I’ve never actually made a blog post here, but I figure it’s time to actually use a code base, because I’m kind of sick of reinventing my wheel every time.

So here’s my base:  http://www.l-ames.com/logan/ld-30-base.zip

It’s just a simple tile-based platformer movement with a built-in editor, for Multimedia Fusion 2.  It’s basically my previous LD entry with all the game content stripped away, but that’s a passable place to start.

I’ll be using MMF2 for code, sfxr for sound, and Abundant Music (which I only just learned about) for music.

That’s about it.

Throwing my potential hat into the ring, here.

I will most likely be using my standard tile-based platformer code base for Clickteam Fusion 2.5, as stripped down from whatever the last game I made was.

www.l-ames.com/logan/base-33.zip

It usually gets the job done.

So, this Ludum Dare I made a game called SnakeLike, which is supposed to be a cross between a RogueLike and Snake.

You can find it here:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=12883

The premise is that you meander around the levels, one move at a time, and can fight enemies and swallow their corpses.  Each enemy you swallow gives you one extra segment, which takes on the properties of that enemy.

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Each segment you get from an enemy is capable of attacking to either side, so as you accumulate new segments, it becomes advantageous to surround your enemies, and strike at them from multiple sides at once.

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Stronger enemies give you segments with more attack and/or HP, and you can let their corpses run through your body to add on to the end, or else digest them before that to replace and upgrade an existing segment.

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So, how did that work out for me? Well…

The timing of things

This ended up being a little tricky, as I actually had work during the weekend.  So my time was a bit limited.  And to start, I didn’t have any good ideas for the theme.  So I pretty much spent the first evening coming up with whatever ideas I could, and trying to refine the mechanics in my head.  I think it ended up being a good move, but I would still have loved to have that time back to code.

What went right

I think the concept ended up pretty solid for something so straightforward.  I was really worried that it wouldn’t come together, but a lot of the feedback I’ve gotten has been positive.

I think that my approach to the theme this time wasn’t as… clever? as what I had attempted in the previous couple LDs I participated in, but I kind of feel like that worked in my favor.  In my previous entries I kinda shot myself in the foot for concealing the theme a bit more than I should have, trying to go for a more dramatic reveal.  With SnakeLike you can pretty much see all there is to it right there.

What went wrong

Boy, where do I begin…

I ran into so many technical problems and bugs while creating this.  Many of them were my fault, but I spent way too long just reading and re-reading pieces of code, trying to see what the heck was going wrong.

But beyond simple bugs, I was meaning to rely on a Multimedia Fusion extension I’d never used before called the “Dungeon Object” in order to relieve some of the stress of generating dungeons.  But it turns out that this extension isn’t compatible with Clickteam Fusion 2.5, the newest tool which I had set up my code base for.  It was either do without the object, or work in an older program.

I went with the latter.  Of course, my code base was no good any more, so I snapped up the one I had made for LD 30, and had to re-code the bits that were missing.

Even though I had never used the Dungeon Object before, it was really straightforward, and I got it working in my game fairly easily.  The Pathfinding Object, however, gave me no end to grief.  Despite having dealt with this one before, I ended up wasting a lot of time just trying to figure out what little things were making it crash.

And once I got all the extensions working as intended, I kept running into huge bugs with movement and collision, where enemies would sometimes stack on one another, or even move onto a space occupied by the snake.  I hacked together a solution as best I could, but there are still remnants off bugs here and there (like these invisible barriers you might occasionally have to chomp through).

By the time I got the mechanics stable, there was almost no time left to make actual content.  I scrambled to make really basic-looking enemy and tileset graphics, and in the last couple hours I was just sort of developing without thinking, running on some kind of stream-of-consciousness mode.  I still don’t know what’s up with the end of the game, but I hope nobody gets so far as to see it.

So ultimately…

I think it was kind of a neat concept, and I think I managed to pull it together just in time, despite all the troubles I hit.  There’s probably a lot more I could add to it (there’s no shortage of RogueLike ideas that could be implemented), but I’ll mostly likely leave this as it is.

Throwing my hat into the ring, hopefully! I'll most likely be using my trusty tile-based code base again, Clickteam Fusion 2.5 edition: http://www.l-ames.com/logan/base-38.zip

Heh, I keep meaning to say something, but it's all felt really surreal. Like, when first saw my game Fallumns up on the results page, I thought, "Oh, it must just be a bug. Soon it'll finish calculating everybody's scores and show the ACTUAL winner." And it still kinda feels that way?

But I'm extremely grateful! Thank you everyone who's played and rated and enjoyed my game, and to everyone who made so many awesome games this time! This is the 10th time I've done a Ludum Dare, and I think it's the most fun I've had yet, both with making and playing things!

So, uh, did anybody notice that "echoes" is listed in both rounds 1 and 2?