♠Play It Here ;D ♣

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After a few hours of doubting whether if I would participate or not (I had a huge Christmas party on Sunday and HELL NOTHING would stop me from going XD)  I decided that I would give it a try to my own 24 hours game jam, so I began creating some magic! XD

You Only Got One…What Should I do with That ¿? 

You only got one? One bullet, one life, one minute…there are many ways to understand this concept and I wanted to have a take on it in a kind of  different way. I started to think in which occasions we really only got one and after some minutes of forcing a bit of hardcore mental processing, I thought of Decisions! Either they’re large or simple, once you have chosen and performed it you can’t go back. Even the smaller decisions in life like choosing to wake up when the alarm rings or having five minutes more of sleep, can make the difference in the way our future develops. Having this on mind I began with the concept behind She, a game in which every decision counts.

Building a 20’s Silent Film themed entry

My tools: Game Maker Studio, Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Audition CS6.

I got the inspiration for the aesthetics  from the old silent films from the last century, I loved the style of the dialogue cards and the influence of art nouveau in every aspect of them. Of course since I had only one day for everything I combined it with a simple vectorized cute style. The final result grew on me and I love how it all came along! ^^

I spent the first 6 hours designing the characters, drawing and painting along with the backgrounds, scenery special effects..etc. My heart was racing and a shoot of adrenaline fuelled me during the whole process XD I even dropped a cup of hot cocoa over my keyboard and damn how I regret that now Whatever….When it comes to programming it was pretty simple I must admit that the part I liked the most was designing the enemy waves for chapter 2. If you’ve already played the game you must have noticed that the second part contains most of the action and fun. The literary aspect was really important since it was the core of the whole game. I spent about half ‘n hour writing the suicide letter. I took a look at many sad suicide letters from real life for inspiration, that was a really intense and aerie experience that in a strange way I enjoyed. I wanted the card to be as realistic as possible.

For the audio and music I opted for the always successful 8bit! In my entries I always do every single asset from scratch with exception of the music. Other than a few I created, most of the tracks and effects come from my royalty free library. That’s why I don’t participate in the real deal! I hope one day I can produce my own SFXs. The main theme is an 8bited version of Music For The Funeral of Queen Mary  and obviously I got the inspiration from one of my favourite movies…A Clockwork Orange!

#LD48 Conclusion…

I really enjoyed this Ludum Dare, I learnt a lot and achieved all my goals. I’m really happy with my entry it came along exactly how I had imagined it, and I think that’s part of what makes Ludum Dare an unique experience…..no sleeping and extreme efforts are worthy when you finally upload your game, see the comments and a sudden rush of self-confidence and feeling of success fills you from head to toes! 😀

Please play my game and replay to see all the endings and drive trough the different roads, snooze and don’t snooze, it’s interesting how the decisions affect the result and difficulty of the game. Enjoy and thanks!! 😀 

About:

Hi there!

A few months ago, I proposed a quite vague idea about a new “cartography” module for the upcoming LD23. Web Cartography is more and more used because of its curiously innovative and interesting aspect.

EuropeanPoliticalWeb (Linkfluence)

The picture above was made by a French startup and is representing the European Political seen through the web. (Based on semantic web crawlers) .

Now you may ask: “What’s the damn connection with Ludum Dare” ?

Just a few games…

With the increasing popularity of the event, we see more and more game proposed for each LD session. Also, the initial idea was to realize a cartography of the submitted games.

Why? 

To have a better visualization of the whole game submissions. Take a look to statistics in an original and interactive way.

•  Which games are  available for a specific platform? Multi-platform?
•  Which games have more votes, coolness? (main nodes) => Imagine a visual helping tool for voting.

…and numerous other possibilities.  (Why not something more realtime-oriented based on database snapshots?)

Proof of concept:

Using available public data and python scripts, I extracted and classified data concerning each game entries of a given Ludum Dare composition (platforms, ratings, creators,votes…). I’ve written a small web application displaying  large directed graphs, generated from these data sets.

You can find my work over here: http://cboissiere.com/projects/ldviz/

Don’t be afraid by the messy aspect of those graphs, it’s mainly because of the huge size of the data sets. And don’t forget it’s still experimental =)

And of course, the source code is over here: https://github.com/cboissie/LD_Viz

Tell me more:

It’s basically two kind of graphs:

• WordCloud: We extract each words from all game titles. The words used together in a same title are linked to each other. For instance, if you click on the “TINY” node, you will see all the words that were used conjointly (like “WORLD”, or “PLANET”). The size of the node is proportional to the word occurrence.

• MultiPlatform: In this graph, games and their respective platforms are linked (Windows, OSX etc…). The size of a platform node is proportional to the number of game ported on this platform.