PLAY TRUFFLES

Well i officially don’t have any more spare time to work on my game… so im gonna upload it as is.

Beneath the surface was actually just about the only theme that i wasn’t really expecting… or hoping for, in fact  i actually had my heart set out on a few of the other themes. With that being said i almost immediately decided that i wasnt gonna do this ludum dare.

About 9  hours into the comp i decided ” hell why not,  how bad could this really be?” and i began brainstorming ideas.

 

About The Game

Truffles is about a little piggy who accidentally falls into a abandoned mushroom mine.

 

Tools

I decided right off the back that i was gonna enter the jam instead of the compo, and for coding i would be using  javascript. I later on decided on using photoshop for sprites, fl studio and my ipad for music, sfxr for sound effects ,pixel Edit for making tiles, and tiled map editor. It took me a while to decided on using a html5 library or Unity3d but in the end i choose phaser.js because i iv used it  for a few other games and i also didn’t have as much time as i wanted for 3d modeling and i was working alone.

 

The Good

– Javascript is a language that i’m comfortable with so i didn’t really face that many coding problems

– I already had a piggy sprite laying around on my computer, which inspired because the inspiration for my game, so i decided to give him a name and a home.

– I had absolutely no problems on day one , even though i started a few hours late. I had completely finished my piggy sprite animation, made the first version of my tilset, came up with a game idea,  and  completed  my level creation goal for the day.

– I’ve completed my first ludum dare

 

The Bad

– I started working a few hours late

– I wasn’t really sure what i should spend most of my time working on.

– Around day 2 i started slowing down due to frustration

– Im sure i drove my family coco from how many times i asked them to test my collision.

– I didn’t get to make as many levels as i had wanted but i still met my overall set goal.

-Right after my laptop died i lost my  charger and spent 1 hour looking for it

 

The ugly

– Phaser.js had one hell of a time with collison. I spent about 3+ hours just trying to get my collision detection  it to at least where i could consider it some what decent.

– i didn’t get to do as much as i wanted with the game such as add various enemies, puzzles, more levels, obstacles…etc

 

So thanks to a storm knocking my power out for a whole day im just starting to work on my ludum dare game. I originally had a pretty detailed game idea  planned out right after the theme was announce , but about 90mins in the power went out.

Unfortunately the only device i had that was still usable/charged was my ipad(for this ld i decided to use unity3d and sadly the unity3d editor doesn’t run on ipad lol)  so i had two options i could create my ld game using html5 and my ipad or i could sit and wait … well i decided to sit and wait so here i am. Now i have to come up with a whole new game idea.Lets see  how much game dev i can  cram together with the time that’s left :/

 

ps. please forgive any spelling grammar errors, im running on about 3 hours of sleep and i ran out of coffee hours ago >_<  

Even though i had a few set backs this ludum dare (power going out for a whole  day, being forced to go to a family gathering with no computer… ) i actually managed to make 3 games! Unfortunate im not really satisfied with any of them so i wont be submitting them.

Its not that i don’t like the games or the ideas its just each game had its own problem:

Do to lost time i had to constantly take out features and make various changes to game direction so in the end i basically ended up with 3 totally different games.

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Game Idea one:

thanks to the power going out for a day i spent the entire day planning out a crazy epic story.

Game idea one was going to be a interactive puzzle strategy game where the players and characters world were connect(your time zone affected story/environment, the player had to make various decisions, etc…)

The first game i bit off more than i could chew and the game required a detailed story and environments, complete 3d models and animations, logic coding, various choices… in the end the game was pretty and detailed but lacked interesting game play(it was mostly just a point and click mystery).

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Game Idea Two:

For game idea two i decided to simplify characters models ,take out the story and make the game mission based around a single event, then i decided to take out ai and allow a second player to assist the main character with puzzles etc.

I would spend most of my time coding two player co-op logic puzzles, and various control logic.

while working on game idea two i actually had a pretty good pace and scheduled unfortunately i was forced to go to a family event which chomped 7 hours from my scheduled so i no longer had enough time to code all of the logic puzzles that i had to finish which made the second game a  bit to short.in the end i was only able to make about 4 levels.

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Game Idea Three:

For game three i decided to remove story completely from game idea to and make it a co-op versus strategy game , using some of the logic that i had already coded,  and then i tweaked a few of the assets i had made to make them more appropriate for the new game play style.

And you know what the third game was awesome. replay value was really high , the graphics were pretty and overall it had solid game play…but it doesn’t  feel like it had anything to do with the theme.

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Overall

im sure that if i hadn’t lost so much valuable time i would have actually been able to add those last little tweaks to make the game/s good enough for submission.

After the power went out i should have followed my gut and made the game prototype using html and my ipad(the official game was going to be made using unity3d) that way i could get my ideas working and would have a more realistic idea of what was capable, instead of me just sitting around sketching out ides.

But in the end its not all that bad, now i  have three awesome new games that i can expand on , ive learned alot about the tools i used ,and i learned more about  my strengths and weaknesses this ludum dare.