finally i am not busy with work
i think i’ll use js and no game engine as usual.
but who knows, i also wrote a lot of rust between last ld i entered and this one so maybe i’ll do it in rust (hint: no)
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yes.
in javascript probably mostly from scratch. maybe a library or two idk.
okay so this is a post mortem of the game i made for ludum dare called bloody tentacles. if you arent familiar with it, here is a gif that illustrates the gameplay fairly well.
basically 5 stages of that. and spikes too. you control the body with wasd and the tentacles with the mouse. they aren’t big stages so i hope it doesnt overstay its welcome/become samey towards the end, although it might somewhat since the last level is a bit tough.
alright on to the postmorteming.
so what went well?
- writing my own engine: i dont think i could have made this game with an off the shelf engine. not without hacks or having to work around the engine in many parts of the code at least.
- using bosca ceoil: i have have never written music before this jam but i was able to make nice sounding stuff with bosca ceoil in very little time. highly recommend.
- my art: i dont consider myself an artist but this stuff came out very well. i have been trying to get back into pixel art lately
- my method of choosing a name: i just looked through my source code and found the coolest sounding names and picked from those. it was down between “gibify” and “bloodyTentacles”. both are good names but i think this was a better one.
what went wrong?
- my art planning: i have like a billion art assets in my art folder that are unused. the coolest of whcih is a set of sprites that let the eye follow your mouse. but also a whole sprite font! and another track of music! jeez. should have held off until the end.
- my sleep schedule: i stayed up until like 5 am every night even though i got no good work done between 1 and 5. had i not done this, i probably would have finished in time for the main compo. this is the biggest thing i think.
- my first day plan was too ambitious: it was the same basic idea but i wanted you to control the tentacles more individually.essentially, you’d hold shift (or something) and go into a slow motion/pause mode (think like in transistor when you’re planning moves, or in the witcher 3 when you are using runes), where you could move the tentacles to individual places and pick targets that were in range. you’d then release pause mode and theyd do that.
this would have been sweet but it would have taken more time. i’m glad i simplified. i might still do this in the future but it is unlikely. maybe even in another game.
- blood splatter on the walls: towards the end i added a feature where i would draw the effect buffer onto the wall every frame at a low opacity, so that you would see the blood spatters (smoke also showed up there but you couldnt really tell). this looked cool, and gave the game a great sense of persistence, but since i was doing it in screen space it looked really stupid when e.g. the blood would fall off the end of the screen and be cut off suddenly, or you’d move and you’d see the world outline on screen because of the parallax background (even without the parallax background, the first effect was bad enough looking make it too annoying to be worth doing).
so anyway, if you havent played it, you should! it’s actually pretty fun i think, and i don’t always say that about my games.
he awaits you
since the last time i entered (which was a failure since i did not finish my game), i finished college, became a professional game developer, and finished a few games.
so maybe it will go better this time? i don’t know. i hope so. i took friday and monday off so that i won’t be exhausted when it starts and so that i will have enough time to do the jam if i dont finish in time for the main compo.
i’ll be using js and rolling my own engine i think, but maybe unity and c# if the theme really seems like it would be better 3d.
Hadn’t expected a good theme, nor that I’d even want to now that gamedev is my day job.
Entry will be in Javascript+HTML5. Possibly WebGL, we’ll see!
wasn’t happy with my last entry, lets see what i come up with this time.
tools:
language: haxe (targeting flash).
text editor: sublime text
sound: bfxr
art: photoshop
libraries: maybe polygonal.ds, but maybe just the haxe stdlib. hard to say.
good luck, me.
Now that the dust has settled, it’s probably reasonable for me to write a bit about the development process of my Ludum Dare Jam entry, Crashed on Planed Minutiae.
I wrote this game using ClojureScript, a variant of Clojure which compiles to JavaScript. For the unfamiliar, Clojure is a dialect of Lisp which runs on the JVM. Barely one year old, ClojureScript is an extremely new language, and when rushing to complete a game, it shows. For the first 24 hours, my development was fraught with regular (every twelfth build, oddly enough) compiler crashes due to an undiscovered memory leak. The JavaScript interop was shaky (but has already improved to address issues I faced during development), and some bugs in my code took a very long time to track down.
That said, I’m happy with my choice. It allowed me to write the logic for the game at an very high level, including writing a (very) small domain specific language for generating random levels. The compiled code ran quite quickly, and I didn’t really have any performance issues with it (that said, the game runs at 30fps, and not at 60 like I would have liked. I attribute this to my reckless calls to the canvas, more than to any fault of ClojureScript). I was able to write a couple macros to ensure that my canvas stack usage was always valid (every call to context.save() had a matching call to context.restore()), and to ease some of the burdens of the canvas’s API. Once more of the quirks with ClojureScript are worked out, I’d recommend it to anyone.
More detrimental to my progress as a whole than the language I used, was the fact that there seems to exist no good tool for writing canvas paths. My process involved tweaking lots of numbers, much guess and check, and just ditching things that I couldn’t make look right. THis, more than anything else, was why I ended up entering the Jam as opposed to the primary competition itself (that and poor time management, of course)
The game itself is somewhat neat, it’s a top-down adventure game, I wish I had time to add more features. Originally my plan was to have beasts rise out of the ocean and attack you as you harvested the crystals. You would have also gotten a blaster, to fight them off (in fact, the dialog still says that you do get one, but it does nothing). I would also just used HTML for the minimap/health window. Much more hassle than it was worth, and for no benefit.
Overall, I count it a success, even though I wasn’t as excited about my product as I had last time I entered (which had the benefit of being my first game as well).
I’m planning on entering Ludum Dare 23. I will be using ClojureScript, and developing using various HTML5 technologies.
Last year I enjoyed entering the competition immensely, but I made some mistakes which I intend to correct this time around.
- Not releasing on the web (e.g. downloadable executable).
- Not following the theme.
- Not blogging/participating in the community…. really at all
I didn’t do number one because I didn’t really know any useful languages. I had been a paid javascript developer for several months at that point, but I was still fairly green in terms of how to make a game, and I hadn’t done visual effects in quite some time (never being particularly good at them :). I’m choosing ClojureScript this time, as it compiles to JavaScript and can run in the browser. It also allows me to enjoy a faster pace of development compared to actual JavaScript. I did a test run this last week to push it to its performance limits, and it performed admirably
Number two fell out of not being that good. Surprisingly, I’ve become a much better programmer between last December and now. Last time I was very focussed on making anything that worked. I was hoping to follow the alone criteria by naming my game “Alone Where?”, and having no other characters. Eventually I dropped the “Alone” from the title because it felt like I was trying too hard, and then the title became shortened further to just “W”. Regardless, I’m going to follow the theme at least somewhat more closely this time.
As far as the third is concerned…. I’m notoriously terrible at doing anything social online, especially when there is code to be written! I have no patience for social networks or blogs, but who knows…. I’m at least making an effort to not be as antisocial this time around by posting this :p, and I’ll see if I can post at least nightly status reports regarding my game next time.
I’m unsure as to whether I’ll enter the Competition proper or the Jam this time. I will likely only have time to do the Competition, but who knows, that ended up being a spur-of-the-moment decision last time anyway based on “whelp it ain’t good enough now, so Jam it is”. Either way, it’ll get released!
I can’t wait.
Edit:
Seems like typically people list their tools and such.
Tools:
- Code: ClojureScript HEAD, using Emacs for editing and lein/lein-cljsbuild for building.
- Art: Probably PixylEdit, Pixen, or something along those lines
- Sound: BFXR, though sound might not be supported cross-browser.