Rather excited to be entering the Ludum Dare this time around! My time is very much occupied for most of this weekend sadly, but I’ll try to do as much as I humanly can.

What little I can make, will be done with:

• Stencyl
• sfxr
• Photoshop / Fireworks
• pxtone
• Famitracker

Looking forward to the theme announcement very much just now!

Fingers crossed for a good LD,

Mach60KAS

The only game in which you play as Jupiter!

One day, Jupiter was sitting around in his orbit, when he thought to himself, “How lonely I truly am.” So a kind wizard give him omnipotence, so that Jupiter could make friends! Join Jupiter on his travels through space as he uses the power of gravity to make friends! Through assimilation!

Jupiter while "making friends".

I’ll be using Stencyl for the game itself. Can I get this finished? Work would disagree with me.

There is, unfortunately, no way that this game is getting finished within either the Compo or the Jam. For LD23, I’ll definitely remember to ask it off work. Else I’ll end up in the same rut again. Oh well, at least I got some more practice with Stencyl. 😉

Managed to be totally free of work etc this weekend, so I should actually be able to get stuff done!

I’ll likely be using Stencyl, SFXR, Pickle and PxTone for my game and assets, and I’ll try to get a timelapse video done, too.

I certainly wonder what the theme will be…

Sitting enjoying a cup of tea due to a lack of them. The ones I’m having are too large scale; entirely unfeasible for this time scale. Still, I’m certain an idea will come to me in time. If not, I’ll go for a walk and see what happens!

Came across a somewhat half baked idea, but it’s enough to get started on for now. Beginning with the tileset, then I’ll make the first room of the world.

After this, I’ll need to:

1. Come up with puzzles and platforming mechanics.
2. Make more tiles! Obviously.
3. Create Music and SFX.
4. Design a Player Character.

I will say that the most likely name for my character right now is “Quark”, hopefully I’m not giving too much away there… 😉

I’m now broadcasting! Link Here: Clickie!

Design is coming along well! Quark’s early designs are shaping up:

Finally got the platforming base done. Had to nix the changing gravity idea though Current graphics as shown:

Lots of work to do today, so I best get started immediately! Next up is the checkpoint system, and then I can implement death. Once I have a new tileset, level design can begin for the indoor segments too! I certainly hope I can meet the deadline… 😛

Wow, I’m beat. That weekend marked my first complete Ludum Dare (and first arguably complete game, too!). I’ve learned a lot of lessons about what to and what not to do for the Compo, and overall had an awesome experience! I’ve put together a timelapse of the creation process below, which I feel is great as I can see all the effort of two days compressed into 5 minutes.

Although a very stressful weekend (the final bout of crunch time in particular springs to mind…), I am relatively happy with what I have created – despite the lack of such critical video game assets as enemies and music. Still, here is the overview:

What Went Right

• I more or less had a plan: I didn’t go in to the design blind expecting things to just happen. Planning out key features and the remaining critical systems helped me to not only prioritise what needed to be done, but also allowed me to see what features weren’t working or could be cut to fit into the time constraints.
• I was very pleased with my art. This was a major confidence boost seeing how well I felt it had turned out, and I felt it motivated me during the final hours so as not to go to waste.
• I was more or less entirely motivated throughout both days.
• I remembered to take the weekend off work. This was single-handedly the most important thing ever.
• Some familiarity with the Stencyl framework helped the coding segments.
• The Ending.

What Went Wrong

• My inexperience at programming severely limited not only the rate at which I could work, but the complexity of the features I could integrate.
• The lack of music really got me down, and ultimately during the last hour I had the choice of whether to favour music or to fix the critical bugs present in the game. I chose the bugs.
• At the 6 hour remaining mark, I completely panicked. The game had a major warp glitch that rendered the game unwinnable (if the game can even be won per se), and I began to panic with 3 rooms still to design – after calming myself (by working) I eventually managed to face the challenges head on. I feel improvements could have been made with this extra time that was wasted.
• I left the music till last. For me, composition is a very time dependant process – if I feel rushed, it falls flat. This should be a Day One task, not one for the last few hours.
• I was not properly managing my time: one animation took over an hour to create – this should never be the case!

This Animation. This is Why.

Changes to consider next time / Advice

• I should become far more familiar with the Stencyl framework to allow myself a fighting chance.
• I’m asking the next LD off work, too. This has been a great experience.
• Better time management.
• More music, created earlier in development.
• I should at least learn how to code enemy behaviour – a key feature that had to be cut during the final two hours.
• I should attempt to achieve the same standard of art (if not better), but I can’t waste time on a single animation like I did here.
• Overall, I just need to be far more prepared.

I feel that if I were to have spent more time on the game, the early mental picture I had of the game would be attainable, perhaps this could serve as a further project? I’d really love to flesh this concept out into a fuller, richer game – and I guess I have all the time in the world to do it! So, why not?

However, I felt a major time killer was that my original idea (the player shifts gravity) was midway through actualisation before I realised it was just impossible as a balanced game mechanic. I just scrapped it after looking at the long term, and my project seriously improved for it. Hence, if anyone is interested enough to peer through the source code there are various vague references to a “GravDir” in the movement behaviours – just holdovers, really.

Quark

I’ve gained so much invaluable experience from this weekend alone: safe to say I’ll be attending the future Ludum Dares! Though next time, I’ll be more prepared for the challenges present. I was totally caught off guard by the workload, having given up LD22 due to work interfering I was unaware of how taxing making a game truly was. I guess I’m rather happy with the end result – it’s flawed and imperfect, but I can always fix it up later.

If you’re interested, my game’s page can be found here. I appreciate all your comments and feedback, especially negative!

Despite having virtually no time at all this weekend to be making games with, I’ve jumped in to Ludum Dare again!

I’ve decided to take it easy and write an interactive story with Twine, a first for me but ultimately necessary if I want to produce anything complete this weekend. Besides, I feel it’s a medium not approached often enough in events like this – it’s certainly an experiment for me!

So, I’ll get cracking and post some more updates in time.

I’m making some progress on my project! Unfortunately, I’ll be out for most of today but I do have a general plan of attack:

1. Get the basic story and structure finished.
2. Enhance and embellish all of the prose where necessary.
3. Add lovely black and white pictures.
4. Create CSS styling for the pages.

Hope I can get this done! 😛

I’m pushing onwards, and soon I hope to have the story finished! Thankfully, using Twine has been a breeze – I’ve managed to pick it up in no time at all.

Now, I get to find out how much of this I can do before I have to go to work…

Restyled the page to suit the story more thematically now (I feel black text on grey really wasn’t fitting it in the slightest). Took very little time, so now my checklist looks more like:

1. Get the basic story and structure finished.
2. Enhance and embellish all of the prose where necessary.
3. Add lovely black and white pictures.
4. Create CSS styling for the pages.

Once I get the story out of the way, I can work on some small pictures to accompany (since raw text would be very grating for a games competition…)

Back from work at long last, now the time has come to focus and finish off my game! Attached is a picture of my (very quickly and gratefully eaten) dinner from work: One of the reasons I’m quite happy to be working at a restaurant!

Good luck to everyone else who hasn’t finished yet!

Tags: food

Finished the Interactive Fiction itself, now all that remains to be done is as much polish as possible up to the deadline.

1. Get the basic story and structure finished.
2. Enhance and embellish all of the prose where necessary.
3. Add lovely black and white pictures.
4. Create CSS styling for the pages.

I’ll be doing those objectives probably in that order, at any rate.

I suppose a briefing of the project itself would be in order, since I ave posted no such thing so far:

Set in the future, 2052 is set in a dystopian world where megacorporations have evolved to the point of controlling and shaping all of the world around them through their tight grip over the media and police, while humanity as a whole is mired in a state of dependency to its corporate masters and the population grows ever more destitute.

…I think I tried to sell it too hard there, but you get the idea. I hope?

So in the end, I only managed to get a single picture done for 2052. However, I’ve managed to expand on the the prose overall and I’m ultimately happy with my Interactive Fiction! The completed game can be found here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=5788

While having an Interactive Fiction entered into Ludum Dare seems very unusual to me, I thought it’d be worth a shot, and I was definitely right!

I’ll probably write up a post-mortem of my experience in the morning!

Well, this Ludum Dare was certainly many orders of magnitude easier than the previous one; for that, I’m beyond infinitely thankful. Where the previous LD had me basically begging for death in the last few hours, I felt far more relaxed overall working on a more simple piece of interactive fiction – considering I find writing to be far easier than coding! The game itself can be found here. As before, I’ve put together a timelapse video of the process (though it’s nowhere near as exciting as the one I made for Quark).

I’m really, genuinely pleased with the result this time around, and I’d really best get on to the actual Post Mortem itself!

What Went Right?:

• I analysed more or less exactly how much free time I had over the weekend, and planned accordingly. Having failed to keep my weekend free, I had somewhere in the region of 16 hours of time to work on a game – so I decided that I’d need to make a far easier project if I wanted to have a completed entry. Hence, why I decided on writing interactive fiction.
• Choosing a far easier project majorly cut down on stress. Unlike the previous Ludum Dare, I wasn’t freaking out or obsessing over the clock. With a far easier project in the works, I could afford the time to take it easy and more or less relax.
• Twine is fantastic, and extremely easy to use. I had never used it before this weekend, and yet in no time at all I had grasped not only how to work it, but also to customise virtually all facets of 2052’s design. Having prior experience with CSS helped out here, naturally, but CSS is so user friendly that allowing the user to build their own stylesheets was a fantastic idea in and of itself.
• I ate well and got plenty of sleep over the weekend.
• I cut out all the supernatural elements I had originally planned for the story. Seriously, that stuff just does not gel well with dystopian Sci-Fi.

What Went Wrong?:

• I had entirely neglected to secure the weekend off. A laundry list of real life obligations cropped up, and I should have prepared against them far in advance.
• My story lacks a high amount of interactivity. I feel if I had more time, I would have based all of the elements in the story on player choice – just now it reads more like fiction scribbled onto an html document rather than true interactive fiction.
• Some more art would have helped to set the mood. I only had the time to create the opening graphic, and I feel more small graphics like that would have helped to show the world of 2052 to players.

Things to Consider for Next Time:

• Actually take the time off work!
• I should have far more interactivity in any future IF I make – otherwise it just isn’t fun.
• I shouldn’t feel restricted to the standard definition of a ‘game’ either: Ludum Dare is all about experimentation!
• Submit more food pictures.Keep on having fun with LD – I should try to relax and keep away from overbearing pressure when I need to.

That’s it for this overview of my second Ludum Dare experience, I might post again later to show some of the LD highlights once I’ve reviewed 100 games or so. If not, then I’ll see you all again in December!

I have no idea what I’m making for my game, but at least I have a preloader and an 8-colour palette!