This was my first participation in Ludum Dare. I’ve known about it for a few years but never made the conscious decision to go for it. About a week ago I decided to start getting ready. I worked a few hours a day learning Love/Zoetrope but the majority of my knowledge was obtained during the Jam itself due to the unplannable nature of it all. You can play Flashpants here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=3958 (Windows/Mac/Linux) but read on to hear my thoughts.
What went wrong?
A lot. But not so much so until later on. I think in images and pictures so I had a plan from the start in regards to gameplay. It was similar in concept to those flash sniping games crossed with I-Spy. The play would move a spotlight which would reveal the colored/full image while the rest of the screen continued in the same outlined fashion as the current version is. Of course, I quickly found out that this was much more difficult than it sounds. I’m a novice programmer at best with no formal training (this was actually my first “completed” game) and I assume, with time, I could figure it out. The problem was that time is short. So I made the mistake of playing around with art, programming a few things here and there and generally just getting things up on the screen but not doing anything with them.
The inability to hide a majority of the screen pushed my game further away from the minimalism theme than I would have liked. The setting remained the same but the nature of that setting (without the selective showing) is extremely over the top – the opposite of what was asked. I chose to embrace it though, trying my best to pull humor from every little thing I could in the game. This culminated into disaster though. The Zoetrope framework both helped and hindered me a lot. It limited my imagination and implementation and my lack of experience compounded that. As of submission my game doesn’t really have a goal aside from “collect dealers.” I figure out some really interesting tempo changes and I believe it’s meritorious to the experience but if the gameplay is lacking the game fails.
I wanted to have the dealers spawn on a timer that adjusted for the speed. This meant that picking up the energy boost would make you move faster but at the same time the dealers would approach the loss number quicker. Unfortunately the Zoetrope timer system is designed in the there is an initial delay, but once it’s up the timer runs constantly. If I was on a different framework, if my brain wasn’t fried, if I would’ve found the hidden timer/factory(object reuse) tutorial during the previous week when I was trying to learn LOVE, blah blah blah. Essentially I was flip flopping between two inaccurate implementations that both had me banging my head on the keyboard.
What went right?
It was so hard to sleep when I just wanted to roll off my bed and keep working. Even though I had almost nothing in terms of gameplay I came into the second day excited and I worked with very few breaks for ~15 hours before submitting. I think distractions became easier to succumb to on the second day as opposed to the first but I actually worked much harder, knowing I had to finish. Even though I know my game is not a lot of anything, I’m proud of myself for actually doing it.
A lot of stuff just seemed to click. The character of Flashpants came out of nowhere but I had to do 3-4 iterations of his image to get the strobe to look right. I spent most of the first day on that tiny effect that really defines the game more than anything else. Realizing that I could change the music’s tempo and fit it into my already built code was another “click”. Trying to decided whether or not the dancers should have collision, if they should move randomly on both axes or just one, and other BIG gameplay factors were hard decisions that I kept putting off early on to get the game to “look right” and I think I would’ve been better off if I had decided on them sooner.
Conclusion
All in all I’m happy with just about everything. My vision adjusted along the way and the only true disappointment is the hindered gameplay goal. The design of the framework hurt me as much as my shoddy, quick, and unplanned implementation of it. It’s a real bitch coming from C# on Visual Studio with Intellisense to learning a engine and framework while you go in 2 days. I had fun though. Now I’m tired. Tonight we rest, tomorrow we start rating!