I’m back for another round of sleepless nights. As always I’m going to be using GameMaker: Studio and Flash, but that depends on the final theme announcement.

This time I will be able to stream! Hope you can take a look during the jam.

Good luck, everyone.

I don’t think I’ve written anything about this new game yet. College has been kinda heavy lately (aka, I’ve been a whiny scum).

I got up, once again, for a Ludum Dare jam! I claimed the dorm’s study room, filled with my stuff (I even bought a cooler for my drinks) and got ready to jam as always.

Alright, so what’s there to say? For starters, this Ludum Dare theme was “You Are The Monster”, so I had this idea about having monsters with many swappable parts set in a Pokémon-esque world.

I took some video of the game, but I can’t show it because Tumblr sucks.

Video 1 | Video 2 | Video 3 | Video 4 | Video 5 | Video 6

That’s me btw 😉

The problem with this concept is that it is crap. Seriously, with a theme like that hundreds of other participants were obviously going to do a Pokémon-related game. What was I thinking? So I did the one thing that no game jammer should ever do: start from scratch at the middle of the jam.

Yep, I knew that my entry was already pretty much screwed, but I didn’t want to give up. Instead I used the rest of my time working on a small game I wanted to do a long time ago, yep, you guessed it, Pik & Pok.

Let me tell you just a little bit of Pik & Pok. About two or three years ago I became obsessed to NES games, to the point I would even start collecting them (what was I thinking, Jesus). Eventually, I got interest in arcade games as well, and I wanted to build a DIY arcade cabinet so I could emulate NES games.

You know how arcade cabinets tend to have really cool designs on the sides, like this one? Well, I wanted to give an authentic look to my custom cabinet, but I tought it would be really cool if I also made a custom sticker for a game of my own (I make games after all!), so I (forcely) tried to come up with a game that screamed “retro”. Starting by the name, there’s really no more “retro” sound than “pik” and “pok”? Why? The Pong game, of course….

Uh, yeah, Pik & Pok’s name comes from the game Pong. So then I tried think of the game itself (sounds like I’m doing everything the wrong way, isn’t it?). So, “pik” sounds like “pick”, and “pok” sounds like… well… it gives me the idea of “bashing”. So this is going to be a game where you pick and throw stuff.

Next thing, the aesthetics. This is going to be pretty weird to explain. News flash! I’m not actually an 80′s kid! However, when I was a kid, I always loved the outer space, the planets, the cosmos! There’s really nothing more nostalgic for me than to think about astronauts and stuff. So, naturally I got dozens of astronaut toys to play, but here’s the thing: in my childhood, the early 2000′s, in Mexico, merchandise usually took a lot of time to arrive from the United States. We would usually get fully-translated american cartoons about 3 years later, if I’m correct. So, to me, this is pretty much what a cosmonaut looked like:

A lot of creators took inspiration from the concept of “non-respratory helmets for spacemen” (trust me, I did my research), and so did I!

I wanted this to be pretty convincing, so I made a research on old-school Japanese video game characters, specifically around the 80′s. Turns out they were very round and simple (which is pretty ironic looking at all the overdesigned stuff the Japanese have been making lately), chubby and baby-like even!

Speaking of authenticity, I really wanted this game to look like a real-deal NES. You see, I hate this indie game trend for doing pixel art on everything, I don’t care about the pixels themselves, but how they do it.

First, we need to go back to why pop culture thinks pixels are “retro”. Video games –hell– computers back then weren’t capable of very good graphics. Computers display bits on whatever screen you have them plugged in limited by a resolution (how many pixels you can display on a screen). People tend to forget that computers also had limited palettes, which is to me the most memorable thing about these computers.

Take a look at how Link looked in the original Zelda. The NES had only two options for sprite sizes back then: 8×16 and 8×8 pixels.

But it also had a limited color palette. The NES made sprites to be able to only have up to 4 colors (including transparency) per sprite. If you look at Link above, it uses: green, brown-ish orange, orange-ish brown, and transparent. Why else would they have given Link green eyes?

It really pisses me off the association of colorful pixels to “retro”. Don’t take me wrong, I love pixel art, I’m a big fan of Cellusious. But to be honest, I definitely can’t go around bragging about how good I am, since I actually forgot to match the music and SFX correctly to the NES standards. By the way, the awesome music and “dying” sound effect is brought by my frenchie mate, Zylann.

All that said, I made my best to make Pik & Pok look credible, since I’m not really able to make an actual NES game working on an NES. I had to imitate the same limitations for this game. Hopefully I did it right.

The last thing to add to the recipee, and the most important, is core gameplay. When I first came up with the whole cabinet game, I made it with the intention that it could be played as a multiplayer game (either co-op or versus) entirely. Two of my top 5 NES games are Ice Climber and Bubble Bobble, those two games had amazing multiplayer gameplay (for their time, obviously), makes me wonder why most NES games had multiplayer but it was only for taking turns (you even had to have the two controllers) which sucks a lot. Anyways, this may seem like a no-brainer, but since most multiplayer games like: Mario Bros., Ice Climber, Bubble Bobble, Balloon Fighter, and so on; have the second player being a clone of the first but with a different color, I did the same. The red guy is Pik and the blue guy is Pok.

At first, was going to have puzzle-based maps, and the goal was going to be to carry the “coin” to the ship so you could proceed to the next level.

Yeah, the ship was going to be one of these. The game was looking so far like this:

However, I tought that there were way too many problems about this. First, the movement looked and felt way too much like Zelda; second, after killing every enemy just to go take the “coin”, the player would walk a challenge-less empty path towards the ship, meaning the stage would be over (technically) before it really ends since there’s no enemy left alive; and third, it would definitely not translate well into multiplayer for many reasons.

When you look at many of the old NES games, there’s usually a lot of different approaches for genres. I wanted to do this as well, so far I’ve made a convincingly-enough NES look, but what about the feel? I took Pac-Man’s maze concept and mixed it with tile-based movement and picking and throwing stuff. This is what we get:

It’s easier to see on video:

Video 1 | Video 2 | Video 3 | Video 4

Again, showing the videos in links because Tumblr sucks.

I tried really hard at doing a never-seen-before gameplay. I feel really proud. Oh, and if you say this plays like Bomberman, then you haven’t played Bomberman :^)

There’s nothing much to say about the enemies, except that I tried to make them look convincing, blah, blah.

Bizz is my favorite! Oh, if you play the game and see that the orange enemy I showed you in the gif above isn’t there, I took it out because I didn’t think it looked convincing enough.

Well, there’s nothing else to say about this game. I just said everything there was to say about the development I guess, hahah. 

Go play it if you must.

Anyways, thanks a lot for reading another long post from myself. I hope you learned something and if I said something stupid please rant me all you want through Twitter or something, I’d like to know.

See ya! 

Oh, by the way, I never actually built the arcade cabinet.

Bonus: a friend made these for me

Ludum Dare 31 is now over and I tought it was about time to write a damn post-mortem… because that’s what we do, right? Uhh… Ah, yes:

THIRD PLACE IN HUMOR!! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! BRONZE MEDAL?! NO WAYY!!1! THANK Y’ALL so MUCH VERY, VERY MUCH! (srsly, brah, srsly)

This is very heartwarming. After all these entries I’ve finally gotten Bronze on a category. Third Place on Humor. Wow. Seriously guys, thanks for the support and love you gave to our game. Hopefully one day I can get to Overall Top 100 and beyond.

But now let’s chill and talk game dev, m’kay? Just be aware that this contains major spoilers about the game, so you should check it out before reading this, I guess (Click Here To Play).

Alright, first of all: GOD DAMN IT GUYS, why did you have to choose such a terrible theme for the Jam?! Did you all vote for that because you tought it was an easy theme? It was so easy it was so limiting idea-wise (instead of being technically-wise) I rated dozens of games with the exact same concept. My partner and I were worried our idea would have been not original as well (apparently it wasn’t, thank Lawd). At the end it was the only theme with positive votes, whyyyy? I hated the snowman theme but now that I think about it, it would have been way better than this.

But anyways, things are the way they are and now that I stopped my ranting, let’s actually talk game dev. My mate, Jorge, decided to help me this time around for the Ludum Dare with music, sounds, beeps and bops; so I crashed his place this time around (he had to take of his younger brother, whatever). Thankfully I use a laptop for doing these jams.

You probably can’t see it very well, but my laptop is so crappy it needed three fans to keep it cool; there was no other way.

Alright, so we agreed that Jorge would do music and I would do art and code. Then we waited a while watching YouTube Poops until the theme got out. Then we got mad about the theme, dealt with it and began to brainstorm. Alright, so the theme was “Entire Game On One Screen” and I was struggling to think of a good non-Pong idea that wasn’t entirely crap. Then based Jorge said: “what if we do a game about closing internet pop-ups?” Heh, I just laughed pretty hard for how spot-on he was with his idea. We checked the Twitter hashtag to see if someone was already working on something alike, and no, so we began to hit the buttons.

We tought since this was all about a game on one screen, the game could go about simulating a PC that simulates an intendedly stereotypical (or shitty) game and then random pop-ups interrupt your gameplay leaving you vulnerable to enemies in the game. As Game Design rules dictate this would be a bit of artificial difficulty because you can never predict where a pop-up will appear or when, but fuck it, it’s funnier that way. You have no idea how much time it took me to deal with this decission.

We tought of giving the game a small plot where the character you play as breaks the Fourth Wall and asks you to team up against the evil forces of his game and the pop-ups that wanted to fuck your PC, like, pretty badly and such. BUT THIS IS LUDUM DARE, there’s simply NO time! So this obviously didn’t happen.

Break time: Jorge’s cat.

Probably the hardest part of making this game was deciding what kind of mood our game would be headed to. You see, most of my games feature very cartoonish, exploding and violent stuff with everyone screaming around. Since my previous Ludum Dare entry, Gargantuan, did exactly the opposite it did awfuly bad on its ratings, so I was very afraid to NOT do a comical game.

As you can see I tried to come up with lots of tiny, expressive and ridiculous designs for the playable character, any of these would have fitted the kind of atmosphere I wanted for the game. However, Jorge disregarded these. Even though I am really negative when someone has contrary ideas as me, I listened to him and let him give his oppinion: Fuck, he wanted a serious, cool-looking knight YET having all the explosions and violence I commented before (WHAT?! WHAT’S THE FUCKING POINT THEN?!).

[Crappy dramatization]

We both wanted completely different moods for the game, which I really disliked. After hours of, instant soups, pizza, Pepsi and thinking about the problem I compared both ideas and came up to a conclusion.

If you’re an aspiring Game Designer, like me, then you should definitely read this. I learned a lot on this decision and you could too.

Okay, sometimes describing what a Game Designer does is hard, but shortly I can tell you that a Game Designer is The Art of How The Fuck a Player Will React to Your Game.

By evaluating the both ideas Jorge and I had, I realized what we could do by mixing them up!

[Another crappy dramatization]

By joining the two ideas + the core mechanic we could pull what I call a Double Twist (OC do not steal btw). It’s hard to explain but I will try to do it anyways:

Okay so if you already played the game, you already know how this rolls. You get the first (and only screen):

By the way we presented the game on its profile it looks really bad and effortless (notice how we didn’t show anything about the pop-ups on the game’s description), next thing you open the game and it is in fact disappointing: an average platformer with an awkward combat system, average grunts doing average (eh) grunt voices when killed (also no effects when they die, just plain dissapearing). Well, this was part of our master plan…

I planned this first part to be easy as cake, mainly to purposely get you bored but also so you can get where the game gets its stands out and commits to the jam’s theme.

You’re playing the game, most likely bored thinking nothing else is comming until the first pop-up shows up. I assure you, anyone playing this and noticing the first pop-up was like “Uh-What…? Oooh, okay”. What I mean with this: the player is startled with something he didn’t expect, but pretty soon after understands what the game is about (maybe after the second or third pop-up, but eventually will understand), the game is about alternating between killing enemies and closing pop-up ads. This is the first twist.

At this point the player is most likely struggling to move its character, but can’t. Since the player could move normally all this time until the pop-up appeared, realizes that the pop-up is indeed the problem and needs to get rid of it or else it will be hit by an enemy.

While we’re on that, I decided that the control scheme was forcely a WASD scheme so the player could control the character with his left hand and close pop-ups with using the mouse cursor on its right hand. Also, we intendedly used popular pop-up ad sounds and the Windows pop-up sound instead of making our own because people are already familiar with these. The player, not only by looking but also by hearing, recognizes that the thing that just appeared on the screen is in fact a pop-up, and it knows already how to close it. We didn’t use any tutorial to show the player how to close pop-ups, people already know how to deal with these, so they simply head to click the [x] mark. Even if our pop-ups don’t look much like regular pop-ups, we achieved to make them credible. Thanks Jorge.

The player closes the pop-up and regains control of its character. The player now understands the core mechanic of the game, and now goes ahead and actually plays the game for real this time, the player is now encouraged to play the game. The player plays closing pop-ups, each time pop-ups appear at a faster rate and it’s impossible to close all the pop-ups and kill all the enemies. Eventually, the player can’t handle all the pop-ups and unevitably dies (this is actually artificial difficulty, but it serves a very important purpose).

So the player eventually dies, all the enemies run away and the game goes mute. The player understands he lost but suddenly… a scaling tone begins to play, as the screen begins to shake, and shakes harder and stronger as time follows, just as the knight that gets a stronger tone of red as time passes.

This serves yet another purpose. Let’s recap, the player has already gone through: disappointment to encouragement and now confusion and probably anxiety. You obviously don’t expect this to happen on a video game, I mean, probably you could from an enemy, but generally not from the playable character. As the pitch gets higher, the screen shakier and and the knight red-er; the player gets each time more anxious about what the fuck is going to happen next.

Next thing: my golden art. Next thing to happen: the knight explodes turning himself into a big, bulky man; holding its sword awkwardly accompanied by screams of all sorts, screen shakes, color twists on the background, a change in the music and lots of explosions and particles. This is the second twist.

Right now the player must be shocked at this point and probably laughing by how ridiculous the game has become. Let’s not forget how both pop-ups and enemies explode, screaming and launching tons of particles when killed. We basically just juiced up the game. The player is given a few seconds to realize that the mechanics haven’t changed and then is thrown back into action. It is basically the same game as before but with a completely different atmosphere. I know this is almost a complete look-back at a previous Ludum Dare entry, but, oh well.

I believe we couldn’t have pulled this part with the same impact without the previous part (the part where the player dies at first). I’m not sure about this, but the player experiences anxiety, expecting that something will happen but nothing expected for sure.

Unless you think I’m pretty retarded or euphoric about my own creation, I think this game is a good roller coaster of emotions and I encourage you to test it on a friend or relative by showing this game and studying the reactions (just don’t tell them what to expect, eh?).

Yes.

Even though I hated this, theme or even this game, it turned out to be my best Ludum Dare entry to this date and even if it doesn’t have a pretty good gameplay, I think it has an amazing effect, though. Just like always, I learned a lot from this Ludum Dare jam and had lots of fun and stuff. I feel bad that I slacked off and slept, like, a lot this time compared to my previous jams. Hopefully I’ll upload the Timelapses to my last three Ludum Dare entries soon so you can see my pretty face move back and forth real fast.

Lastly, a link to the game…

GO PLAY THE GAME! IT’S RIGHT HERE! CLICK THE LINK! DAMN SON! JUST CLICK IT! WHAT ARE YOU EVEN WAITING FOOOOOR?! CLICKEDY-CLICKY! YOU HAVE SOME CLICKING TO DO! …JUST CLICK THE DAMN LINK, OKAY? …OKAY?

I’d like to thank you all for all those amazing ratings you gave to our little game, without mentioning all those heartwarming comments you left us. Also, big, BIG thanks to my bro Jorge for making the music but also being really supportive on my game making passion after all these years. We both are traveling to Monterrey (it’s like, another state) heading to the Global Game Jam and hopefully we’re going to make a great fucking game, if not, we’ll at least make you smirk.

Blockade, a game by Rodrigo Gómez Maitret, music by Jorge Figueroa.

Peace out… I spent some good two hours writing this. I’m off to the fucking bed.

Well, I was in for the th- I don’t know really’th time! I went solo this time to actually see what the serious view of this jam is all about.

Serious as my work area:

After tasting the sweet glory of using a second screen for game development, I simply HAD to do it again, but since I’m a cheap boy I just plugged my T.V. (hope it doesn’t burn my eyes, though). Oh, and that fan, it isn’t for me, it is to cool down my crappy PC (it didn’t cool it down).

I wasn’t able to catch up with the guys at La Cordée doing Ludum Dare Paris, so I did a small poster as a homage to the good times during the last compo:

And thank you guys for signing it back! Hope you all did well this compo and ate lots of pizza!

Alright, now the game.

I worked for the first time on the jam and HELL, it was horrible. Don’t get me wrong, it was fun but not as much as working with some mates like in Ludum Dare Paris or my self-made jams with friends. Without mentioning that family slept over in the house, and well, I won’t ignore my guests.

But anyways, I worked on the game, and thank you all for finally choosing a theme I liked (though I don’t think it has a lot of diversity possibilities) but I got overhyped for my idea which was probably not that original/great (I just hope I was good enough to compensate it with nice gameplay).

If you played my previous Ludum Dare games, Hell Hole and One Man Army, you may have noticed that I have this obsession with making cute, puffy characters doing explosions and lots of screen shakes. This time I decided to try to do it a little bit the other way around, a little bit more serious and different art style (heck, I didn’t even use my tablet).

A few sketches I did during the jam

I didn’t sleep for two whole days, and it was odd, my brain simply couldn’t make basic math and I think I saw a few eye illusions, which creeped me out.

There’s not much to say, really. It’s just a game about a futuristic guy fighting stone giants. I didn’t put all I wanted to be in the game because time limitations, which was a story and background art. But I’m pretty happy about how the gameplay turned out. Have some screenshots.

Maybe I’ll post the timelapse if my computer doesn’t burn down while rendering. In the meantime, go play the game, won’t you?

PLAY THE GAME  

Anyways, as always, it was great to be in a jam again. I am really, really tired and I’m going to sleep now. Thanks for reading this post or playing the game or both, I love you <<<<<333

G’nite! I think I’ll rate some games tomorrow.

Last weekend was a tough one, I’m going to explain y’all about it, but since it’s almost Christmas I’ll say it in a poetic way:

One day, little Rodrigo was lying on his bed,
out of his shirt, there was his tummy,
it was growing fat ‘cus of the french bread,
he is surely turning chubby.

After minutes of scrolling he saw a mail
“Oh shit! A Ludum Dare jam!” said after looking his phone
I think it’s a good time to make a game,
thank God it begins just when I get home.

He gets ready for the event one day before,
Grabs-n-picks two bottles–four liters of Coke,
he pays and gets out of the store,
“Man, this is so much, I’m surely going to choke!”

He goes on his way, exhausted, for all he had to carry,
a computer, books, clothes and bottles of Coke,
he took the bus and walked through a forest that was scary,
“It’s creepy, really! I’m doing this at nine PM! This is not a joke…”

…Well, actually it’s because he’s a pussy,
but when he crosses that road he gets pride:
he does fourty minutes of bus and thirty of bus, not that cushy.
After walking with his stuff he finally gets to arrive.

He puts evertything in order to get ready and takes a photo ‘cus he’s a wench,
finds out that the jam begins at three AM for him,
“Gee, that’s what I get for trying to be french,
well, I should begin with energy so I should go to sleep”.

Nevermind because he had a dinner that he had to attend,
“Crap, something always turns up when I have to jam!”
He goes and always looked to his watch, until the end.
“Fuck… I need to sleep because of how tired I am…”

The moment finally comes but he still sleeps like a champ,
it’s past three AM, but he is still tuck
eventually, from nowhere, on his leg, he gets a cramp
“Aaaaaghhh! What the hell?! It hurts! Fuck!”

After crying like a bitch, he manages to climb,
he reaches his watch that was on his right,
“It’s already six AM! Look at the time!”
So he just runs to his computer and logs to the site.

“You Only Get One…”
The jam theme was finally announed, as it said one sign.
“Wow, you guys really chose stupid shit for a jam”
He had to hurry to think for a game to design.

He takes a shower, washes his hair and dick.
“What am I supossed to do?”
He tought something really bad, really,
and he tought something further as he drew.

“You only get one…. soldier?”
Even he knew that the idea was crappy.
He began the project and saved it on a folder.
It was bad, but didn’t matter ‘cus it made him happy.

Cokes down,
codes up,
he used new tricks that he learned by playing around,
worked nonstop until he finished his cup.

One day goes,
the other one is on, stressed as fuck,
he wore the same clothes,
I think they even had muck.

After testing his game, without knowing why, it crashes,
“No, no, NO! What the hell?!
All I’ve made is going to be trashed!”
The faggot was so mad that he began to yell.

After toying around he fixes it on a whack,
“I don’t even know how”
It’s okay now, but he almost had a heart attack.
“I feel like the best coder right now”

After a while more he finishes,
“I can’t feel my brain….”
He has to take a shower ‘cus he smells like the fishes.
“It was a pain, but good as hell! I’ll do this again”

Even if you understood or not, that was my experience through the Ludum Dare 28 jam. It’s the first jam game that I can consider “not a complete piece of crap” and I’m really happy about it.

Eeeh, eh… ENOUGH GAY RHYMES, PLEASE, AND LET’S TALK ABOUT THE DAMN GAME ALREADY. CAN WE?

So, again, this is a game entry for the Ludum Dare 28 game jam, a challenge where you or any other developer struggles to create a game with a selected theme in less than 48 hours. This jam’s theme was “You Only Get One”… Really? I’m so pissed by how closed this theme was, and I’m not taking just for myself, you should have seen Twitter at that moment.

My work place, btw…

Anyways, I worked on a little title called “One Man Army”, which appeals to the jam’s theme as “You Only Get One… Soldier!” To me, the idea of one soldier versus a whole army isn’t that bad, but when you put it into a game… it’s very cliché.

You can’t learn much about the game’s story because I didn’t have enough time to put it into the game. So let me tell you a little about it:

The game takes place on a country called Republic of Chekolosgeria, which is in war. The only problem is that they only have one soldier (giggle), so these folks right here, the Doctor and the General take their only soldier, Duffy, and convert him into a super soldier… Duffus!

Smart-ass, award-winning idea. About the gameplay, it was going to be completely different, but then I changed my mind during the development of it. Right now it looks like this:

Basically, all you have to do is slap the enemy soldiers so the burst and explode all their body parts.

I’m so happy with how it ended looking. I knew the explosions and body parts flying around was a very important thing to add to the game so I had to learn how to use physics. Yep, that’s the first time I ever used physics on a game and it probably took me more than half day to just make the physics.

It’s a great thing to have on any of your games, remember: your game can never have enough particles.

That’s it I guess… You can download it here:

But here’s the link to the Ludum Dare entry so you can vote for it to win if you liked it. I really don’t expect to win because I think the idea is really dumb, not original and not really appealing to the competition’s theme at all but do what you feel like.

Thanks again for reading yet another long post of mine, finishing this game felt so great for me, you should really try the next Ludum Dare if you don’t know it already. Anyways, I’m out.