I’ve never done a Ludum Dare before, but over in #flixel they’ve convinced me to give it a shot. I have no idea if I can even get something up and running in time – but I’m going to give it my all this weekend! Hopefully we get a topic that I can really run with…(Go Go Alone!)

Software

• FlashDevelop, with Flixel and Flixel Power Tools
• AS3Sfxr
• Adobe Fireworks for pixels
• OpenMPT for .mod

This is what I’ve got for the end of the first night.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13349757/LudumDare22.swf

Best Friend

It’s about a boy and his dog, as cliche as ever. There are two endings to get, and the dog is stupid. Control with the arrow keys, press M to mute the music.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13349757/LudumDare22.swf (Looks best in standalone flash window)

Here’s the source: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13349757/LudumDare22.zip (You must link it to flixel 2.55 as an external library, with photonstorm’s powertools 1.9 installed if you want it to compile)

And here’s a timelapse of the making of Best Friend: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOY8cDkqlSY

Did I submit that right?

This was my very first Ludum Dare entry, and I had a lot of fun with it

It actually got me motivated to make a game from start to finish, even if the game wasn’t so great. That said there are some things that I learned from doing this that everyone might benefit from.

When we were all sitting there voting on the final bunch of entries, the three best ideas that entered my head were for Forgotten Places, Kittens, and Consequences. I had a solid idea for Alone, but when the theme was actually announced I really fumbled it a bit. The final idea to come to mind had nothing to do with gameplay at all, it was a story idea. You’re a kid with your dog, your dog gets stuck, and you have to try to get the dog out. The twist was that you couldn’t do it the way you’d expect. Either you or the dog died, and you (the player) had to make that decision, and I’m certainly not going to make you feel good about either of them

Things that went well:

• Livestreaming. I really only had a max of 6 viewers at a time, and all of them were friends that I know in real life, but having someone there watching you is an amazing motivational tool. Want to go to 4chan real quick? Better be content you don’t mind everyone seeing. It also opens up a channel for some good ideas to get pelted at you when you get stuck.
• Art. Considering what usually gets saved and called art, I believe that the majority of the game art ended up pretty good. It’s a bit tile-ey but someone told me that it was a bad idea to spend the whole weekend drawing art, so I tried to get done with the art as quick as I could.
• Story. It’s an implied story, since there’s no text or dialogue (Unless you count the endings). I really wanted the player to enjoy the dogs presence and make the dog seem like a standard idiot dog, the kind that just roams around sniffing and being generally useless. And then once the player really likes the dog, take it away from them, and present them with a possible way to save the dog. I think it worked pretty well, and when I get comments like “You monster!” I know that they felt the emotions I wanted them to feel when playing the game.
• Sounds. Everything that seems like it should make sound does, and there’s also the little happy dog yap at the end as it runs off with the bone. I like it
• Multiple Endings. Games that have alternate endings always seem to require an extra bit of thought into how you go about completing it, and with a game like this i feel having the two endings was a really nice touch.

Things that could have gone better:

• Level Design. The level was really just slapped together as I added more and more to the little debug area that I started with. It certainly could have been more interesting, with things like traps, and enemies, or at least some form of challenge.
• Gameplay. The game isn’t fun, at it’s core it’s a button stomping game. This is really because all I had focused on is the feeling of being separated and alone.
• Music. I have never made an original tune before in my life, the music in this game is pretty bad, which is why I added in the mute button.
• Programming. The game is a horrible mess inside. At first I wasn’t really going to have that many objects so just placing the objects directly in code seemed like a good idea at the time, but as I got farther I realized I had like 150 lines of just adding new objects into the level. I haven’t used the DAME exporter for anything more than a CSV editor with a  GUI for a long time, so I could have taken the opportunity to get used to the exporter again.

The game itself wasn’t very fun, because the idea that I had in my head was for a story driven game, not so much a cool gameplay concept. I was short-sighted when I was making the actual game and just wanted the specific scenes that are present in the game, and wasn’t really taking much consideration as to how to hold the players attention.

Really it seems like the worst part of the game is… the game. As I was finishing up I began to realize that my game wasn’t a game as much as it was a mindless button stomping adventure, and by then it was far too late to go back and really change it. If (lol when) I do another Ludum Dare, I intend to put more thought into how to make the game fun before I work a story. It’s supposed to be a game after all, and there’s no point playing a dull game.

I’m in for Ludum Dare 24. Since I didn’t make it into college this semester, I owe it to myself to get at least something productive done.

Tools of the trade:

• FlashDevelop – For all my programming needs.
• Flixel – It’s the best! Beats the rest!
• Graphics Gale – Pixel art program, using the free version.
• Adobe Fireworks CS4 – In case I need to use some filters, or more advanced editing.
• DAME – For the map editing.
• Open ModPlug Tracker – For whatever musics end up being made.
• AS3SFXR – for some sweet sound effects.
• Chronolapse – For taking snapshots and making the timelapse.
• X-Split – Free version for use in streaming whenever I’m working.
• And most importantly… Google – for the everything else.

This Ludum Dare is shaping up to be a pretty good one guys. Just remember to eat, drink, and sleep.

Another jam, another overambitious game I could have no hope of finishing. I tried to limit the scope of game to a very small game this time: collect resources, fight a handful of enemies.

That ballooned into having dynamic lights, a day/night cycle, purchasable upgrades for multiple entities, a helper turret, box-meuller distribution curves for resource rates, and more. Whoops.

Things that went well

Godot was a joy to use. There wasn't a whole lot of friction getting in my way as I was creating the game itself.

The content pipeline for Godot is also super simple. Just drop the images and sounds into the folder and they're good to go. Update and re-export the image and it was already updated in the engine before I tabbed back. No recompiling or reloading/refreshing the engine.

The game itself also came together super quickly once I got some of the boilerplate stuff out of the way.

As usual, Aseprite is a joy to use, and made the art creation process very fluid.

ChipTone (https://sfbgames.itch.io/chiptone) was also very nice for that crunch time burst of quick and dirty sound effects. All of the sound effects (a grand total of eight) we're hastily slapped together in the last 15 minutes of the compo timer and rammed into the engine as fast as I could possibly muster. I had no idea if they were balanced very well, or even audible when played together. I also had no time left to make the menus, or the music. Though your ears will probably thank you for the lack of music.

Things that didn't go as planned

Making UIs in something that isn't Flash is hard, man. I spent 3 hours just trying to cobble together the buy mode menu. And it took 2 or 3 hours to get the bitmap text to render at all.

This is my first entry since flash was killed off by Adobe. I haven't made any games since then. I also chose to use a new engine, so I was learning Godot at the same time. I really should have toyed with it in the weeks leading up to the jam, but I couldn't find the time. This meant that I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do things in the engine that I could have spent actually making more game. As a result, I ended up having to cut a lot of the content of the game.

I had to make the enemies scale up with the number of days survived, because I had to scrap all but one enemy type. Originally, scouts would have been weak all game, but more heavy enemies would spawn in to round out the enemy forces.

Cut content

• 5 of the 6 enemy types were cut
• Mining drones to assist with the mining in later waves, when the player is tied up fighting.
• Pilotable defense turret
• Grenades for the player
• Missiles for the turret
• Adrenaline to slow time for a short while. Would have given the player more time to mine during the day, or more time to fight at night.
• Menu screen
• Game over / Victory screens
• Music
• Animations for the player and the enemies

Unplanned stuff that made it in

• Dynamic lights and shadows.
  • It turns out this was crazy easy in Godot, just add a light source and some light occluders. Though it did take about an hour to get the occluders to work right.
• Hand-made bitmap font.
  • Godot made this very difficult. It really wants you to use TTF fonts. I almost scrapped it and used sprites instead of a custom font because it was taking too long.
• Footsteps in the sand that fade over time.

Time sinks

• Learning a whole engine from nothing while trying to jam. Womp womp.
• Bitmap fonts
• UI positioning
• Setting up the upgrade purchase prices and leveling ramps.
• A lot of time play testing
  • In hindsight, I think this was a good sign that the game was at least fun to play.
• The footsteps took a lot longer than expected.

If you're interested in seeing how it turned out yourself, head over here and give it a quick play: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/crash-landed