This won’t be the end of There’s a hook, hopefully it will get launched on desura in a few months. There was loads of feature I wanted to add but left too late, I explain below
Software used:
programming: C#/xna (visual studio 2010)
graphics: Gimp
music: abundant-music.com
Day 1
So I live in gmt +0 so uk time but i live in Ireland. I sayed up until 2am to see the theme and then couldn’t sleep until 6am because my sleep pattern was messed up. I then had to get up at 9am with only 3 hours sleep and milk cows, then off to see my brother do a triathlon. He did 750m swim, 10km cycle and 5km run in 79mins and came 10th overall (fast). So I had to start ludum dare 14hrs late (4pm). I wanted to do a platformer because i had never made one before. So i build a working tile engine in about 5 hours and had to milk cows in between. This day was getting tough. I thought a 2D platformer was kind of boring and i had no idea how i would implement my theme. So i decided to have a 3D looking tile. Shown below was my first prototype compared to my final one.,and the last one is what I’m working on atm to make it look fancier in the final version. I also spent ages making a funny looking character and a good walk cycle. The level art was inspired by 80’s retro futurism. I ended my night at 6am
Day 2
Got up at 9am again to milk cows. Still the gameplay seemed boring nothing could kill me so i had to add spikes and falling off the map and for a in game reward I also added coins. I wanted to add moving tiles, boy was this a bit of a challenge. it took me far too long to get this. The problem I had was when a tile changed direction that it would display in front or behind other tiles. I got it working enough to be happy with. A couple of thing that aren’t perfect say if 2 moving tiles collide the layers of display don’t work correctly, so i had to leave that out. During the day i came up with the idea to implement the theme. I would have a random event every 10 second that would either make the game harder or easier. I had used a matrix transform camera so it was easy for my to change the camera in game and used this for half of the random events. I noticed i only had 1 hours left and I only had 2 random events working and no levels designed. At the last few minutes i started panic as i got 2 bugs one fairly major and where the player and camera would started to shake. I then just said i would enter the jam. Went to sleep at about 3am.
Day 3
I got up at 4am, a well needed rest. I was planning on polishing my art work but never got around most of it, i got a nice new hud and overlay messages (enlarge image above). I also made a nice menu and title screen. So in the last 4hrs left or so left i designed 10 levels, added music sounds, the ability to double jump and a new jump animation. Designing the levels were a piece of cake all i had to do was edit a text file. It took me longer to beat the levels than actually make them 😛 . Submitted it 10mins early and only just about. I came up with a name in literally 2mins and i thought it fitted perfect as coincidentally i had my character have one hand as a hook. (Gameplay in link below)
Gameplay of There’s A Hook
Feedback
The biggest thing that almost everyone commented about was the camera turning upside down as one of the random event. It made it too hard. There was a small problem with the random events. They are supposed to last 10-30secs. When a event would be set to inactive it still had a good change it would be picked in succession so it would continue for longer. Also there was only 4 different events and only 1 that made the game easier. I think it was penalizing players too much for being bad at the game by constantly making it harder. I will take all this into account when making the full game. Please have a look and rate of my game it would be really appreciated.
Ther’es A Hook ludum dare entry
