I’ll be giving this another go and try to get it finished on time!

Potential Tools: SFXR and BFXR, VS2008, Gimp, paint.net, Netbeans, pickle, graphicsgale, lmms

My game will probably be 2d and use c++ and opengl (maybe SDL) for rendering unless I find a simpler route.

It’s all done, minimal too.

You can play it at: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=16392

Ingame View

So I made a whack-a-mole game this time around.  Was it my original Idea? NOPE!.

You can try my game at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=16392

I can get to level 8 because I am a fan of Tontie.  I don’t think anyone can survive level 9.

What went wrong?

– Minimalism didn’t suit my over the top tower defense game idea that I wanted to write.  fooey.- I spent nearly 20 hours of the competition sleeping or doing other things because I was more anxious about a font system than I should have been.  In the remaining time, I spent nearly 20 hours building my framework and only 8 hours on gameplay and media creation and testing the core components to be sure the game performed well.

– This was my first time using SDL and I got stuck in the mindset of using colorkeyed bitmaps to do transparency.  In this age of anti-aliasing and alpha blending being prevalent in tools, this didn’t work out well as there were some artifacts left around the edges of my images.  As I added all of them late in the last day, there was not much time left to fix them.  I know SDL supports alpha channels in bitmaps but didn’t spend the time to simply convert the source gimp files into rgba bitmaps.

– Sound was a last minute endeavour as well, throwing in SDL_Mixer and some non-optimal BFXR sounds in over the last 20 minutes of the competition time.

– As it turns out, many people use laptops!  What a bad combination with a game that requires a number pad for optimal play!  ouch!  Lesson learned!

What went right?

– the framework appears to run solid with rendering tied at 60 fps and the logic running at 30 fps.

-I have a framework to build on/improve that I may use for the next LD!

– I am a fan of games that push a player into overload with a simple mechanic, not many mechanics that overload from the get go.  I am a fan of progressive difficulty and my game sits perfectly in this paradigm as it increments the level of difficulty every 30 seconds you survive.  I am still quite pleased with it, even if some say it doesn’t have the depth of some of the other games.   Who said games always have to have a story!?

What would I do differently?

– visuals and sound

– code wise: plan ahead more.  never really built texture animation into a game, or had to write my own font loader/text to screen stuff.

– in future, consider having a framework ready or using potentially something like unity that can offer web play.  Even as a windows game, the download and play bit is probably much more hassle than some want.

– google drive didn’t make the download button (bottom right) so readily apparent for people.  maybe I’ll use drop box next time.

– plan implementational details for my game more than just “this should do that” design.  knowing what lower level functions need to be added to the framework or 3rd party engine to support your game ahead of time can really shorten dev time in the compo.

TLDR:  first completed LD48, graphics and sound suffered. core performance is high.  DON’T agonize over things like “I have to build a font system?”  just sit down and start designing/coding it, it will go easier and faster than you expect!

Again, please try my game! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=16392

Ingame View

Tags: postmortem

I am in for Ludum Dare #27

I’ll use C++

Software: Vs.net 2008, blender, audacity, sunvox, sfxr, bfxr, the gimp 2.0, paint.net

I will use SDL and OpenGL

I have a light framework built from LD#26 ( http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=16392  )

that can be seen at https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7GcUQ-vqs2DcUluYUdGMjVUR2c/edit?usp=sharing

I’m in again!

Tools: Vs.net, gimp, sunvox, bfxr, sfxr, audacity, paint.net, SDL, OpenGl, OpenAL, Blender.

Language: C++.

Framework: LD28-framework

Tower Defense with a new twist. You need to power your towers or watch the enemy wipe you out!