And I’m in, solo. Dunno if I’ll make it, but I’ll try.

So people just wouldn’t vote for the best theme ever. Kitten! Wasn’t that so cool?

Nevermind, this will be the story of a lone KITTY. Nah! Rough design done, moving on to coding.

So, this will be HTML5 / canvas stuff.

Sources: http://github.com/lorancou/lonekitty/

Running game (yeah, just prints FPS ATM): http://lorancou.free.fr/bulk/lonekitty/

Yey! Kitty moves, but he’s still alone: http://lorancou.free.fr/bulk/lonekitty/

‘Cause darkness make you feel real alone. Play here: http://lorancou.free.fr/bulk/lonekitty/

I’m quite an interpret  http://lorancou.free.fr/bulk/lonekitty/

Oh, and seems like we’ve got spiders around now.

My game got some really basic gameplay, some art and a great music track. 14 hours left to polish all this, I’ll try to add some animations, SFXs, and a final surprise

Play it here: http://lorancou.free.fr/bulk/lonekitty/

Yey! I finished my first ludum dare entry! Phew!

Here it is: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8588

Or use the direct link: http://lorancou.free.fr/bulk/lonekitty/

The ending is GREAT you should check it out 😉

I compiled a little list of stuff to gather before the ludum dare next time. Bad thing to discover that browser support for audio s*cks, just 3 hours before the compo ends. Now I just hope the game will run well with most browsers. If it doesn’t with yours, let me know!

The first time I heard about Ludum Dare was a few days before LD22, and I took my decision to participate only a few hours before it started. So I had absolutely no preparation, and I’m quite proud I actually finished something. Also I’m glad my girlfriend let me spoil so much week-end time Here’s the result, an HTML5/Javascript/canvas game:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=8588.

Looks like postmortems are popular here so let’s jump in.

Good stuff

• This wasn’t my first accelerated game dev thing, I took part in the Global Game Jam in Paris last January (link) and learned a lot from people there. This surely helped me to plan and get things done without lacks of sleep and horrible headaches.
• I wasn’t sure if I would go for a Flash game or an HTML5 one; finally I went for the second option even if it’s far more limited. I’m glad I did because what I’ve learned could prove valuable to me later on. This wasn’t my first HTML5 experiment either (first one here), so I managed to get a good basis at the end of day 1: basically a moving character and fleeing enemies.
• I also managed to get enough time out of day 2 for polishing, notably the gameplay. This way the game won’t finish if you don’t play (as it did at a point… maybe that would have fit the theme… somehow.. the game playing alone…) -but it will resist you for a minute.
• My first idea was that the kitty would evolve somehow (turning into err… well, play the game and you’ll see, let’s not spoil), and that the environment would become more and more colorful while you progress. But I figured out soon enough I had no time for this. Instead, my game is just a very simple run, but finishes with a little joke. So I had to sacrifice a bit of my original idea, but it turned it into something that still makes sense (a bit).
• I can play a 15-seconds song on a crappy flute, what a musician!

Bad stuff

• I wasn’t really happy with the theme, actually “kitten” sounded real fun to me. A great opportunity for disrupted cuteness and mass murder. So as a fallback I did a game about a kitty that is alone, but meh. There’s hundreds of entries like this, of course, I should have anticipated that. So next time I’ll try spending more time on finding something that really plays around the theme, like this entry by Ludexor Studios. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this was a bad theme, just that it didn’t inspire me that much.
• Maintaining decent performance was an issue too. I was testing on two browsers (Firefox and Chrome), and they had trouble drawing all my sprites. I had the idea from the beginning that the kitty would be surrounded by a glowing light, so I took advantage of this to render only the visible stuff, and clear things around with a few black stripes. It did the trick, and the game’s running at 60FPS on Firefox, and around 45-50FPS in Chrome. But still, I had to restrict the number of enemies and I wish I’ve had a bit more time to optimize all this. I’m sure there’s some Javascript library around that does sprite blitting in a much more efficient way that I did (please comment if you know any).
• The biggest mistake was with sounds. I could play music easily with the HTML5 brand new audio tag, but it would loop only on one browser and not on the other, so I had to drop looping background music. And the SFXs I wanted to add a few hours before the deadline became real hell. The browser support for the HTML5 way of playing sounds is really poor, sometimes they’ll play, sometimes they won’t, sometimes they’ll stop my music, sometimes they’ll scratch… Really, proper sound playback for games is not there yet, or maybe I did it wrong and didn’t find the simple way that works, but next time I’ll probably rely on some good, working library, that I’ll test beforehand.
• This would have helped if I’ve had some good Javascript libs for vector math, collision handling and sprite animation. I had to do some tedious coding instead of creating actual gameplay.
• I had no time to check if Internet Explorer would run my game. Turns out it doesn’t, but IE9 is supposed to handle HTML5, so I’ll try to fix this in a near future (EDIT: done). Also, I discovered at the last minute that zooming on the webpage would crash the game with Chrome, maybe I’ll find a fix some day (EDIT: no problem with a recent version of Chrome, so nevermind).

Conclusion

Democracy hates kittens, but game competitions are great. Thanks to the admins for organizing such a great event, and cya!

Tags: postmortem

There’s something that was still missing for my entry, and it was IE9 support. Turns out Microsoft did some efforts for HTML5, and with a few tricks it just works. Check it out.

Merry Christmas folks!

Just a few hours available for this LD, so that’s it for my tiny entry.

Enjoy

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 22nd, 2012 at 9:59 am and is filed under LD #23. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Family, duty, you know, all that stuff that sometimes prevent us to live our true geeky life. Ludum Dare 24 won’t be my 3rd LD, and that makes me a sad, sad panda.

Or… maybe… let’s say the theme rocks… there’s still those 2 hours I’ll spend on the train doing nothing useful… 48 hours, that’s overrated!

So as any video game villain you build towers to imprison princesses. Of course loads of valiant knights come to try saving her, so you’ll have to build something solid in order to counter their continuous puerile assaults.

(Oh, and pardon my French, let me translate that for you: “princesse” = “princess”. Now you get it?)

Tags: concept, progress

But that’s only the beginning! Check it out here: http://princesskeeper.dyndns.org/.

Ah by the way, this shall be named Princess Keeper, I now own the full trademark on this title and I will fight any offender in a Hawken duel!

Tags: progress

Now, Marge, tell me, what am I gonna do with this? How can I finish this game in 16 hours?

Tags: deskphoto, progress

We’re so awesomely ready, everything’s setup. A team of four, ready to rock. Nothing can go wrong. Theme disclosed in less than 2 hours.

SO! First thing, a good night of sleep.

So we’ve formed this very minimalistic team, me and my buddies Hadesfury, Paul, Huitre and Leo. At this stage it’s very clear that we’re creating something very innovative, just in-between connect four and othello, but pink.

I mean, we’re very advanced in the process of doing something great. Revolutionizing video games is our destiny!

We’re taking inspiration from one of the greatest movies of our times.

But there are already some good screenshots to show. Building minimalistic animals at 3AM, a Ludum Dare experience!

The last version is available ! With some tutorial levels

Click to play !

Controls:
– Drag and drop parts to create a thingy,
– Right click rotates parts in place,
– Click “LoadLevel” in the bottom to throw your creation into the wild.