This entry marks my 5th entry in Ludum Dare, and I think it has been my best so far from an art, game design, and coding perspective.  I wanted to get my thoughts down in my standard Good, Bad, and Ugly format.  I’m not sure about everyone else, but I always go back through and read my old post-mortems before each Ludum Dare to get back into the rapid prototyping mindset, so here we go.

Thog has no time to read your puny post-mortems!

Play Temple of the Sky People here!

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Want to help me playtest my entry?  I’m getting close, but this is going to come down to the wire.  I threw together a quick test level of some of the elements that I’ve got into the game so far.  Checkpoints, powerups, traps, water, health.  There are a lot of little things left to do (invincibility frames, displaying text, main menu, pause menu, etc) and some bugs to squash (hitboxes for the traps facing left are wonky, plus some more) but I’ve got the basic framework in place.  I’d appreciate any feedback or bugs that you uncover.  It is playable in Flash right in the browser.

Play here

You can complete everything in a minute or two.  This is really just a test bed for me.

Thanks all!

I’ve got a lot left to do, so natually I stopped for about an hour to make a giant, alien… status thing.

I’m defending my choice by saying that it is a time honored Metroid tradition to have upgrades delivered by giant alien statues.

I’m making good progress on my game tentatively titled “Temple of the Sky People”.  I spent a bunch of time doing sprite work, working on Tiled map importing, and coding a bunch of stuff.  I’ve hit a problem where the map tiles are showing up wrong.  It is because when I pull in data from Tiled indexes each tileset sequentially so I’ve got to do some math before getting it into HaxeFlixel.  I’ve run into a solved this problem before so I’ve got to go back through some old code, but I’m putting that off and posting here.

Thog hasn’t changed though

Here’s the temple tileset.  I’ve still got a bunch of little things to do, but the bones are there.

I went with the DB32 palette this time.  I’m working with it and I’m really enjoying it.

I’ve also started on some traps.

Ok, back to code review…

Screw it, I’m making a Metroidvania.

I’ve never made one before and I’ve always wanted to, so here we go…

This is Thog, or some other caveman-like name

Thog has a sick child and the village wise man says the only cure is a gem found in the ancient Temple of the Sky People.  Thog will brave the monsters and traps of the temple to recover the gem to heal his child.

I’m using the theme twice.  See, Thog is a caveman, so everything he uses will be ancient technology.  But then he is going to go into the temple and discover even ancienter technology! (I don’t think ancienter is a word).  But because ancient lost civilizations always have better technology than the current ones Thog will find ancient technology that will actually be super advanced.  So Thog will start the game using clubs and torches and end the game flying around with a jetpack shooting lasers.  Isn’t that clever?  See normally ancient technology is worse… but in this case… it’s… better…

Running! And Jumping!

Keyboard inputs, map imports from Tiled, basic main character animations, collisions, and more all running at a silky smooth 60 fps.  But the gif is captured at 33 fps so you can’t see it.  Great start for me and 4 hours of work.

This Ludum Dare I decided to do something a little different.  I’ve been messing around with Adventure Game Studio over the last couple months and when the theme came up I thought this would be a good opportunity to use it for something.

My idea was that a generic evil genius named Dr. Destructo had his plans foiled by the forces of good again.  He is blaming his incompetent minions (like any proper villain should) and summons a monster (the player) to use its mind reading power to root out the incompetent minions and make them pay.

Introduction sequence

The game is made in the style of the old Lucas Arts adventure games like Monkey Island and Indiana Jones.  The graphics are a glorious 320×200 with four frame walk cycles.  Music is non, existent and minimal sound.  I’m really happy with how it turned out.

The game is investigative as you try to find out which of the minions is responsible for the operation’s failure (spoilers: they all are). Find the evidence to eliminate as many as you feel like and then talk to Dr Destructo to see how you did.

The Good:

• The Engine – Adventure Game Studio does exactly what it sets out to do.  I spent no time coding an engine.  Every asset I made and letter I typed is directly tied to gameplay, which allowed for a longer game.
• The puzzles – There is a fine line for puzzles in adventure games.  Too strange and the player is just trying random things to guess what the developer was thinking.  Too simple and it is boring.  I think I struck a good balance, but just in case I made the central puzzle (you gather clues and then figure out a logic puzzle to learn who sleeps in which bed and has which job) skippable in case you don’t want to do it.
• The sprites – I like the look.  I originally had some more frames to the animations but started to minimize because of time constraints.  I think the lower frame animation cycles add to the look.

The Bad:

• The Engine – The engine is great, but the export options are not.  There have been some people successful getting them to run on Linux natively but the OSX engine only runs on older versions…
• Time available – I was traveling for work during the jam and was on a special project that didn’t allow for much time.  I spent about half the time I normally like to dedicate to a game jam.  Having the engine helped this a lot, but it led to some rushed areas like…

The Ugly:

• Backgrounds – I had to switch styles because of time constraints, so while the sprites are very clean and crisp the backgrounds were made with gradients and the normal tricks (granted at a low resolution).  I needed to go back in and clean up the brackgrounds, but I ran out of time.  They aren’t really bad, but they aren’t where I’d like.
• The endings – I’d hoped to make different animated endings depending on the number of minions you killed, but I didn’t have time.  You do get a different ranking and score, but I’d hoped for more.

If you want to play, follow this link!

The Great Debate is playable!  Well, there is only one puzzle and no funny MadLibs like conversations yet, but it works!  You can play as Albert Einstein matching wits against Neil deGrasse Tyson in a battle of wits.  Try to figure out what makes certain words score higher than others and earn more points in 10 rounds to win!

I’ve got most of the art finished.  Tomorrow is all content, music, bug smashing, and polish!  Now I’m off to bed!  I’m typing with all exclamation marks because I’m really tired!

Play here!

Note: There is no victory screen, so you will have to imagine an awesome one if you do win.

Note 2: There is at least one bug.  It isn’t a game stopper, but if you click on something other than a choice in the box you automatically answer the same thing as your opponent.  Annoying, but not game breaking.  This should just give you an idea of how it is going to play when finished.

I finally decided on my game. It will be (tentatively titled) The Great Debate!  Words are your weapon of choice.  Debate your opponent into submission!

Fear his Gedankedank! (click for animation)

It will be a puzzle game disguised as a debate simulator. The debate will take place over a number of rounds and each round of the debate, the two players will be given a list of four random words and have to choose between them. Each debate will also have a secret rule that determines how the words are scored (number of letters, highest ASCII value in the word, number of duplicate letters, etc). Your job as the player is to look at the results of the scores and try to determine the rule being applied, which will in turn let you maximize your score. The winner has the highest score at the end of the debate.

In the background the two debaters will be using the words that you select to have a debate about something random.  What the debaters say will be random.

Humor will be added due to the MadLibs like nature of the debate, since I will be inserting random words into completely random sentences.  Hilarity will commence!

Incidentally, does anyone know why the gif isn’t playing?  It is animated if you click on it…