but you look the same as you ever did. You end up just scratching your head. I wanted to convey things more through color, but I didn’t quite this implemented. That’s why most of the game is in black and white. What I did manage was that you turn more transparent when you’re closer to mutating, and you turn more red the more damaged you are. I had wanted to color code the enemies somehow, so you.
I did a lot of new things. I struggled with them, and didn’t end up accomplishing as much, and what I did end up accomplishing wasn’t as good as I wanted it. But I did do a few new things.
MovementGetting movement to work right was most of Friday night, once I started on my Idea 3 concept, which wasn’t until about 11pm or so. I wanted the game to feel like you were in an open, unrestricted space, and I didn’t want it to have boundaries. Creating a really big room wouldn’t have worked very well, and would have hurt performance. I elected to take an approach that is pretty counter-intuitive in Game Maker, which was to create a room that is only as big as the current view, put the player object in the center of the room, and when you control the player to move, it stays still, but everything else in the game moves in a relative way, giving the illusion that you’re moving. This was simple with static object that didn’t also need to move on their own, but it took a little bit of trial and error to figure out moving objects. I wanted to have things that moved in a straight line, and from there a progression from ellipses to spirals, which I got, then to undulating motion, which stumped me. I did also implement an AI (“Homey”) who homes in on the nearest object, and if I’d had more time I would have created something that went off in one direction, randomly turned around to a new direction and then went off in that direction. I spent a lot of time working on these behaviors, and I thought a simple progression that built up might be fun as well as simple to implement and give a sense of a path of evolution. Probably this would have been better if I’d designed my game to throw each type at the player one at a time, to create that feeling of progression, instead of all at once.
InheritanceI tried to do some crazy things with inheritance, not all of which was successful. I had created some motion classes which worked pretty well, and my intention was to create collision classes, which would randomly inherit one of the motion classes. That way, there would be different styles of interaction between the player and the different objects in the game. Some would be immobile, some would be pushable, some would be eatable, some would hurt you, and so on. And they were going to be color coded to help the player know which ones were safe/desirable to collide with and which ones to avoid. GML has a function object_set_parent() which I thought might have been useful, but I’d never used it before, and it turned out not to do what I had hoped. I was trying to get it to randomly re-assign a motion class as a parent to a collision class, and that would have given me a large combination of dynamically derived classes to throw in to the game, which could have been done in such a way as to convey a sense of evolution taking place as well. My objects in the game are really, really simple, as they currently stand, but I was hoping to introduce complexity through successive mutations, each round of mutation resulting in a blending of attributes from different classes into new classes, randomly creating new types of enemies. I think there is probably still a way to do this in Game Maker, as it is possible to generate a new object type at runtime, but the approach I was attempting was the wrong one, and due to my lack of understanding of a language feature I’d never tried to use before, I squandered too much time. Rather than trying to re-assign parents of existing classes, I should just have created new objects entirely.
Multi-platform buildsI had wanted to create a Windows, OS X, and HTML5 build for the game. In the end, I only manged to make an HTML5 game. For some reason, Game Maker Studio lost the ability to build this project to Windows along the way, and I couldn’t spare time to try to troubleshoot the issue. Since HTML5 is accessible to both Windows and Mac OS X users with no performance penalty, this isn’t too big of a deal.
DietI noticed on Saturday that I really didn’t feel so great. I think most of this is attributable to poor diet choices on my part, especially too much caffeinated soda. I think it’s very typical for people to load up on snack foods, caffeine, and sugar, and not plan or prepare real meals, because it saves time. This is just not a good idea. You should fuel your mind/body as you would for any other rigorous competitive event, such as rock climbing or a marathon.
SleepI did sleep pretty much normal. I was up until about 3:30am on Friday, but went to bed at around 11 on Saturday. My Saturday was almost a complete waste, though, I barely got anything done, felt like crap all day, and couldn’t focus. Sunday was more of the same up until about 4-5 hours before deadline.
Figuring out the motion trick thing was the one useful thing I learned this weekend. I learned a lot of “what not to do” also.
It was really nice being able to spend the weekend with the Cleveland Game Developers meetup members who showed up at our site at Shaker LaunchHouse. Extra special thanks to Dar Caldwell, Matt Perrin, and Steve Felix for putting the site together and for everyone who showed up, participated, and helped out.
Fixed a few issues with Karyote:
The disappearing food bug was the main thing. After playing for a few minutes, it seemed like everything disappeared. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Now you can play a lot longer. This is closer to the way it was meant to be all along.
[mild spoiler alert]: fully implemented the mote behavior. I don’t want to give it away, too much, but they now do something. OK, I’ll tell you, when you mutate, they mutate also, into one of the other food types that are present in the game.
Slightly improved the title screen by adding a larger title font. The old title text is now kindof a subtitle, I guess. I think it looks a lot nicer. Also added a graphic to the title screen which gives the controls, so you know how to play without reading the entry page. And added a timer to the Game Over to return to the title screen if you don’t start a new game after a few seconds.
Give it a try now:
The Windows build has nicer particle effects due to the way colors are rendered by the Game Maker runner in HTML5.
Tags: bugfix, enhancement, Karyote
As much as I’d like to, I really don’t have enough time to try out all the entries. Having a title or especially a main image that stands out really makes a difference. I have subjective taste and preference in the type of games I prefer, so if you happen to make a game that looks like something I’d like to play, obviously I’m more likely to play it.
How to do well:
If you took the time to write up a good description, I will give you the courtesy of reading it. I want to understand what I’m about to play before I start.
How to do well:
Describe the game in detail, especially how to play and what the goal is.
Also, be sure to describe your level of experience as a game designer/developer. I take this into account when offering feedback in my comments, but I try to score every game on an absolute scale. I try to be honest in my comments about what works and what doesn’t, because otherwise how else are you going to learn how to get better? But at the same time I don’t want to discourage someone new who may not yet have a lot of experience. If I do give you some negative feedback, keep in mind that the fact that you participated at all, and especially that you were able to complete a project in 48 hours is a real feat. Like finishing a marathon, it doesn’t matter if your time is world class, just finishing is an accomplishment to be proud of, and nothing I can say to you can to take that away.
Like the LD instructions say, if I can’t play it, I don’t rate it, leave a comment explaining the problem I had, and moved on.
If the game really looked good, I may come back and try again later to see if the bug might have been fixed. But it’s very likely that I won’t remember to do that.
How to do well:
The amount of time I give to a game depends a great deal on how good it is. I don’t have a lot of time to begin with, and if a game doesn’t give me a good first impression right away, I’m not going to give it very long before I give up on it. If I suck at the game at first, I’m going to keep playing it, but if the game sucks, I’m only going to give it a minute or two, tops, before giving up and going to rate it.
How to do well:
I take some time before I rate. I think it’s fair to let the experience sink in and waiting gives me a little time to collect my thoughts.
I have to rate every game according to a consistent scale, or else the ratings don’t work for comparing one game to another. I don’t always rate in every category. I generally try to, but if there’s nothing to rate, like if you have no sound in your game, I will not rate it for audio rather than give it one star. Unless of course the game is really hurting for lack of audio, in which case I might give it 1 star. It depends somewhat on how important I feel the thing that’s missing is to the success (or failure) of the game in question.
If I have anything at all to say about your game, I’ll leave a comment. I like to say what worked for me as well as what didn’t.
What else? Oh, I wish that LD would add a feature to the site so that when I submit my ratings, I have the option to share the game I played and my rating of it on social networks. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, whatever. We all have a lot more friends in our circles who play games than people who build and rate games for Ludum Dare. If we could harness our friends and get deserved attention to games that we enjoyed, it would really do a lot for our community. While I can manually share these games with my social networks, and do, I’d really like it if it were more convenient/easy to do so.
I’ve now published my 7th enhancement revision to Karyote.
A lot of bugs have been squashed, not much in the way of new features, but the game is starting to take the shape that I had wanted it to have all along. Now that I have the code I’ve written so far more or less bug-free, I am getting close to being ready to add the final features that I wanted the game to have. This makes me happy, because it’ll mean I can put down this project and work on some other ideas that I’ve been wanting to play with. It’s been interesting toying around with different mathematical models controling the game mechanics and figuring out what works best. I’m not entirely sure that I’d call my game successful, it feels like it needs something more, still. But I do feel like it’s been a worthwhile experiment at this point.
What will probably be the final release of my Ludum Dare 24 entry, Karyote is now up on my server. It’s quite a bit different, and much improved, compared to any previous versions which you may have played, so I encourage you to give it a try even if you’ve played the game before.
The Windows version is definitely the better of the two. The HTML5 version has some limitations with color blending and the hit detection has a bug due in GameMaker HTML5’s sprite creation which causes the collision mask to not be set properly. So play the Windows version if you can.
If you like the game or have any feedback to give me, please drop a comment here, or over at csanyk.com
Thanks to everyone who played!
I wasn’t sure whether or not I’d be doing LD25, but after I decided to organize the Cleveland Game Developers meetup for it, I’m looking forward to a weekend of no sleep and vigorous game development.
Hopefully the theme will be inspiring and I won’t have any major technical glitches.
My tools, once again, for this jam will be:
I’m also not sure what I want my goals to be for this jam. My previous games have featured microorganisms. I’d like to try something different with this one. I feel like I defaulted to microogranisms for LD24 because they’re easy to draw, and are simple enough animals that you can program them very simply. But I’d like to find ways of programming that makes other types of games possible for me to create in 48 hrs and that means figuring out ways to simplify other types of programming problems.
I’ve been reading a bit about how to implement platformer games in GameMaker, so perhaps I’ll attempt a platformer this time. I won’t make any final decisions before the theme is announced, because I think it’s important to allow the theme as much freedom to drive the design of the game as possible, but I guess I’m hoping for a theme that inspires me to attempt a platformer this time out.
We’ll see, I guess.
Tags: Cleveland Game Developers, csanyk.com, gamemaker, ld25
How much inspiration can you get just from a title? I’m reminded of the scene in Ed Wood, where Johnny Depp is trying to pitch his movie ideas, and starts just spouting off titles… “Bride… Of the Atom.” “Dr…. Acula.”
To that end, I give you the Video Game Name Generator:
A few coming-when? gems:
I think for LD25, I may have to see if I can get a good game idea going from one of these random titles, if I can make one fit with the announced theme.
Tags: videogame name generator