I first heard about Ludum Dare about a year ago but wasn’t convinced to participate until now.
I got ideas written down from the voting rounds, just to be safe than sorry. I’ll be ready once LD hits me up with a theme!
I’m too cheap on using new paper; so I used print scraps instead.
Here’s a list of software that I would be using during the game development:
I’ll see if I could do less paper work and more electronic work as I usually draft things on paper.
OpenMPT
After gazing on my computer screen for 35 some hours, I have finally accomplished something! I’ve decided for an evolution theme, particles would “grow” in experience and health. Your enemies can grow too!
While the number of lines of code hits 2000, there are plenty of comments left in!
The game’s called “Entourage” because you control parasites where you can command them to defeat the bad parasites (or badguys as I put it.)
It wasn’t easy to create because there were tons of logic to figure out plus tweaking the bugs and glitches PLUS dealing with the editor’s flaws. The time was spent entirely on programming so I had to skip much of the graphics and some fancy-shmancy interfaces. I hope to GOD my game turned out crash free!
First off, thank you everyone for your reviews on my first LD entry “Entourage.” I was meaning to participate for a while and I am now glad that I took the time to enter. It is ironic that I entered at the same time the theme “evolution” finally got its light of day after many years of voting. Lucky me heh! Keeping an open mind during the theme voting, I was pondering on the gaming ideas for each and every popular theme. When “evolution” was announced, I figured I could develop a game with parasites that have their own set of instructions that they could follow after certain things happen. Glad I had finished it, so now I would like to share how my development went!
Objective — My primary goal was to take control on parasites and give them commands to eliminate the bad ones when certain conditions were met. When that happens, it will execute a command with or without the selected target. Overall, I believe my objective was presented clearly, but there are still some clarifications needed to be presented. Although, more could have been added to improve the idea of “Entourage” to give it more depth.
Stability — I did put a good amount of effort for bug checking. The logic for looking through instructions were complicated, but, after taking little steps of a time, I was able to pinpoint the cause and found a work-around. As of now, the commands were executing correctly, there are no problems adding new instructions.
Structure — The parasite’s instructions seems to be running as it should; although, not 100%. More needs to be done to allow certain conditions to be executed properly without cancelling other executed instructions and so on.
Focus — Considering how complex the game was, I only focused on getting the game play finished while keeping graphics and audio at the very least priority. Regards, I wanted to get the user interface prepared so everyone could play the game easily; even if the graphics were a bit plain.
Execution — Sort of a hit and miss depending on how you play the game. For me, I take one parasite and add instructions for attacking the bad, and then program the other parasites to follow that parasite. Tedious? Yep. Of course, I was keeping it simple and keeping my focus on finishing the main objective.
Preparation — Unlike other game programming tools, BlitzMax leaves you with nothing other than a few modules. So in order to make information windows and buttons, I had to program them by scratch. It wasn’t hard to do, but it did take some time to get them working properly. Another thing too is using some new things such as using the mouse to zoom in or out and move the field around. It was supposed to be simple, but the math has gotten to fuzzy. After several hours of trail-and-errors and drafting, those procedures seem to work basically well. I could had worked on a few small BlitzMax products before participating Ludum Dare, but I was feeling the need to challenge myself!
Using BlitzMax — I would say that I’m experienced enough to use BlitzMax at the fullest. However, because it had been while since I last used BlitzMax, there were some problems that appeared during development that I had forgotten. One example was to add images with transparency. While I know in general how to add pictures with transparency, “Entourage” doesn’t want to keep the transparency. After trying a few methods, I was already taking too much time doing that. Therefore, I’ve left the background black and added the pictures with black backgrounds.
Performance — It is not a major factor in this case since the game was made on a small scale. I did adjust the number of good and bad parasites to 200 each — making a total of 400 parasites — too see how the game takes it. Yeah, it was pretty slow; so that was why I maxed each parasite to 100 each. I sort of expected that since it was looping through every existing parasite 5 times. I could have definitely find a more efficient way of updating each parasite, but due to limit time obviously, I just let that be.
Too many ideas — Each parasite has its own HP and EXP, but they weren’t used to their full potential. EXP was supposed to make a parasite better at many things, but I didn’t give it much time to work on. At least HP was working as it should, with an advantage to recover after certain hours were passed. Definitely a lot of ideas were cut at the last few hours, but my main purpose was to present the game’s idea. So many ideas at a very little time, making the game watered down to the very last bit.
“Entourage” seems to have potential according to you players. Although, I do have another game that I wanted to get through first before I move on. I’ll just say that I’m returning back to my original ways of developing new games and actually enjoy it for once. Meanwhile, I’ll keep “Entourage” stored away and come back when I feel the will to fully construct it.
If you like to see my other games that I’ve made in full, check out… http://www.acoders.com .
I’ll give this a go. I’ve done this last year with the theme of “Evolution.”
This time, I plan to develop the game in Flash. This should help me get more triers and responses.
I’m not sure if I’ll take the time to add audio, but just in case, I’ll be using the following files:
Wish everyone best of luck!
Here’s what I’ve done so far:
*A simple platform engine
*Protagonist pixel sprite…
I’m attempting a run-and-jump platform game, hopefully something similar to Super Mario Bros in terms of the platform engine. I’ll think of how the game fits the theme shortly!
Gashapons and Power-ups makes “Gasha-power” at the very last hour, hehe. While I’m glad I got the game working, I’m somewhat disappointing on it’s performance. I can’t be the one to judge, but I’m glad that it’s done and in working order.
It’s a first for me to develop a platform game for the first time on Flash. I’ve done Flash programming before, but not for making platform games. This is a shot in the dark as I didn’t take time to look into how to develop platform games with Flash. I’ll give this game some time and wait for the public’s response.
Here’s my entry. Do not hesitate to rate!
In-game screenshot 1
UPDATE: There’s now a third version of this game that should address the performance issue for good. This message is referring to the second version that partially resolved the performance issue, but it wasn’t fully fixed. Here’s the original message:
I have managed to get the game to run more faster than before. Turns out to be less complicated than first through. Regardless, this game is not efficient still. Although, it is running faster and less laggy than before. This will have to do for this entry. Next time, I will put more work toward my next Flash platformer to make it run more efficiently.
What I had done to make the game faster is actually quite simple but not obvious: the entire level was caching as a bitmap. That is the main reason for the lag. The second reason is having certain objects NOT caching as bitmap. One are the blocks. Another are the enemies.
Also, I had dropped the frame rate from 60hz to 50hz as a precaution to compensate the large objects loaded onto the stage.
Hopefully this game now runs fast enough to make it more playable. Be sure to (re)try the game out!
Heh, wow then. I never through I would post a new version in a short time frame as my second version. This time, with confidence, the third version of “Gasha-power” performs a lot more better than the previous versions. I’m hoping this version fully addressed the lag for good.
Meanwhile, I’m preparing a post-mortem for “Gasha-power.” Stick around for that very soon!
Waiting ever so patiently…
I’m having a good start so far. I’ve got a game idea all planned out and I hope to get it all programmed soon. My initial plan is to make an overhead view where you move in all 8 directions (like “The Legend of Zelda” on the NES). The green block is the player’s placeholder. The pink background is also temporary, but I might use it later as a background for a world.
My idea for presentation is a graphical style of ATARI 2600 shown on top of a picture. Therefore, you see the map designed reminiscently to an ATARI game on top of a square-pixel background. Kind of like the Magnavox Odyssey with the cellophane overlay. Granted, I’m not putting details to make the game look like it’s projecting through the overlay; that would be too much work.
As of now, I’ve just started programming and got the player moving. I only got one portion of the map done; but that too is temporary. I’ll post more details on the game concept later as it is still too early to explain. Time for sleep!
Some details on what I’m using:
Just a start.
Tags: ld start
Bloom World
If you haven’t already, give “Parallel Worlds” a try! Feedback is welcomed!
Try and Rate “Parallel Worlds”
Now’s my turn to announce my postmortem on my edition of “Parallel Worlds!”
Map system: Although I spent most of my Saturday on the map system, I’m happy to get that working and designed. I came up with three worlds, each with it’s own map, style, and song. The portals are working as they should: to take you to the next world in sequence.
Mechanics: Having just a labyrinth where you move eight directions overhead is not so innovated in my opinion. Therefore, I decided to add a gravitated side-scroller in one of the worlds. My initial thought is to add different mechanics to most worlds; although, I only came up of two. Likewise, I’m glad to get two different mechanics in the game to show my idea.
Graphics: I wanted to design an game reminiscent to an ATARI 2600 game but with a background/overlay reminiscent to Magnavox Odyssey. The map is full of big blocks while the background is a detailed, pixelated environment.
Audio: This is my first ever LD entry that featured audio! 😀 I’ve done both sound and music with OpenMPT. The sounds didn’t take me too much time to complete as I only have one. The music was a challenge for me to create in such a few hours. I’m not an avid musician, but I do enjoy making chip-tunes. I was amazed to come up with 3 songs in under 2 hours time.
Smooth play: This is my second game made in Flash, but I used Flixel this time. My previous Flash game was nicely done, but it suffered from laggy performance; but I manged to get that resolved later on. This time, however, this game ran smoothly during development and remained that way by its release. Flixel has helped make game development easier and efficiently in little code.
Feature creep: My initial thought was to add enemies to add a more arcade-style game rather than a standard labyrinth with portals. You will notice some rooms have particular designs. Those were designated for enemies — which, unfortunately, is what I didn’t have enough time on. Therefore, the game ended up as a maze with no combat, which is not what I planned initially.
Not enough experience with Flixel: I’m still rather new to Flixel, still learning what it has to offer and learning how to handle its objects. Most of my time was spent on experimenting and trial and error — which could be the blame for the time it took to get the map system working well. Game programming is nothing new to me and game programming in Flash is certainly not a new thing to me, but Flixel is still something I need to learn more of. Eventually, I’ll come up with tricks to take advantage of Flixel’s objects and come up with something in shorter time.
Portal system: The portal system works as intended, but not to what I planned. Sure, the portals will take you to the next world or to the first world when you’ve reached the maximum world, but I wanted an option to choose a specific world to teleport to. While that idea is already achieved in the game when you keep entering the portal, that idea leaves a better way to use the yellow keys. Currently, yellow keys allow you to access the portal in a world. My initial idea is to have each world contain keys to unlock every world (other than the world they are currently in). Any collected keys would actually not be carried on to other worlds. For example, I you are at world 2 and you wanted to go to world 1 or world 3, you will need to find keys to world 1 and world 3 somewhere in world 2. Those collected keys would only remain in world 2. This is the best as I can describe about my initial idea.
Sprite Details: Most objects in game are designed to make them obvious to what they represent — e.g. key. My only issue is the green block representing you — the player. I didn’t have much time to come up with a design and I couldn’t think of a design that would fit the style since there isn’t a story. So, an ordinary block (a la Odyssey) is what I thought best fits the game, and I made it green so it stands out better in every world.
I do see this game having a future. The different mechanics definitely add variation, so I would certainly develop more interesting rules. I like to hang on to the Atari 2600 + Magnavox Odyssey presentation, but with more details. A story would add meaning and thought once I come up something compelling. I really want to add enemies, even bosses, to make this game an action game with a point and life system. With enemies, you can punch and kick them and destroy them accordingly. I have an interesting idea for how the enemies are eliminated, but it’s too complicated to describe. It might be easier to explain once I post the game footage or a prototype.
So, I would definitely like to continue working on “Parallel Worlds” — under a different name. I’ll post details on Twitter, so check out my Twitter account for the latest! (@jprogman)
See you all next time!
Tags: LD30, ld48, postmortem
Walkthrough (Click it to see in full!)
Need some help? Sure you do! I’ve made a walkthrough for my game to give you assistance on finishing the game — but try to use it at the last resort because it’s more funner that way! 
For your convenience, I’ve added the walkthrough as a screenshot to the game’s description page so you don’t have to find this post for it. 😀
Haven’t tried or rated “Parallel Worlds?” Now’s your chance!
–Try and rate Parallel Worlds here!–
Thank you very much for your support!
Tags: ld48, walkthrough
As of this point of LD, I got much of the the programming set in stone. I still got more to do yet!
Pinatas won my interest as the theme of the game! As a weapon, I was thinking brooms — which led to my decision of pinatas. But, I felt brooms are too much of a cliche. So, as a last-second effort, the sweeper was selected instead!
Still got plenty to do: the enemies, the graphics, the animation, the rules, the audio… tons to do! Likewise, the most consuming part is programming everything from scratch and I’m glad to get a large portion of that done.
Oh, and that pink boxy protagonist is a pinata too. (Suppose to be a generic pinata with one “company defect” — it’s very blandly designed.) I’m striving to add a story too if time’s willing.
Here we go to the second half!
Just for your interest, here are the following I am or will be using…
Here’s a sneek preview in GIF!
It blows confetti!
This marks number 5 in my list of games made for Ludum Dare! “Ay Pinatas!” have you go around to destroy all the pinatas causing havoc. Although, you are also a pinata too — but with the good guys. Walk around the land to eliminate the bad pinatas while stocking yourself up with candy — since you are a pinata after all!
I’m just starting to try your games out and leaving my feedback as much as possible. Later on, I’ll post my post-mortem regarding the development and time during LD #32.
This game can be played on the web with Adobe Flash.
— Please check out “Ay Pinatas!” here and be sure to rate and comment! —
— You can play the game by clicking here —
I say this Ludum Dare entry went along as I wanted to go — give and take a few features. “Ay Pinatas!” is my fifth game to enter Ludum Dare. (You can see my other entries in my journal.) I’m glad to get the general idea all completed and some people who have played it seemed to enjoy it too.
Now, I would like to share my development story on how it all went — my postmortem report!
At this point, I wanted to develop a post-competition version of “Ay Pinata” to add what was missing or just to improve what I couldn’t during development. (I really wanted to add sound!) Be sure to keep in touch for the latest development on that. Here’s a teaser on what that version would look like:
Hope you could give “Ay Pinata!” a try and share your comment on the page! Thanks for playing and rating my game!
Tags: postmortem
To celebrate rating 100 games, I drew a picture of what the main character suppose to be in my game “Ay Pinatas!” It’s a pinata too, but one of the good guys. Don’t feed it too much candy… it’ll go boom!
If you haven’t already, take some time on “Ay Pinatas!” and let me know what you think!
[ Click here to play the game ]
Meanwhile, I’m developing a post-compo version of “Ay Pinatas!” to add what I couldn’t during the compo. Check back at the game’s page or at my twitter feed for the latest happenings.
[ You can play the post-competition version here on itch.io ]
Looks like Ludum Dare #32 is about to post the results. I haven’t checked at the time of this post, but I’m getting anxious!
I’ve put my time to develop a post-competition version of “Ay Pinatas!” As you can tell from the screen shot, one of the changes is the details. You’ll notice more new things like audio and graphics as you play through it. Although, the level design is still identical to the LD version. This time, however, you are not obligated to destroy all the pinatas but rather a certain amount in order to get to the exit. Before, you would win automatically when you destroy your 100th pinata. The post-competition version (also called my prototype) still has only one world done — which is pretty much the point of this version.
I’m glad to put most of what I’ve missed and hope this adds more anticipation than from the LD version itself. I might add more changes to the prototype along the way, so keep in touch through Itch.io or Twitter.
This wraps my participation of Ludum Dare #32. See ya next L.D.!