Here is a little mockup and logo!

HaxeFlixel hacks

Seriously though, I’m gonna have to go and make some messy hacks in the engine as a quick fix for some sprite jittering. I’m meant to be pushing a proper fix for that at some point. I’ll do it on Monday.

Not that the players will have much of a chance to look at it. This stuff appears at the beginning of the game to provide contrast and then isn’t really seen again. Perhaps I’ve misplaced some time, but hey.

I’m running several hours behind where I’d like to be, but at least I there is some kind of challenge, now.

Who knows . . . perhaps it was too ambitious to try to create a Halloween game two weeks before Halloween? Come October 31st, we had a rough but “finished” game, but boy did we underestimate how much effort it would take to actually get it on stores.

Rather than rushing out a broken, unbalanced game, we decided to give it a little more thought and care.  Since officially failing the October challenge, we fixed a tonne of bugs, improved the balance, added a bunch of crazy easter eggs, leaderboards, and prepared it for submission to google play, the apple app store, the amazon app store, and a flash web build. (Got to love haxe!)

And at last, one month late, Werewolf Tycoon is available for free on Google Play! (http://joecreates.co.uk/werewolftycoon) Submissions for the Amazon and Apple app stores are pending review, but all the actual work is done.

It feels great to complete something, and Ludum Dare really helps provide the extra motivation to do that. However, if like us you fail to meet a deadline, do not give up! After all, deadlines are more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules. Or is that the pirates code? I forget.

Oh, and of course . . . I’m in!

Progress on a mockup. I have also done a bit of music.

Admittedly, it’s not at all the game I had in mind, but it’s getting there. I would like to run with this dragon thing and see what else I can do with it!

In.

Language: Haxe
Engine: HaxeFlixel
Art: PyxelEdit, Photoshop CC
Audio: Reaper
IDE: Flashdevelop
Notebook: Black n’ Red (A5)
Respiration: Aerobic
Distractions: 1x Cat

And, assuming I have time to get something in here . . .
Base Code: https://github.com/JoeCreates/LudumBase

This was my seventh Ludum Dare. I always aim for the compo, though for my last couple of entries I ended up overflowing into the Jam. I’d only failed to finish once before (Ludum Dare 33), and it felt pretty terrible. Not only was it the first time I had failed to finish, but I also felt like what I had produced was not worth using.

Once again–Ludum Dare 35–I did not finish, but this time I feel quite differently about it. I could have gone into the Jam, but realistically I know that would not have helped. I still had some fundamental issues to fix and was far behind where I needed to be.

In the first morning I produced a rough mockup. My thinking was that if I kept to low resolution silhouettes, I could save some time on art compared to my usual style. It didn’t really work out. It didn’t do any art beyond this, but it’s pretty clear is wasn’t going to be a simpler task than usual to complete.

Following that, I produced some music. It’s very rough but I was pretty pleased with it for how quickly I put it together.

Finally I came to implementing my shapeshifting mechanic idea, which is perhaps the most ambitious I have attempted in a Ludum Dare. Having not completed any new level design or art for this jam, here is a demonstration of the machanic in my LD32 game, Fathom, alongside a gif showing the original LD32 mechanic.

One issue I have with Ludum Dare is that it often leaves me with an idea I really want to work into a full game, and finding the time for that is very hard. Each Ludum Dare seems to add another game to my todo list, and Fathom is already on that list! However, I feel this new warping mechanic suits my plans for Fathom very well, both in terms of story and gameplay. I have many ideas for variations on this mechanic, and many ideas for puzzles.

Unlike in LD33, then, I feel I have actually spent my time in a useful way. Furthermore, I am newly inspired to do more work on Fathom!

I pretty much started sketching and hoped an idea would come. Two hours later and I finally think I have something that could work. It's not even a platformer!

It's been too long since I finished one of these! Had to miss many and those that I didn't I wasn't able to finish for various reasons.

Looking forward to finally being able to give one my full attention again!

Code: Haxeflixel + Lycan Art: PyxelEdit + Photoshop Audio: Reaper

I'm still doubting myself about this game idea, but here is a quick demonstration of creating and killing clones with some beautiful placeholder art.

It's a long time and many failed attempts since my last finished LD entry. My last entry was "LongBeard" for LD34, and my last finished compo entry, "Spiral Wings" for LD 31.

Approaching the compo deadline, I had barely an hour left to design the levels, having spent most of the jam implementing the core features, creating assets, and overly polishing things which didn't need polishing. I thus had the difficult decision of either cramming in some rough design based on my notes, or waiting a day to give it more thought and also flesh out the art a bit more.

In the end I crammed, but I have a million more ideas for where to take this. I already started and dropped a whole handful of features when I realised I wasn't going to have time to complete them.

The end result maybe feels a little rough compared to where I could get it with another 24 hours (or months), but I'm pleased and surprised that it seems to work at all!

I hope you enjoy playing World Collector: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/world-collector

Spoilers ahead, so if you haven't played it yet, check out World Collector.

I had been fiddling around with trying to get "power circuits" into the game for longer than I would care to admit. My self-imposed deadlines for implementing the feature were no match for the thought that with just 10 more minutes I could get them working. Alas, I could not get them working, but rather had to abandon the feature and start designing the levels with one hour until submission.

Fortunately I had some notes made on Friday evening and had at least a vague idea of what I would be doing.

Key goals:

• Introduce concepts gradually with each new world discovered
• Tease with elements you cannot yet reach but will have to return to later
• Have the final goal be teased from the very first world
• Have multiple paths possible too allow for player creativity
• Make sure the player can't get stuck somewhere!

World #1 Panic status: Relaxed

Here the objectives are simple. Firstly we need a new world to collect. During the intro, the first piece is collected simply by running, so this is an opportunity to introduce jumping. Secondly, we tease the final goal of the game with the abstract frog-like creature in an unreachable part of the map. I placed the entrance for this right in a corner to make it easy to avoid accidentally granting access to this room too early when making later worlds.

One final consideration with the first world was to ensure that the player started very centrally for the aesthetics as you drag this first world into the void.

World #2 Panic status: I'm fine

Here I wanted to introduce the spikes to indicate the potential danger of exploring further. I also wanted to, once again, tease a later goal that could not yet be reached. I also wanted to introduce early the fact that you would need to remove rooms in order to proceed, and to do this I made sure there was no option but to go back out to the left into the first room. This was to ensure that I didn't accidentally teach players the idea that it would be possible to proceed simply by adding rooms until too many worlds were complicating it and making it harder to realise that this isn't the case.

World #3 Panic status: Uh... how did it get to that time?

Here I wanted to introduce a little more complexity, including the button and door mechanics. On my first draft I actually had a world piece behind this door, and the moving platform was moving from the start. It wasn't until a later that I came back to it to turn it into a button for the moving platform. I put the moving platform in knowing that I would eventually want it to be used to hit a ceiling button, but I didn't know the details about that yet. I had to be careful not to accidentally allow access to the froggy room.

World 4 Panic status: GO! GO! GO!

I had a lot of things still to fit in, and very little time to do them. I ended up using this room to fit quite a lot in quickly which may otherwise have been split into multiple rooms. Firstly, I made a quick and cheap way to allow access back to the button in world 3. I also wanted to introduce the idea of reusing the same world multiple times, so this is the first room in which it is possible to exist from one side and go straight back in on the other, albeit with some obstacles block your way. I knew I had a moving platform that needed to be useful at some point, so I threw in the ceiling button and the obstacle it allows you to cross. As an afterthought I threw on a crate to make sure players realised these could be moved as soon as they touched it as I was intending to use that mechanic again later to make the final spike jump. Finally, I wanted to make use of that earlier piece that we couldn't yet reach in room 2, which was achieved twith the top left exit.

The spike zone here did not turn out as planned. My intention was that multiple crates could be borrowed from other worlds to get across safely. I carefully placed the room to make it near impossible to jump straight across. There were two big problems with this. The first is that I hadn't implemented the worlds in such a way that their objects could persist when they are deleted, and I certainly didn't have time to implement that now. Such would also lead to the potential of getting the player stuck behind walls of crates. Secondly, I didn't have time to implement checkpoints upon entering a room. I had only implemented the far less forgiving reset back to world 1. This was especially bad thanks to the unintentional long routes required to get around to this point! This meant that dying on these final spikes was not only more likely, but also far more brutal. This remains to be the biggest issue I have with the game as a whole.

In summary this world was very much a case of trying to get as much off the todo list as possible, because I wasn't sure how many more I was going to have time to make!

World 5 Panic status: Emergency mode activate!

At this point I have about 10 minutes remaining, and a quick look over my current tiles reveals that I have no way to complete the game and the path to to complete it would be quite complicated. I also had multiple world tiles in the world which I definitely wasn't going to be able to create. This is when I cut one world and replaced the tile in the right of world 3 with a button to activate the lift, which in hindsight, was a much better idea anyway!

I had to come up with a cheap and easy way to ensure the final piece could be reached and that the lift could be used. The crossroad piece let me do this. To highlight the uniqueness of the room, I decided to give it a totally different style, made entirely out of the grey blocks. So yeah, this room was a bit of a hack, however, I am totally happy with how this turned out. If I'd had an extra hour to make the levels, I probably wouldn't have had this room as I would have had time to design more intricate ones. I'f I'd had two extra hours, then perhaps I actually would have used it, with time to realise such a room makes for a nice unique reward toward the end of the game which unlocks a lot of new potential routes!

World 6 Panic status: AAAAAAHHH!

All I needed now was a way to get back to the froggy-thing. This was a quick and simple path which could go from the first room to the frog as a kind of victory lap.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this didn't exactly go to plan, but with the odd hack and a bit of luck I landed on something that not oly could be played from start to finish, but that I was actually mostly pleased with.

I'm very much looking forward to continuing development on this alongside my current client work. Not only did I have to drop a whole load of features mid-jam, but I have so many ideas for where to take this. Ideas include the aforementioned power lines, mechanical structures which can be joined such as gears, themed collections of worlds, paradigm shifts where the rules of worlds change, e.g. having different shapes, filter doorways which limit which worlds you can use once you cross them.

I would also like to explore the idea of doing more detailed mostly hand-pixelled worlds in one of my usual non-rushed styles such as this:

I'm planning to continue to stream all development at twitch.tv/joecreates and also do a devlog on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/joecreates

It's been four years and four failed attempts since my last finished LD, so I couldn't be happier with this result!

The responses and feedback I've received have been amazing, thank you! Sorry to those mac users who still can't drag and drop worlds. I'll fix that soon as I schedule more time to continue developing this. I am very excited to continue working on this and have so many ideas to explore such as power lines, mechanical structures such as gears, themed collections of worlds, paradigm shifts where the rules of worlds change, e.g. having different shapes, filter doorways which limit which worlds you can use once you cross them, roller coaster tracks...

For anyone who is interested in following development, I'm planning to continue to stream all dev on twitch and will be starting a video devlog on youtube (although right now my only real video is the unofficial Ludum Dare theme tune! xD)

Twitter: joecreates Twitch: twitch.tv/joecreates Youtube: youtube.com/JoeCreates