So, I really ran out of time with this one, but at the same time I think it went really well.

What went wrong:

Like every time, I didn’t have a completely free weekend for ludum dare. Some things I had to attend to took up a lot of my time, and I also spent most of sunday doing stuff with friends. I also restarted with a new idea on saturday evening and really only worked saturday and sunday evening.

Because of the time limit, I wasn’t able to include proper enemy spawning, failstates or menus, so my entry ended up more like a broken prototype than an actual game. There really is no good gameplay except the movement system, I hacked in enemy spawning in the last minute and the game doesn’t have any proper balancing.

It is also missing any polish at all, I was hoping to add more animations and player feedback to it so it would feel better, and again wasn’t able to add sound.

What went right:

Except that my entry isn’t really a game, quite a lot. After realizing that my first idea would be too big for me, I settled on an easy and fairly fun idea pretty quickly. Work from there on was fast and smooth, I’m especially happy about how fast I got the art together. Normally art is really complicated for me and takes ages to make anything good looking, but I feel like I really improved since the last LD and was able to produce half-decent sprites.

Engine and coding wise everything went really nicely, since I know HaxeFlixel quite well by now and didn’t have to constantly look up stuff in the documentation.

What really stuck out to me this ludum dare was the fact that I didn’t stress myself about it and I was okay with doing other things with friends for about 4 hours. Instead of constantly thinking about it, I relaxed and had fun for pretty much the first time in a ludum dare.

And since that really is the spirit of the game jam, this for me was the most successful ludum dare so far.

Now I’m looking forward to playing the other entries and, further into the future, for the next LD where I can hopefully relax from the very start and really have fun!

Looking forward to my 4th LD in a row! Here are my tools:

• HaxeFlixel as the engine, code in Haxe
• FlashDevelop as the IDE
• Aseprite for pixel art and animations
• My gameboy with LSDJ for music
• Maybe sfxr for sound effects

Really hoping to find an idea more quickly and focus more on polish, as well as music and sound effects (my previous games didn’t have any of that).

To every one else I wish good luck and a successful LD!

 

Got the core mechanics of the game complete and already started work on polish such as tweens for colours and shapes and all that. This is the current look (makes more sense in motion):

 

The premise of the game is simply to dodge bullets and collect those that have the same colour as you. You can switch colours by entering portals that randomly spawn in the level. Not really original or spectacular, but quite fun so far.

This time around I set out to come up with a very basic idea and focus more on music and “juicy” gameplay, and so far it’s going very nice!

Tomorrow I will add some smaller but important features to it that will make the game feel better, and also focus on music and sound, which I normally never get to.

Good luck to everyone else!

 

The finished game PhaseShift

With this game, my 4th ludum dare concludes. PhaseShift turned out to be a arcady bullet-hell game about colours and bullets (obviously) and it’s the first time I would call a LD game of mine finished!

What went right

Pretty much everything.

The idea

Since the theme ‘Connected Worlds’ came out with about 600 votes more than any other theme in the final voting round, I started thinking about ideas on friday. This was a slight gamble but it worked out well for me. Normally I take ages to find an idea I like, so being able to think on the idea earlier was very helpful and freed up lots of time.

Luckily I came up with a very simple idea for the game which really played to my strengths: Simple geometric shapes as visuals, gameplay that does not require levels, no fance mechanics that take ages to implement.

Because of this simplicity and headstart I was able to implement almost all of the mechanics during the first day. I did spend a few hours adding some progression to the game on sunday, but overall the choice of the right idea enabled me to do lots of polishing and also include music for the first time!

Polish

The most important lesson I learned during this LD was that visual polish goes a long way in making your game look and feel better.

As an example, compare these two screenshots. Overall they are only about 4 hours in work time apart:

The visuals after the first day

Visuals after some polish

Simply adding a gradient in the background and moving the score to the middle already made a huge difference in how nice the game looked.

Another helpful way of making the game look nice was Paletton with which I spend most of my first day finding a good colour palette for the game, and I think it really helped making the game look nice.
(Pro tip for Paletton: First select a few nice colours through one of the “composition” modes, then change to custom and fine-tune your colours by holding shift. This really helped avoiding some colours just completely blending in with the background.)

Even more polish with Tweening

Because I’m bad at animations and I am using simple geometric shapes, I had to add responsiveness and  juice via tweens. In this game almost everything is tweened, from the rotation of the cannon barrel to the portal “animation”.

It was also a great way of making the game feel more responsive by tweening the size of the bullets every time something happened in the game, in this case when the player collected a bullet or a new bullet was shot. This, in addition to some camera shake, made the game feel alive.

Music and sound effects

This was the first time I was able to include my own sound effects and a background track in my game. I spend about 4 hours just on composing a track in LSDJ (which is also the first track I ever finished in LSDJ!). I think that gave the game a complete feel and made it really responsive.

Making all the sound effects in LSDJ also had the advantage that I could re-use sounds from the background track for the sound effects. This made the overall sound design a bit more cohesive.

Use shortcuts and hacky code

Another important lesson I learned this weekend that I can totally write hacky code for a jam. Adding some of the later features in quickly became a big ball of callback functions and uncaught exceptions, but in the end it all worked out well!
Additionally, I was able to reuse some of my code quite nicely which saved time. Instead of making a nice-looking title screen, I simply duplicated most of my game code, applied a blur filter on the level (which took longer than I thought, but I learned a lot) and put some text on it. With just a few modifications I had an interesting title screen without adding much compexity!

Conclusion

Overally this was the best ludum dare for me so far. I got to complete a full game with visuals, decent gameplay and sound, and all that without being overly stressed.
I also learned to use new tools, such as Paletton, improved my knowledge with others (HaxeFlixel, LSDJ) and got closer to knowing what I’m good at and what kind of games I am able to make.

If you want to see all of this in action, you can play and rate my game here.
You can also follow me on twitter @KeyMaster_ where I post about my ongoing game development projects.

Thank you for reading and until next time!

KeyMaster