Alright, it’s not too special, but it’s the first time I’ve ever made one for Ludum Dare, so I wanted to take a picture to commemorate the occasion.

So my Dare game blossomed into a Jam game as I suspected it would. That’s okay, it’s a fun idea and I’m glad I get to clean up a few rough edges. I’m nearly done now, just doing a couple of final tweaks.

I don’t have any snazzy animated gifs, but you can check out the music I made for it: LINK

The first two tracks are improvisational piano, and the second two are short little sequenced ideas.

Now I’m going to go eat something. I’m starving.

Play it!

If this looks adorable to you, you should probably play my game.

My game “Only One Chance” is about robots in love and it’s cute! You should check it out: BOOM!

GOOD STUFF

• Consistent mood. I was really satisfied by how all parts of the game work together to create a mood. After composing the main theme on piano, I realized that it would be really nice if ALL the sound was played on the piano, so all of the short sound effects are little arpeggios or what have you on the piano too. The art started out much moodier and darker, but as I figured out what kind of game it was going to be, it became brighter and more charming, which fits really well imo.
• Game as experience. This ties in with my last bullet, but I was thinking about writing games that were coherent experiences that try to express a certain emotion rather than a bunch of features tied together. I really want to make more games like this.
• Aesthetics over features. In my past games, I’ve had a habit of adding new features rather than polishing old ones. Right when I started this game, I decided to focus on aesthetics over adding new features.  That means that the cannons animate, the cannonballs explode in beautiful particle explosions, random yellow particles float in the background (I don’t know what they are, but they look nice), there’s a title screen (the first time I’ve ever added one), etc. I’m very pleased with the overall effect.
• Let the game develop itself. At first I wanted something dark and moody and atmospheric. This was my guiding idea for the first 8 hours or so. But I had problems – I couldn’t think of any way to make that fit the theme. I was also thinking about giving music more than just a background role when I developed the idea that you could have two different things that play different melodies, and when you bring them together the melodies fit together. I thought it could be some sort of music based atmospheric platformer game. I thought more and realized it was a really nice metaphor for love – two people that both have a song that are incomplete without each other. Once I came up with that, I knew I had to use it. So my working idea until the end of the first day was that you would be some sort of robot cupid that would solve puzzles to bring girls and guys together.
  But then after the 24 hour mark I realized that there was no way that I could make a bunch of guy/girl pairs, corresponding theme songs, and level puzzles. I was way overscoping. Plus I was noticing that the interactions I wrote between you and the first girl were really adorable, so I just made it a straight up love story between you and her. And that ended up working really well.
  I thought this gradual strategy of “being guided towards what the game wants to be” seemed to work very well. I wouldn’t have come up with the main idea otherwise.

COULD-BE-BETTER STUFF

• Forces outside my control. I was feeling pretty awful during at least 50% of Ludum Dare. I really think that I could have squeezed this into a 48h game if I had been feeling better – but I wasn’t. There’s not much I can do about that, though.
• The music. The music is certainly not bad, but it was all done improvisationally in the space of like 20 minutes and could have been a lot better if I had bothered to sit down and work at it. I was feeling bad though, and was having difficulty concentrating on it. There were also like 2-3 beautiful themes that I just ran out of time to include in the game. A definite goal for next time is to spend longer on music, and to make a game that is more receptive to multiple music themes.
• Difficulty. Though it wasn’t really a huge problem (no one has really complained), I was surprised to find that the game was a lot harder than I thought it was. I’m constantly learning in Ludum Dare to take how hard I think a section/puzzle is and multiply it by 2, and that’s how hard everyone else will find it. I obviously have a huge advantage, as I’ve played my game way more than anyone else has

GOALS FOR NEXT TIME

• Improve graphics. I’ve improved from last time, but I think I could do much better with more practice. I felt like this was holding me back. I was slow and the results could have been better.
• Spend longer on music.

Play the game!

Mainly cuz I’ve been spending the last couple of hours trying to get Phaser to do simple things like reading tilemaps and so forth.

Why do I insist in doing LD in a new framework every time I start? Just imagine all the things I could accomplish if I wasn’t so dumb. <_>

Link to watching me suffer: https://github.com/johnfn/ld29

It seems it is my curse to always create terrible graphics.

ALWAYS

Progress is being made, but good lord am I behind.

Definitely not finishing this time. I was way too ambitious, I had way too little time, and for some reason I decided to use a framework (Phaser) I didn’t know, and language I sorta knew (Typescript). On top of that, I had no starter code like I normally do, so even at the halfway point I was only implementing really basic stuff. It’s kind of a shame as I though that my game concept was quite interesting.

Phaser was really enjoyable to use though, though the compile-from-typescript workflow isn’t really ideal.

I did finish a pretty good song though – I think my biggest disappointment is that I won’t be able to see how I’d place in audio, but oh well.

hmmmmm. Well there goes all my ideas about platformers right out the window.

Can’t wait!

Here’s some code that I’m releasing: https://github.com/johnfn/BaseUnityProject

It’s a simple collision engine and map manager for Unity.

Yeah I haven’t done any art at all… but at least you can see the scoping mechanism of my gun. Which is not that unconventional.

But if the light green square is the main character, why does there seem to be 2 of him… Hm. That’s weird. I’m sure it’s nothing though.

I also wrote an object pooler for Unity because it’s not built in for some reason? Seriously, they have so much ridiculous stuff, but no object pooling? Huh…

Might not get my game done on time, but at least I’m learning a lot. Almost *too* much, in fact.

Anyway, here’s a screenshot that looks exactly the same as the last one. Meh. There are some more gameplay features now. That’s hard to demonstrate though. 😀

…no doubt.

Still, I’m thinking very seriously about writing a strongly worded letter to the guy who decided that game objects can have multiple components of the same type by default. When is that ever the right idea?!?

The professor is making his third appearance in the johnfn Ludum Dare saga.

Conspicuously absent: Any sort of graphics whatsoever.

God darn it

Stuff I’m gonna use:

• Graphics Gale
• TypeScript
• Visual Studio
• PIXI.js
• My own stupid game library that does nothing (except lag)
• Ableton Live

My goals are very lofty

• Don’t die

Okay! let’s do this!

I’m in for LD37!

Things I’ll use include but are not limited to:

• Unity
• Visual Studio Code
• Some plugin that some cool guy made for Visual Studio Code
• Photoshop
• Ableton
• Tiled
• Tiled2Unity

Let’s set a goal for myself, because why not? I want more improvement on the art side of things. I want my game to feel dynamic and artsy. Particle effects everywhere!

Here’s my starter code. It’s just some collision detection stuff, plus some IoC stuff that I really don’t understand at all and shouldn’t be learning during LD.

Good luck, everyone!

I always want to do platformers.

And then we always get these weird themes that aren’t amenable to platformers at all.

I mean, what’s the point of a platformer if it’s in a single room? How on earth could you do a platformer if your Entire Game is On One Screen? etc

The next theme is going to be “Anything But A Platformer” just to spite me.

They told us not to use a framework we didn’t know, but did we listen to them??

NO!

Maybe we should have, though.

Anyways, here’s what I got done on day 1:

• Some sort of weird time system
• Text that follows your character
• Things that can be interacted with

Yeah, not too much!

Alright, it’s 2:30… not exactly morning… but whatever

Progress gif:

Sadly, that’s pretty much all I got done today. I blame Unity. What? No! It’s not my fault that I didn’t know Unity coming in to LD…