This is my very first Ludum Dare and my first post here. I wanted to take part here for quite a long time, but there were always problems with the date. This weekend is set aside for the contest, finally.

Since the announcement of the theme was at night for me (I’m located in Europe) and the first round of Google Code Jam was at the same time, I didn’t start yet. I have some ideas in mind, slept some hours and hope they evolved well during this time 😉 Yesterday, I read some blog posts with hints for beginners and now I feel ready to start.

Next steps: write a to-do list and decide for a programming language/platform.

I hope you all have fun during the next days and I would be glad to get to know some of you!

I made some progress with my game for LD26 that I want to share with you. The basic gameplay is finished and I added some sounds and background music. The basic idea is that you have to escape some enemies by moving around quickly. They get destroyed when they hit each other or some walls, but when they catch you or you hit a wall even more enmies will spawn. You have to eliminate them all.

I need to add instructions, a congratulation to winners, some texts and some more levels and obviously polish it everywhere. Maybe I will even add more elements to the game play if I have enough time. There are severel ideas in my mind…

You can see the current version at http://ld.aleatic.com, but remember: This is of course work in progess. (controls: left/right arrow or a/d)

My game is running and nearly finish (I know, I always say this 😉 ). The game works, sound and instructions for new users are added, there is some screen when you won the game and there are even buttons to pause and mute it. I will now add some more levels, that’s it. There is even a LD26 level =)

You can play the current version of the game at http://ld.aleatic.com.

My game just got finished and I am really satisfied with the results. 48 hours are quite a long time, even though I didn’t code the wohle weekend. I even added an additional feature in the last hours (passersby). There are 12 levels that are waiting for you. I’m looking forward for your comments. You can find my entry here.

I just created a screencast showing whot to play the first levels of my game. That way you can see the game without playing it yourself. Great, isn’t it? 😉

You can play my game at http://ld.aleatic.com and rate it here. I’m looking forward for your comments.

I just made a last minute decision to take part in this weekend’s contest. I won’t be able to use all the time, but I hope it will be enough to create a game. Last time I finished a game which was quite fun and I enjoyed finishing something that I could show to friends. I hope there will be a similar experience this time

Regarding technical details I will use Eclipse Orion this time. I installed it today and it looks nice. The game itself will be written in HTML5/JavaScript as last time. Probably I will use pixi.js as framework. I created one game with it some days ago and I really like the framework. I extracted some lines of code from my last project and created a template for a small game. You can find it at https://github.com/stoman/pixi.js-game-template, but be aware that this will be updated frequently in the next days.

I’m looking forward to reading your blog posts and having a fun weekend. Enjoy!

I finished my second game in my second participation in Ludum Dare I’m proud of the result, even though it could obviously be improved with some more time. I want to give you an overview of what went well and what didn’t and the tools I used. I hope you enjoy this collection.

In the course of the weekend I used the following software packages for creating the game:

• IDE: Eclipse Orion – an development environment mainly for HTML5/javascript running in the browser . The UI is familiar if you are used to eclipse, even though some things are different, in particular the main menu. It’s a nice tool to continue coding on a netbook or tablet if you want to go somewhere else 😉 There is also a nice GIT integration.
• Framework: pixi.js – an HTML5 rendering engine using wegGL or canvas elements. It’s a small but powerful library. I used it before for small projects for the github game off 2013 and the warmup weekend. It helps a lot in handling sprite sheets, animations and rendering. Give it a try!
• Map editor: Tiled – a level editor which saved me a lot of time. Instead of coding the level data by hand I parsed the JSON files exported by Tiled and used them in the game – a great speed up in creating levels. The six levels took me a little more than 30 minutes.
• Graphics: TexturePacker – a small yet powerful program for creating sprite sheets from many small pictures. It is not free but the features of the lite version are still fine.
• Graphics: Gimp – an evergreen in image manipulation. I have always been using it and never regret it
• Sound: Bfxr and inudge – websites for creating sounds and background music for games. inudge badly lacks an export feature but the both programs still helped me a lot.
• Sound: autotracker – a genius tool for creating random songs in a matter of seconds. This is great for adding background music in the last minutes.

I have probably skipped some software I used, but these were the ones I used most or used them for the first time this weekend. All of them worked out nicely. I do recommend them all.

Screenshot of my game

What went well:

• I used an IDE I’ve never used before. The same holds for the framework, the level editor and so on. Everything worked unexpectedly smooth in using these new tools
• I’m very unexperienced in creating graphics assets. That’s why I decided to draw all images in a pixaleted way. This worked out nicely and I was surprised of the result which I think is quite good for me.
• Using a level editor was a good idea. I thought that it may be more work to read alien file formats than hard-coding the levels by hand. This is not the case: I recommend you to use level editors if possible, you will be much faster for game like the one I wrote.

What didn’t went well:

• Time management… I didn’t do much on saturday and sunday morning, but worked the whole sunday night. I should start to work hard earlier 😉
• The background music was made within minutes and I think you will hear that. Maybe its a good decision to mute the game – I added a button for doing so in the lower right corner 😉 Maybe I should focus on sounds in the next Ludum Dare.

Obviously, this game is not finished yet. There is some basic gameplay but I have lots of ideas that are waiting to be added. I like what has been done so far and therefore think of extending it the next days. This is what could or should be done in the next days or weeks:

• done: Fix typos in the description (it was late…)
• add images for keys that are currently active
• add tiles that could only be passed from one direction
• create shoes, hats, … that influence gameplay
• add enemies
• add more levels
• create better background music
• move some reusable code to my template project
• implement all the things mention in your comments

All in all I really like my game, even though I think my last one for LD26 was a little better. But this depends on your personal taste. I learned a lot of new tools and had fun which is what I was aiming for. To that extend this weekend was a great success!

I’m looking forward to reading your comments on this blog post, my game and about the experiences you made last weekend. Thanks for reading this post and now have fun playing Key by Key.

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem