It’s first time i’m participating in this.

Where i live it’s only morning. Theme opened at 6 a.m. in local time and i was so frightened i couldn’t asleep after checking it.

First thing that comes to mind is one screen arcade, and i’m not very good at them so i thought it would be something impossible to me.

But then i got an idea of the time manager- or quest-like game. Sounds much more understandable for me.

I have no idea will it work or will i finish it in time but i will do my best.

One of the complications is that English is not my native language and i’ll need a lot of texts.

Ok, good luck everyone. I promise myself to finish it and fight for it (well, with myself mostly, but still).

I can’t stop myself from posting this. One of the first icons for menu. 1 min in Photoshop.

I think it’s the best thing i’ve drew ever =D

No, really, i like this guy.

Work in progress.

Ah, i am so afraid of blaming on my understanding of the theme but i like this application of it.

The whole life of character on one screen via his activities in the Internet, messenger and games.

This will end up as a game or as my own OS =D

(Sorry for all possible language mistakes in this message)

Ok, I guess it’s time for my first post mortem.

It’s the first time I tried myself on Ludum Dare and it was intense. I never did something like that, that was the whole new experience and it was fun (including not-sleeping and not-eating parts =)).

Thank you all for your reviews and time spent in my game, when I published it I wasn’t expect any good comments – it still hadn’t story or normal user feedback.

That was so fun playing your games, reading your comments.

It’s a post about creation of Whole life on one screen.

How did my work process look like? (long post + bonus)

1. Idea. Well, it was strange. I have a big time difference with Ludum Dare “official timezone” and for me theme was announced at 6 a.m. At 6 a.m. I just opened my eyes, took my phone and checked it. I had no alarm or something, I just woke up at 6 somehow, with no intentions to sleep. After reading theme I start roaming around furniture and form the game idea in my head. I had only one (yep, this one) and I panicked a lot because of this fact. I even woke up my husband and told him my concept to check is it sane and ok for a game.

2. Code. The game is made with ActionScript 3.0 in Flash Develop. I used Starling + Feathers (it gave me a lot of UI opportunities). It was interesting to use  something familiar and discover new parts of it (I even found a bug in feathers). At first my code look nice but at third day I was desperate and was rushing questionable classes and code parts into it, well, I’m not very sorry about it, I will rework it anyway.

3. Graphics. I have a new wallpapers (not kidding, I set this picture as my windows background). I’m not an artist and I’m really happy I managed how to spend minimum time on making something that doesn’t make people scream. I love this MMO icon. In general, it took about 1 minute for each icon so it didn’t take any extra time and was fun. Like, look, it’s me, drawing icons =D

4. Texts. English is not my native language so I was frustrated from idea of writing a lot of messages on it. First pack was made for chat – it was easy, chat messages was based on idea of standard not-readable mmo messages like “wts GGD 5kk tp RD” so I quickly made a full chunk of this code with small amount of sane speech (messages about Mark was a reference to “Gamers” btw). For correct spelling all other messages I should say big THANK YOU to my US friends – Tami and Felipe, they checked everything came to my 2 a.m. insane mind and fixed a lot of ‘bugs’ in it.

5. Story. In my mind all this started from the story *sigh*. It should be game about guy who spent too much time in games and Internet and start loosing his friends and girlfriend. But at the end his best friend comes back with intervention and you decide what to do – skip raid or stay at home and lose last friend. Yep, it could be depressive and hard. Luckily or not but I hadn’t enough time for it and I just made a basis for game and tried to make it playable.

6. Planning. Nope. Obviously for my first game I wasn’t prepared and had no idea how much time will all the parts take. I failed at timing but not so much. At least I had enough done (and courage… or madness) to publish it. I’m so happy I made intro (tutorial part), without it, it looked weird and hard to play.

Result

I will definitely 1. finish it, 2. participate in the next Ludum Dare. It’s so much fun, so much adrenaline and three days that you will hardly remember (who needs alcohol, hah?).

Thank you all for reading this, for playing the game. Thank you, Ludum Dare creators for this experience. It was awesome.

Now, bonus for those who read this. Some blog themes from game (<theme>: <post title>):

[Themes that came from working]

“Droid OS”: “How to run Droid on your toaster”

“Jyawa”: “Jyawa memory leak on calculators”

“BrainThink”: “BrainThink as a main language”

[General]

“Politics”: “Some politicians got together. All taxes raised”

– “War somewhere. Everyone concerned”

“Cooking”: “Masterpiece with potatoes and cheese in the microwave”

– “Coffee as an universal meal”

“Gadgets”: “Smart robot as an excuse to stay in bed”

– “Watching movies on the tiny screen of your smart watch”

“Search inc” (check its logo on search page): “Search inc bought a new project. And an island”
–  “Search inc. Thinking about future. Sometimes”

“Blogging”: “New blog engine. Try another set of bugs”

– “Earn money with banners. Make people hate you”

“Money”: “Investing into potatoes”
–  “Storing your bank accout data on your desktop” (;))

It’s only half of all possible themes, so keep posting =)

Tags: bonus, fun, post morem, thank you

Ludum Dare 32 is close to the end and it’s time to get ride of the procrastination and summ up some parts of the work we done.

First of all our game was about robots. And Natasha did some nice job developing their appearance:

Here’s the sketch to the first comic line:

that ended up as this:

 

She even wanted to add a cover, something like this:

 

But we, sadly, didn’t have enough time for it.

I’m very happy we made special room design for the boss

 

Btw, the way dead robot looks like was actually the fun bug at first.

The point is that we made robot animations in Spriter that has its own export format that doesn’t work well with Dragon Bones I could use in program. So I tried third part library to parse it properly, but it didn’t understand the bones and robot animation ended up as a mass of body parts with only one leg moving. After some time of hysterical laughing we decided to use this image as a base for robot’s death.

 

As a programmer I should say that the hardest part for me was work with frames (we had very precise table of active and recovery frames amount for each animation) and AI. Mostly because I’ve never work a lot with both technologies. So it was hard yet interesting experience.

Most of my work you could see at my Twitch channel. I even got my first tiny achievement for streaming for 24 hours total.

stream

Sadly I managed to cut only couple of highlights and Twitch deleted all the videos (I didn’t know about “Save forever” option). I really hoped to save the whole process but now I have only first video that was saved on the computer by accident.

That’s it for now.

You can play and rate our game here:

> puch -s

As a bonus for the long post here’s our cool ending wallpaper:

(Sorry for possible language mistakes, English is not my native language)

I made it!

I posted my first Compo and third LD game!

Drawing sprites was fun. In fact, I’m a programmer and my graphic skills have always been somewhere between: “I can resize this photo” and “I can make a programm that draws this better than me”. But it ended up much better than it could be.

My monster is now yours.

If you want to check out the process, you can watch the videos from my channel:   DemyHallar

If you’d like to, you can play the game here

a-a-and don’t forget to rate it!

 

 

 

Tags: chaos, ludumdare33, monster

Oh, btw, yesterday I made a new logo image for the game, so here it is.

The game ended up as a pretty short one, and first thing to improve for the post-compo will be better items randomization and bigger table.

Anyway, the bonus level is nice and I can make some extra stuff based on it.

Feel free to review my game and comment on any possible improvements. (link)

Phew~

It was a big time. I participated in Compo, so I have two days of video of making the game. Here’s the day 1:

Have fun!

Play the game here: Room Chaos Monster

One way or another I ended up here alone this time. So I decided to convert it into my first Compo – personal mini challenge.

In short, it was like this:

(By the word “collisions” I mean the mechanics of the object’s borders detection and the collisions between objects)

 

– Woo-hoo! Ludum Dare tomorrow. I totally need to sleep well.

 

Day 1:

– Are you kidding me?! 3 hours of sleep because of sudden insomnia strike?

– Hello, stream, I’m your sleepy friendly ghost.

– What do you mean “no internet connection”?! OK, no panic, start it offline.

– Hi, welcome back, luckily I have only the game idea, let’s draw it!

– Lunch time!

– I nearly made these collisions.

– I nearly made these collisions.

– Lunch time? No? OK.

– Let’s just call these good collisions and keep going.

– Yay, my own sprites. Me is drawing! I don’t even want to burn these down.

– I nearly made these colli… Anyway it looks better with the sprites.

– Cut scenes! I’ll just ignore the fact that I don’t have the finished game, play it cool.

– Looks nice, next task: don’t fall asleep on the keyboard.

 

Day 2:

– Morning, guys! Let’s finish it!

– Yay, it’s actually very simple.

– Damn, it’s actually very simple. I need to make the bigger game.

– Lunch time!

– Or… Maybe I’ll finish the game and make a bonus? Something in-between?

– Main part is done. Looks like it even works.

– Bonus level!

– Bonus level that works and actually gives the fun!

– I made these collisions! I made the z-sorting! I’m unstoppable! Let’s finish it gloriously.

– OK, let’s post this. The easiest part – write down the description. Right? Oh…

– Posted!

– Hr-r-r-r… Zzz…

 

Day 3, bug fixing:

– I nearly made these collisions…

 

 

P.S.: you can play the game here

Time lapse of the 1st day of the work process here