I’m 7Soul and I’m the programmer of Dead Pixel Games, a group of 5 brazilian friends with a passion for game design.

   Cosmic Canvas is our second ludum dare game, the first being Biodome.

   I don’t have much to say, other than go play our game, and have fun.

Took us (a team of 5) 4 hours to come up with an idea. The concept art you see here doesn’t make any sense, ignore it.

First time I’m interested in a MINILD, the theme is really cool this time. I’ll be trying to make a game similar to The Guardian Legend, in which you have a space shooter and an exploration/roguelike game all-in-one. Graphics will be 8-bit, trying to follow the NES restrictions

 These are some sprites I made in advance, the girl will transform into a ship, like in the game

Using Construct 2 and Photoshop

Some progress ^^

We had an idea pretty fast, and started with the concept of characters. I begun coding everything. What you see here is the 3 controllable characters, and one of them can carry boxes around, and stack them.

The other guys are making the art and the music, and it’s all looking pretty good

Not much to say here

What went right:

Simple gameplay idea
Using tools i’m familiar with
Livestreaming, there was only a few people, but they were a great motivation and stress relief

What went wrong:
Making a level editor, should have added a few more features like painting an area and auto-save
Enemies programming, should have optimized this

Timelapse:

Download and rate here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=2958

Progress :D

I made a lot of progress, the level editor and an automatic tiling feature. Some of the art is done as well
The game will be about an astronaut that find himself the last survivor of his space ship. But he has extreme powers that will help him defeat the invasors.

Little advertisement here:
Twitter: @7SoulDesign
Livestream: http://www.livestream.com/ails

Going to bed now, ill continue my livestream tomorrow morning, and continue my quest on having more people watching than Notch’s stream (so far i had a max 5 viewers :O)

Cya, 7Soul

Made title screen on Flash cuz it was faster and looked better than Photoshop

Timelapse

Download and play it here!

LD 20 was really fun. I used half the work hours than last time, so everything was more relaxing and I could work on some better graphics and other stuff.
If there’s something I learned from past LDs (aka LD 19) is that you should not spend too much time working on some engine that is not important to your game. Last time I spent hours and hours just to implement a simple shadow system, while the main focus of the game, a battle system, was postponed for the second day.
This time I set my goal and by the first hours I already had a running engine and was ready to start making some graphics and levels.

My friends helped with testing /o/

I don’t know where the idea to make a puzzle came from, I don’t usually make puzzles. Actually the last one I tryed to make was a big failure (days and days to make an engine that was buggy and unstable)
But I’ve probably learned something from that, and this time I worked on a simple system that was fun at the end. Also the built-in physics system from Construct helped a little when making the pieces fall ^^

Level design was simple

What went wrong:
This was the first time I used the built-in transitions on Construct. And I must say, they are buggy. Next time I create my own transitions
Music was also a big fail. Next time I look up for some free music on the webz

What went wright:
My game is not a zelda clone \o/
Work was not overwhelming and I got to have some good resting time

What I’ve learned:
Use some time to think about what you gonna do and stick to that. It’s not worth to start working on something right away just to find out your idea is too complicated.
Don’t waste time working on small things, the main game engine is what matters the most!

Clean work screen on construct

I’ll try participating a second time

My tools:

» Construct
» Photoshop
» SFRX
» Tablet maybe, if I decide not to do pixel art
» NesTracker or FLStudio for music, if I make any music at all
» Coffee (lots)
» Noodles

It was fun to participate on this compo, and I’m happy I could finish it on time

My first idea was to make a simple platformer, but with the theme being discovery I couldn’t resist to make a roguelike. And btw it was the first time I made a roguelike, so I didn’t know where I was getting into…

One of the hardest parts was to create the battle system, and to get all the math right, like exp and hit chance calculation… it was a pain to get it right.

Luckly I kept things simple. No items or equips, and all stats are based on player level and by buying stats, wich was also pretty simple to make.
I’ve chosen to work with Construct (a game maker by Scirra), even though I was using it for only 4 days, I was quite familiar with it, because its so simple to use. A part of the game creation process was to get to know the tool better, and this will help me on future projects.

Creating the map was kinda hard, because Construct was lagging every time I selected a bunch of object or when there were already too many tiles on the map.

Debugging was impossible near the end. The built-in debugger couldn’t handle over 5000 objects without the FPS dropping to 4. The game itself was at 35fps for most of the time, at least on my computer.

And yes, I made some mistakes
– Playing TF2 for more than an hour
– Wasting to much time to get the shadow system the way I wanted (I started using 8×8 shadow tiles, but I switched to 4×4, wich took some time, but at the end I switched back to 8×8 to improve performance)
– I think Construct has a built-in save system, but I made a custom one myself, maybe it could have been easier to have used the built-in one

But
– Making really simple cute little pixel art graphics saved quite some time
– Giving a shit to music also saved time (at a price I guess)
– Slept only 6 hours a night

And that equals game :]

Cya next compo

That wass stressful o.o

I finished the game with 6 minutes left. By the time i had it compiled, Zip’d, uploaded, screenshot’d there was only 1min 40sec left!! That was close ._.”

Check out Mini Ghost Hunter!

Not much new stuff to show. Made some mode graphics and more level design

Enemies are now ready for battle (although there’s no real battle yet). They get stronger as you venture to the depths of the map

FPS is a little low, but it doesn’t seem to affect the game so far