This will be my first Ludum Dare event. Good luck and have a great time!

Creating a small hand-drawn puzzle game based on the theme 'A Small World.' Completed the first of three puzzles and the core gameplay, in addition to the graphics and music.

Hand-drawn 'puzzle' interaction game is coming along quite nicely...

Recording sound effects now...

Really.

Finishing up tomorrow. Gort isn't giving me any more trouble. Klaatu Barada Nikto

A Relatively Small World

My hand-drawn 'puzzle' game, A Relatively Small World, is finished! Play it, and let me know what you thought!

Am I allowed to ask someone to make a Mac from my Game Maker project after the compo has ended? I don't have access to a Mac or a Mac export module, and I would really like my game to be playable multiplatform.

Dr. Artemus Blackcraft has made himself a giant. Play Dr. Blackcraft as he saves the world from various invaders and nefarious villains.
Download
Source
If someone wants to make a Mac port using their copy of Game Maker, it would be much appreciated. NOTE: The installer can install to a flash drive.

Testing because my publish button isn't working quite right.

It's complete! My first time doing Ludum Dare and I completed it in 48 hours (quite a bit less, actually). Play it here.
Postmortem will come later because my publish button is finicky (doesn't work when I copy/paste what I wrote).

Well, it's finally finished.
My second complete game, A Relatively Small World.
This was my first LD, and my second game jam (the first jam I ever did was in Blender, and we had a week, and I still made a terrible game).
I'm super proud of what I've made, and I hope you like it to. And now, the process I used to make the game.

Preparation

Cleaned out my workspace, ate pizza, set up an iTunes playlist and watched The Andy Griffith Show to slow down my mind. That's pretty much it.

Day 1

What's better than a belly full of pizza, and 18-hour orchestral game remix playlist, a room with no distractions, and a game to make?
Well, it's not drawing a blank on the theme, I can tell you that.
I had come up with vague ideas for the other themes in the Final Round, but I didn't think that 'A Small World' would ever become the theme.
Shows how much I know.
To get inspiration, I googled 'A Small World' and came up with Disney, Disney, Disney, and Disney.
So, no help.
Then I remembered The Little Prince, with its little planets and big characters.
I knew I had my concept, and threw together an ugly scientist in paint.net:
From here I had until 10:00 PM if I wanted to get a good night's sleep, so I cranked out some more graphics and the core gameplay (yay, trigonometry!), and hit the sack.

Day 2

It must have been fatigue telling me my graphics were good. When I got up in the morning I saw the futility of my efforts and quickly came up with a new art style. This was way better and I redrew the rest of the art to match. Any further art I drew as I came up with the ideas.
Also the sound effects were recorded as I went along, and I recorded the first version of the soundtrack with a terrible pick. Now for the glitches...
First, the aliens would not attack the cities. This was due to an annoying quirk about Game Maker where the image angle's 0 degrees points up, while the sine function's 0 degrees points right. In addition to this, as the y moves up on the screen, the value goes down (WHAT?). It took me a while to figure that out and fix it, but it still took a huge chunk out of my development time. The second trig bug came when I went to put Gort in. When he appears, he takes the image angle of the city and increases it by 10, then figures out its location on the planet from that (for more explanation, stay tuned for the code explanation post). But I had Gort appearing all over the place, off the planet, on the wrong side of the planet, in the middle of the planet, in the right spot but upside down (but only when the angle was over 90), but never appearing in the same spot twice. Eventually I got it figured out and fixed him, and from there it went pretty smooth. I took some breaks, played games, ate, and got to bed at 9:00, leaving me the rest of Sunday to finish the game.

Day 3

Okay, maybe not all of Sunday. I went to church in the morning, and didn't get back until 1:00, so I had 5 hours to finish. I rewrote most of the text in the game and created the last mission, and spent an inordinate amount of time on the fade out at the end. Once that was done, I left my brother and sister to playtest it while I re-recorded the soundtrack (I found a better pick). When I came back, they had discovered a game breaking bug that had me working until 30 minutes to the deadline.
But I got it done, and I did it in 48 hours.

What Did I Learn?

Don't ever assume the theme, don't ever assume that you can do it without difficulty, and don't ever assume in general. A Ludum Dare schedule is incredibly fluid (at least for the way I work), but if you get stuck on one thing for too long it could ruin your whole game. For me, it was Gort. I should have scrapped him and come up with a better mission.
But I just love The Day The Earth Stood Still...

Future Plans

I think this game would go good with a sandbox mode, a longer, more dynamic soundtrack, and more pugs. But all in all, I'm really proud of what I've done.
Play it here and rate!
A Relatively Small World

I don't have access to a Mac export module (plus I'm using GM:S Standard, which is now pretty much obsolete). If any one does have one, and some time, I would appreciate it so much if you would download my source from my game page (it's a .gmx folder zipped up), and export it to Mac (link to it in the comments of my game page).
The Mac download link will say: 'Mac Download (courtesy of ____) Thanks!

Does anyone else have custom controls in their Game Maker game? There's one in mine but I wanted to see if anyone had a more efficient method (mine's 300+ lines of code for the menu).

I have no access to a Mac export module for Game Maker, so if you have the time and resources (it surely can't take very long), would you make a Mac port for me, and link to it in the comments of my game page? I will download and re-upload the file so you don't have to host it, and a credit will be placed on the game page by the download.
Thanks!

Play it here.

Walkthrough

Thanks for reading the walkthrough! This walkthrough assumes you have downloaded the game and are familiar with the controls.

Setting Up

From the main menu screen, press X to start. From there, you will be taken to an options menu, which you can control with the up/down arrows. Here is a breakdown of the menu: 1. Options 1. Controls
From this menu you can remap the keys used to control the game. NOTE: You cannot map two functions to the same key. Once you change the action key, that will be the key used to select menu options. Up/Down to control the cursor cannot be changed. TODO 2. Sound
From here you can use the left and right arrows to set the FX and music volumes. I recommend music set at 50 and FX set at 100 for best experience (with headphones). 3. Fullscreen
This is useless as the windowed mode resizes to your screen size. TODO 4. Back * Returns to the main screen of the menu. 2. Quit Game * Um, it quits the game... 3. Play * Hold shift on this option to skip the intro 'cutscene.'

Gameplay

This one is fairly simple (though it's one of the harder 'puzzles'). Cycling through the hints with Z (or whatever you mapped Action 2 to), we can see that the beach town has treaties with both of the other cities (which hate each other). Thus, if those cities were placed next to each other, they would fight until they either made peace or destroyed each other.
NOTE: There is a one in four chance they will make peace instead of blowing up. Try to really get world peace!
You may have noticed in the upper left corner your Global Havoc Level. This increases every time something explodes, you pick up a city, or something else bad happens. If the Havoc Level reaches its max (i.e, 50/50), you get a game over. Every time a mission is completed, the Havoc Level goes down by 5 or 10 points, depending on the mission.

One of the hints in this mission is a little confusing: The alien tracking systems can't see through wool.
What?
Well, this is definitely unnecessarily complicated, but dress pants are traditionally made of wool or polyester. Looking closely at your player character, his pants are creased, hinting that they might be dress pants. Thus, if you pick up a city, it goes in your pocket, and the aliens can't find it.
Way too complicated.
NOTE: Once you pick up a city, the aliens who have targeted it will choose another target, and it is safe to put the city down immediately. Once an alien's target has been changed five times, it will explode.

NOTE: It may be that you will beat this mission immediately by having already placed the desert city by water, in which case the mission will change to the next one.
This mission is simple. Put the desert city by an ocean (but not all the way in it, or you lose instantly) to win.

NOTE: It may be that you will beat this mission immediately by standing where Gort appears, if so, the mission will change to the next one.
This is even easier. Just run over Gort. He usually appears by the industrial city.

Oh no! Professor Lichtenbachensteinenbaum is trying to drain the ocean! Pick up his pump to destroy it.

Can't find the pug? Try the panda (that's what I've been told it looks like). From there pick one of the cities to give him to.
The desert city will eat him.
He will get lost in the industrial city.
The correct answer is the beach town.

The city built a shrink ray, just try to pick it up to activate it.

Thanks for reading!

I would like to be able to sort games by Compo and Jam. Any way we can get that implemented?

Here's a timelapse of my LD38 game, A Relatively Small World.

Over 4MB!

And, since I learned how to export animated GIFs in Premiere, here's a peek at some art that I'm doing for a side project.

Having never worked in color before, I think it's pretty good.