Hello everyone! This is my first Ludum Dare and I hope finish something playable. I’m bit worried about which language to use: haXe with HaxePunk? HTML5? I’m familiar with GameMaker Studio, but I think this time could be a chance to learn new skills. Any suggestion is welcome.

Best!

Xavier

After reading a lot of posts, I decided the next toolkit:

• GameMaker Studio
• Pixen, GIMP, PixelEdit and  Pixelmator for graphics
• No idea of sound effects or audio. I think that the best option in this case is Bfxr
• GitHub to mantain and publish the code.

I don’t know if afterall I’ll do something playable, but it’ll be a full learning  experience.

X.

This is my first LudumDare and I confess I’m so excited seeing how people are sharing pictures, screenshots and thoughts of the development process.

After know the theme I started to play around the idea that player controls a Slender after he killed a “player”. As you know, Slender is a very popular scary game, specially for the videos that gamers has published in YouTube showing them horror faces when they meet with the pale faceless figure. So I have decided to use the Slender “symbol” as an idea for a simple game. The first image that came to my mind was something similar to the splash screen of Terry Cavanagh’s “Don’t look back” but, instead of the player in front of a headstone, I imagine the Slender watching the dead body of a player on the ground with a flashlight close to him. The player is now Slender and must return the eight notes to its original location.

The game is titled “Don’t look at me”. I haven’t any graphic, sprite or screenshot yet because I’m now at the stage of developing the game engine. I hope to have something to share with you this night.

Finally, I just finished eating and working on the game again!

Callos with a glass of a good red wine (LALTRE -“the Other” in catalan)

Happy to see a few improvements, but still nothing interesting to publish here. Really still it’s an early stage of the development! On the other hand, here the source code at github (https://github.com/xbelanch/LD48). Really helpful and gives to you a big feel of security. As you can see, I’m trying to make a remake of Terry Cavanagh’s “Don’t look back”. I love this game. It gave me the idea for make the game for my first ludumdare.

Now it’s dinner time:

As I said before, I’m planning to make a remake of Terry Cavanagh’s game Don’t Look Back, but changing the history. In fact, I’m playing with the idea that the player controls the Slender character —from the popular, silly and scary 3D game Slender, the eight pages.—.

Here’s some sketches  (I don’t know if they helps to explain better the idea)

On the other hand, I resolved some nasty bugs of the simple game engine therefore I can concentrate myself the whole morning on the graphic stuff (sprites, backgrounds, credits…). Yesterday I made this… not of my taste (too much detail!)

Sure!

A break before I understand how particles works in GM Studio

a big goat… 

I finished the game! Hoooray! Time to bed.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=15692

My first LD48 game!

This is my first Ludum Dare and I’m glad to know I’ve been able to finish a game, strange, but at least, a game.

To be honest I was uncomfortable with the winner theme. I think I was not the only one that thought: “omg!” I have preferred other, probably more simple or more conceptual. After all I think that this issue isn’t important. Instead I think it’s a challenge that forces us to be more creative to find a nice idea to start to develop the game.

The first important choice I took was to do a remake. In fact, I think that’s all we do when we’re trying to make a game: we search for a clue or inspiration from the lots of games we played before. I decided to do something similar to Terry Cavanagh’s “Don’t look back”. I thought this will be a good starting point to, after a while, modify the characters, the game plot and graphics. But it was no possible in the end and I feel like I was haunted by the feel of DLB.

Ok, I’m also stuck with the no-end of the game :)

Play and rate it

What went right:

• Incredibly funny experience.
• Working with Game Studio Pro is ok. I have a six months experience with it and I feel I improved my skills in GML. I think that Game Studio is a good tool for developing games in a fast way. This makes me to think that GM is a right tool for make prototypes, sketches or mockups and platform games as well.
• The ambience and the atmosphere of the game.
• The rain effect.

What went wrong:

• There’s no a clear plot. Well, in fact I love games without a plot and left the player to imagine a plot by himself while he’s playing the game.
• There’s no ending. This is the big fail of the game. I was in a mess trying to work out a perfect end but I failed miserably. This is the first issue I want to fix this holidays
• No audio effects like footsteps. Only the rain sound as background.
•  No enemies to kill/avoid or puzzles to solve.
• No web port of the game. This question I think it’s crucial. As a player while I was rating games I find myself more comfortable playing the web port than Windows/OSX/Linux version. This issue makes me think that I need to learn HTML5 or Haxe + NME soon

Second try! This time I’m in for the jam with Tsuki_Usagi (she’ll work better than me the graphic and audio side). Tools:

Code:  Last time I used GameMaker Studio. It works well but I hate that it’s only for Windows (though you can export to different platforms). I decided to move to HaxeFlixel and it worth to giving a try! (the community is awesome and helps a lot!)

Art: Paint.NET, GIMP, Pixen, Pyxel Edit, oh… well…  Tsuki_Usagi could explain it better.

Sound & Music: SFXR, Audacity…

Timelapse: Maybe!

I love this theme. In fact, there’s a lot of amazing games that bear this concept in mind. The first game that everybody remind is Thomas was alone. This is a game with minimal graphics (not the gameplay) but  also there’re others games that aren’t so popular though they have in common the same concept: geometric shapes, simple scenarios and go on, i.e. Alphaland, LIM or One

But I guess that working only “minimalism in graphics” could be a misconception or bad interpretation. And that’s the question! What about a minimal gameplay or plot? minimal, not simple… that’s the real challenge! Probably, the last game of Pippin Barr, Mumble Indie Bungle is the answer!

This things happen. After learning HaXe because you’re tired of Game Maker and other paid tools solutions you got to deal with a theme that only works with Perlenspiel or similar. First lesson: the theme rules everything. You should choice the best (I said, the best) tool or language programming in relation of theme (and not in backwards). Most people is fighting now with squares or cubes… yeah, minimalistic stuff, but why don’t use minimalistic tools or thinks in terms of minimalistic gameplay? or minimalistic plot? Other people seems to be comfortable with Twine. It’s a straight and valid solution but people like me are so much lazy to read a yet another Twine story…

After hours learning how Perlenspiel works I decided to make a minimalistic horror game: LESS (Last Exit Scary Square). I want to do something similar to Imscared but in a minimalistic way. Stop! are you talking about to do a horror game based in squares? Probably… This evening I meet up with Tsuki Usagi and we’ll talk about the game design and other boring development stuff.

Anyway, I don’t forget to share a picture of food (I love callos…!)

After working for 6 hours I made a splash screen I feel comfortable. Sounds a bit ridiculous if you see the screenshot. To be honest build a game with Perlenspiel is really easy if you’re familiar with Javascript, but that’s not my case.

I’ve been talking with Tsuki Usagi about the gameplay. She has been playing with Imscared and I See You as well to get some ideas to define the plot of the game . Also we paid attention to Jason Rorher’s Passage (http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/). Really inspiring work!

This will be my 3th LD48. This time I decided to use Haxe and OpenFL. As rxi said, it’s pretty neat and there’re a few frameworks like HaxeFlixel or HaxePunk that allows to make a simple game in fast way. In fact I was working on a simple platform demo this weekend to practice. You can check out here. That sort of training has been a bit depressing. I found a lot of unresolved questions and issues that could be a problem next weekend. So I’ll keep everything simple and won’t design any complex game. That is!

I don’t know if it’s easy to do or useful but, is it possible to create a page that distribute the games depending of the language programming used once finished the competition. I think it would be a nice feature of LD48 that could help to people to see and study how other people are coding the same game programming issues and how they solved them.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 20th, 2013 at 2:36 am and is filed under LD #27. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

This is my fourth Ludum Dare and I must confess that for time I have no idea of game design, game programming, graphics or sounds. But I need fresh air, far from job routine. To get involved again and breathe the amazing mood of the competition. Cows, tower defense or other creepy thoughts will return. No problem… in fact, this is Ludum Dare, isn’t?

I discovered PuzzleScript for a while and I’ll give it a chance for this LD48. It seems reasonably easy to learn and make a simple puzzle-sokoban-based in less of 48 hours:

Some weeks before I gave a speech in Barcelona about how great and amazing LD, specially due the community. The goal was to meet up together at the first gathering in Barcelona. That was not possible due some reasons (find the right space use to be the big issue). You can check the slides out here: https://slid.es/xavierbelanchealonso/ld48-survival-guide (some words are in spanish, but at last that’s not a problem I guess).

Well, actually this is my fifth LD and I’m in and I’ll use HaxeFlixel and OpenFL and, what can I say? those guys behind the curtains are great. They’re doing a nice job and allow people to create more games. In fact I spent the weekend working on a HaxeFlixel clone of the dangerous 2048 (don’t play if you want to lose your friends, your partner, your family, everything!) to practice. I’m stuck with some issues but I think I’ll solve soon and submit it on the warmup.

Finally I would love to create a simpe Room Escape engine from the ground up and fit the theme onto. Hope I will!

Best and good luck to everyone!

have a lot of work, but depending on which theme will win (Pluto, pluto, plutooooo) I’d give a try! and test some HaxeFlixel dev features!