My game Legacy of Hamelin was a bit of a rush job, and crucially the levels were the last thing I made. Always a bad sign!

That meant that I didn’t have time to actually see if the puzzle mechanics worked or were interesting. Turns out they don’t really work, so what could I do about that?

A few ideas for the rat sections:

• Don’t let the rats go into the sewers until they’re all over a sewer. However, that A) seems weird in the fiction (stupid reason) and B) might make it hard in a not particularly fun way.
• Don’t stop the rats falling in the water in the first stage. But why would the piper care enough to restart? Not sure if I want there to be moves that kill you: that’s frequently annoying in puzzle games. Might be okay if I also had undo I guess?
• Make the rats poop, player won’t step on any tile with poop on it. Might end up with too much poop? Alternative: only make the rats poop after they leave the sewers.
• Add tiles which only the player can go through/only the rats can go through. What would these tiles be? Already have that the player won’t walk over sewers, but can’t really use that to limit the player’s movement because then it’ll be too easy to get the rats in them.

And for the children-stealing:

• If a child moves next to an adult, the adult grabs them until the piper moves next to the child and re-brainwashes them.
• If you move next to an adult while controlling the children, they’d attack you.
• Possibility of drowning the kids? A bit dark, not sure if people would pick up that you have a choice of drowning them or kidnapping them?

Additionally, people don’t immediately get what the aim is in the second and third sections. Could fix this with some dialogue from the mayor probably.

Not sure I intend to take the game any further, but it’s good to consider these issues anyway.

A meetup organised by Midlands Indies and Warwick Game Design.

Location: University of Warwick campus, room H0.01 (Humanities building)
Map link
Time: 10:00am to 10:00pm, Saturday and Sunday

If you’d like to come, please email me. I may not notice replies to this post.

Hope to see you there!

A Midlands Indies meetup for Ludum Dare 23: you should come along if you’re nearby.

Location: ComputerMinds Offices, 8 Edison Building, Electric Wharf, Coventry: Google map. You’ll need to phone me when you arrive to let you in the gate.
Time: 11:00 – late, Saturday and Sunday.

If you’d like to come, please email me and I’ll send you my phone number.

Hope to see you there!

A Midlands Indies meetup for Ludum Dare 22: you should come along if you’re nearby.

Location: ComputerMinds Offices, 8 Edison Building, Electric Wharf, Coventry: Google map
It’s the building just next to the entrance (shown here saying “this piece of la… and canal”). You will probably need to phone me to get me to let you in the gate.

If you’d like to come, please email me and I’ll send you my phone number.

Arrive around 11ish on Saturday and Sunday. Expect to be kicked out around 6-7PM on Saturday (I have a Christmas meal to get to), but Sunday we can stay as late as people would like.

Entry page

Not too happy with the completeness, I will create a jam version too.

Here’s what my game looks like so far:

I’ve spent too long on the graphics and not enough getting the actual gameplay to a point where I can find out if it’ll be fun, but I am at least happy with how it looks.

The idea is a puzzle-exploration game with completely unique enemies that you certainly won’t recognise from any other game.

Submitting what I have now for MiniLD, will keep working on it for Versus.

Wanted to add different shaped blocks, but didn’t have enough time.

Tetris Fight Club

Working on something:

Tetris Fight Club

Not very happy with the jump attack for a few reasons including that if both players try to jump at the same time that is more than 3 keys pressed at once. But not sure what to do about that.

Have only managed to play one game with another human (embarrassingly, he wiped the floor with me) so reports of trying it out with two people would be really helpful.

Better name suggestions welcomed.

Play here

Not yet a game (story of my LD life).

Super Collide-Em-Up is finished.

Entry page.

I have a prototype but no real gameplay yet.

Play here.

Topsy Turvy post-mortem

What went right:

* The concept. I’ve had the idea in my head for a while, and I’m very glad that I used the competition as an excuse to make it rather than forcing myself to think of a game idea inspired by the theme. And the game ended up pretty much how I imagined, so that’s good too.
* Inkscape as level editor. AS3 has some rather lovely XML-parsing abilities, so reading the SVG file was surprisingly simple. It’s very much hard-coded to the specific output that (my copy of?) Inkscape generates, but it should be fairly easy to fix if it ever stops working.
* Abstract graphics. I am not an artist, so I decided to save time and just draw everything out of lines. I think the results fit the game fairly well, even if they’re not actually good.

What went wrong:

* The goal. I added the collectables to provide an incentive to get to the more difficult areas and also as extra landmarks for getting your bearings. Unfortunately, with time running out and no win conditions implemented, I made the decision that you would win if you could collect all of them. In hindsight, I should probably have added a level exit instead.
* Difficulty. The game is ridiculously hard. I knew I wanted to have some areas which would be tricky to get to, as a challenge, but when the goal became “collect everything”, those areas suddenly became non-optional.
* First day motivation. I wanted to have all the basic game mechanics done by the halfway point, but I was just procrastinating like crazy. I’d come to the conclusion that it just wasn’t technically interesting enough to hold my attention, but then on Sunday morning I added death and respawning. Suddenly my game idea was in front of me and I could start constructing devious routes through the level, and I spent the rest of the day excited by it.
* The name. It actually changed name twice between starting and submitting, and I’m still not really happy. Currently thinking about maybe renaming it “Jump-Zap-Flip”.

Lessons learnt:

* Get death/respawn implemented earlier in future
* Think of a win condition as part of the design process
* Don’t make ridiculously hard challenges required to complete the game

Once again, I seem to have made a game which only I will able to play.

You can play the current version online here.

It desperately needs collectables of some kind to give the game some objective. I can probably get away without much more level design, since it’s already fairly confusing with a non-massive level.

But first, I think it’s time for some food.

Viewable here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKdPC42_F3Q