First LD for me… should be an interesting learning experience.
I’ll be using the following:
No kitties yet, but I’ve actually been able to make progress!
There was about 9-10 hours worth of no work due to important, and completely unexpected family stuff, so I’m happy I’m this far!
I may be a little behind where I think I should be, but Tiled and melonJS are REALLY helping me to have a LEAST a start of a prototype!
Here’s my latest progress, may not look like much, but I proud!
Music, sfx, powerups, menus…. now it’s time for sleep.
I’ll wake up in a few short hours and work on levels! It’s going to be tight, if I finish at all…
My entry is starting to look like a game! Still a little dull to play though…
My submission is no longer bound to a zip download!
You can now click directly on the ‘web’ version, and actually get a web version! wooo!
You can find ALONE with K.I.T.T.I. here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=7263
What went wrong?
There was an unexpected family emergency that took up the better part of 10 hours. The emergency was unavoidable, and unforeseen. It was unfortunate, but I absolutely do not regret missing the 10 hours.
That said, 10 hours is a lot of time in a 48 hour competition. After sleeping for about 10 total hours and the family emergency, I was left with about 28 hours of total work time. Not bad, but it was not evenly distributed, requiring some energy drinks and long periods without sleep. If I had had the 10 hours, about 4 of it would have been for sleeping on Saturday night, and the rest would have been time spent on polish.
My first time sync when working on the project was going with the sprite.js library — it’s an amazing library, but I hit a wall when I realized the support for Tiled, which I was banking on, was not really all that complete. I was going to use melonJS from the outset, but then a couple of days before the competition, I decided sprite.js would offer a better experience. I had tested it out before the competition, and thought I could get everything to work based off of one of the libraries examples, but you know how that goes.
I ended up switching everything over to melonJS, which has faculties for reading Tiled maps directly. In the end, I think this was beneficial to the overall project, but it did eat up time. If I had just used melonJS from the beginning (like I had originally planned), I would have had at least another 3 hours of work time.
My second time sync was maps. I initially built a small test map, and iterated features over that map. The test map was an excellent strategy I think, but coming off of that I jumped into a really large map — bigger than I needed by several factors. I wasted a lot of time just trying to fill it in and make it playable. I eventually shrunk the map down, but I spent an awful lot of time with a map that I ended up throwing away.
I think if I would have just did a little more level design up front on a piece of paper, I could have avoided this time sync, and probably got several more hours to work on polish and other levels.
More experience with the Tiled editor would have helped to, but it’s pretty easy to pick up.
What went right?
Tools! I knew my tool chain fairly well — I’m certainly middle of the road competency wise, but I have been using gimp, vim, and javascript/html/css for quite a while and was at least comfortable with how they worked. I think this saved me a lot of heart ache.
The things I didn’t know well were sprite.js, melonJS, sfxr, Tiled and the music generating python script that GreaseMonkey posted about: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/12/13/if-you-find-it-hard-to-make-music-read-this/
However, I did practice using these tools before the competition, so I was comfortable using them, and they didn’t offer any surprises, or set backs (other than plain inexperience).
melonJS was fantastic to work with, and really easy to pick up with the great examples on their website.
Tiled is an amazing editor — combined with melonJS I think it really saved the project after the 10 hours I spent away from the competition.
And, of course sfxr really added a little something to the game. I’m no sound engineer, but having absolutely no sounds in a game is almost as maddening as eating at a restaurant without background music. sfxr is amazing. On top of that, it’s really easy to use!
And the Autotracker-Bu script from GreaseMonkey gave me something I thought I wouldn’t have. Perhaps the music isn’t perfect for the game, but it does add something.
Summary?
My experience? Positive. I’ll definitely be doing this again. Next time I’m going to hopefully avoid emergencies, pass on the energy drinks, get some nice evenly distributed sleep, and know exactly what my libraries/frameworks are capable of going into the competition.
Happy Hacking, and I’ll see you all in April! (and possibly before that for the MiniLD’s!!)
Tags: LD22, post-mortem, postmortem
This time around I’ll be working with html/css/javascript once again. Haven’t decided which libraries (if any) I’ll use this time around though.
This is going to be a post mortem for my most recent entry, The Tiny World (vote, when active). I hope to be short and sweet:
Things done right
Things done wrong
I think that hits all the main points. Over all I’m pleased with how The Tiny World turned out, but I think there’s a lot of space for improvement on almost all fronts.
In LD22 I used a decent framework (melonjs), but had never used it before and suffered a significant time penalty learning what I could and couldn’t do with it. I spent way to much time tinkering and learning.
In LD23 I built everything from scratch (for a text based game). I knew the tools well, and didn’t need a bunch of art, but I spent most of my time on framework. The story and game-play suffered significantly.
This time around, I’m opting to use tools that I’m familiar with, and that provide a significant amount of framework to build atop — I’ll be using LÖVE, and probably the Hump, anim8, and, possibly, advanced tiled loader libraries.
The downside is that they won’t be immediately playable in the browser, but the upside is that linux, osx, and windows are all supported, and there’s not much to install.
I’ve been keeping my personal blog up to date more than posting here, but here are some progress shots (note “FLOW” is a working title, and I’m planning on changing it). I’ve had plenty of break time in between some of the shots, which I think is making the game better over-all.
This was me just getting to my idea finally.
This was me implementing some circular collision detection.
A shot of some mechanics that I added.
A shot of the initial version of the death screen.
A shot of the start screen, complete with a list of “DEATHS” aka, high-scores.
And here is where I’m at now — custom font, some instructions and a functioning game!
I have yet to properly name the project, perhaps do a little tweaking, and package it. Ideally I’ll be able to release the .love file along with bundled apps for Linux, Windows, and OSX, but we’ll see!
Wow, I can’t wait to do a post-mortem on this round. I think this is the best experience I’ve had yet, even if the game isn’t the most flashy or intellectual.
Here is my entry: And Thus She Spake
I’ve also been updating a post on my own blog with updates throughout the compo.
Oh, also there is an easter egg 
This round I’ll be using the following:
Apathy is pretty villainous, right?
Perhaps a race to the death — Apathy vs Passion! And you’re goal is to play the part of Apathy.
Got my idea pretty solidly down (in my head and on paper anyhow).
And I got a basic start on the project:
Not much to look at, but it’s a start!
I’ve dubbed the game “APATHY”.
I’ve got the game play mostly down, just need to add a visible timer, visible point count, and some “coin” like objects to collect. Going to try and do those tonight so I can concentrate on art, sfx, and music tomorrow!
I have 10 hours to do art, sfx, and music now!
Got the graphics done for all the entities in the game itself (still have to do intro screen and win/loss screens). sfx and music still need to be done too. SO CLOSE.
At least as done as I’m gonna be able to get, here’s the project page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=7263
And the final screenshot of the menu:
Also:
