Pewwww!

• 48 hours
• 5 hours sleep
• Every relative within 5 states visiting me.  (When it rains it pours.)

I made it.  This was my first flash game ever.  You can play it here.  I found a great tutorial for an Asteriod game.  By the time I made it halfway through the tutorial I had hit my stride so I ditched the tutorial and started making my game.  I struggled with my concept but I finally decided on a puzzle game where you move blocks to trap an evolving robot.  Each level the robot looks a little different and has different move logic.  By the time you get to the end it looks just like you.  I want to redo the game from scratch because it has remnants from my tutorial efforts in it but it work mostly.

Lessons:

• Flash is stupidly simple if you already have a programming background.
• It takes more time to create assets then it does to program.
• Don’t start programming until you have a complete game plan for your game.  (I was just happy to get sprites to move at first so my game evolved as I learned how to use flash.)

I am going to consider this a successful Ludum Dare.  I uploaded Evo to Kongregate and in the last hour it has already gotten 50 plays.  I think that equates to $0.10.  I doubt I will get the same rate of play but that is $876/year.  I am going to be rich.

I am participating in Ludum Dare for the first time.  I have never touched flash and after a brief look at Adobe’s IDE I decided I never would.  Until now!  FlashDevelop is by far head and shoulders above Adobe’s own product.

My game doesn’t look like much but it is actually coming along nicely.  The concept is a puzzle game where robots move every time you move.  You can push “squishy” blocks around to trap them on all sides.  Each level the robot will evolve and take on new characteristics.  I have a proto at http://cse.asmsa.org.  It doesn’t do much and looks kinda weird but it was my first stab at Flash and I was trying to work out all the pieces that I will need for the final game.  Now that I am comfortable and I have a good handle on my game logic, I am going to do a complete rewrite to make sure I don’t perpetuate all the crap code I put in while trying to learn which way was up.  I never thought I would be this far with hours still until the halfway point.   (Edit: I now am done with all my assets.  I only have coding left.

Good luck to everyone else.  Without this community and this contest, I would never have given Flash a second look.  I hope to dig into HTML5 in a future contest.

~Nicholas Seward