I’ve been working on a new game for a couple weeks now and I am finally to a point where I would like to share what I have got. I’m intending it to be a coffee break roguelike that focuses more on grabbing lots of loot and evading enemies as opposed to fighting, hence the name “Grab the Loot and Run”. I’m not 100% how all the mechanics I’m planning will work together (I’ll have a post about that later), but I’m going to give it a shot and see if it is any fun. Here some screenshots.

I’ve been working on my roguelike recently and decided that I needed to switch to a font that included lowercase character. I’ve never made a font with lowercase characters before and it took a little experimentation to get everything looking good.

Overall I think it came out pretty good.

I’ve been working on a running animation recently. I haven’t worked on the upper body yet, but I like how the legs work. My usual method of leg animation is to make it look real busy and fast so it kind of has the illusion of running, but really it is just garbage. This time I actually researched how it should be done and tried to do it myself. I think it looks pretty decent.

My goals for this Ludum Dare were mentioned a few posts ago before the competition started. I wanted to finish in the top 70 overall and have at least one category in the top 20. I managed to achieve one of those goals. Here are the judging results from my game.

#40    Mood    3.59
#63    Overall    3.44
#76    Theme    3.56
#94    Community    3.22
#147    Fun    2.89
#157    Graphics    3.26
#284    Audio    2.41
#340    Innovation    2.44
#360    Humor    1.75

My game was judged as the #63rd overall so I achieved one of my two goals, but my highest rated category was Mood and was only at 40. I am pleased with the results. This game was definitely an experiment and wasn’t the type of game I would normally make. It was much more story driven and really wasn’t fun at all. My goal for the next Ludum Dare is to just make something fun. Lets say at least top 50 in the Fun category. 

I’ve also started some design work on a new game. It’s similar to Xploration, but much simpler and more complex. In many ways Xploration failed because everything was too complex and my intended scale was too large for me to deliver. Perhaps something like that would succeed if I had more experience or more skill, but I’m going to try to make something much simpler and see how it works out.

Now that I have gotten some sleep I’ll go ahead and reflect about how I think I did on my game. I’ll be honest that I wasn’t a huge fan of the alone theme and I didn’t really have any ideas initially. Me and my wife brainstormed together for a while after it was announced, but we couldn’t come up with anything that I was satisfied with. I eventually decided to make a platformer and that I could come up with the exact storyline later. This worked well because as I worked on the platformer code I also spent some time working on the art. While working with the art I managed to come up with a simple storyline that I felt was a good fit for the ‘alone’ theme.

What went right

• Graphics – I really like the look of my game. I had decided prior to the start that I was going to use a very minimal palette and it fit my game very well. I also added a fading effect to the screen that added to the alone factor. Overall, I think the graphics were pretty good.
• Audio – I made a simple short background track that sounds alright. I’m not very good at making music, so getting anything that sounds halfway decent is in a win in my book.
• Editor – I have created a nice tile editor from previous projects that I used to create the game world. It was fairly easy to use and all I had to do was write the code to import the binary map files.
• Storyline – I like the story of my game. I don’t want to give any details, but I like the flow that it has.
• Tools – I was very familiar with the tools that I used. Gimp, PxTone, Visual Studio, C# and XNA. They are all things that I have been using for at least several years.

What went wrong:

• Editor – There are a couple things about the editor that made it tedious to work with. It has auto tiling functionality, but the tileset has to be setup a certain way for it to work and I couldn’t do it with the tileset I was using. It also didn’t do any scaling on the Source texture and because I was using 8×8 tiles, it was a little difficult to select the tile you wanted.
• Time Management – I spent way too much time playing my game. I had more elaborate plans for the storyline, but due to time constraints, I wasn’t able to implement them. You can actually see hints of it in the world if you look closely enough.

Overall, this Ludum Dare was a great experience and I think my game is significantly better than my LD21 entry. I encourage everyone to give it a try and tell me what you think. Here is the link to the entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=4628

I have finished my game and submitted it. Unlike my first LudumDare, I’m actually really happy with my game this time. It isn’t the type of game I would like to make, but I didn’t really want the alone theme, so I kinda had to go with my first idea. Here is the download.

I ended up taking a very long break today, which wasn’t really good for the progress on my game, but I still think I am in good shape and will be able to finish it Sunday. I’ll probably work on it for a couple more hours tonight and then try to get some sleep. The main things remaining are:

• Finish creating the world (I’m probably about 10% done)
• Everything Audio related (Haven’t done any audio stuff yet, probably not going to be able to get much done)
• A menu/title screen (This shouldn’t take more than about a half hour)

Visually, not much has changed since the last post I made, but I will still go ahead and post another screenshot. I am really liking how everything is coming together and I am hoping I can get close to my vision for the game.

Things have progressed very well since my last update. I have finished a lot of the core features and I am almost ready to start working on content development. I got 6 hours of sleep (3:00am to 9:00am). I decided to add a little fade to the camera and I think it helps make the player feel isolated. I have also decided on a storyline, but I don’t want to give any details, as some of you might end up playing the game, and I don’t want you to know what happens. Here is a screenshot.

I’ve got kinda a basic idea of what I am doing and I’ve gotten a lot of basic stuff working. I hoping for it to be a story driven platformer (really creative, right?). I’m kinda trying to take advantage of a reduced color palette to create a mood and reinforce the loneliness of the player. I don’t really know how successful I will be, but working with white+gray+black palette is kinda fun. Also, the physics are currently terrible. I always have a hard time getting platformer physics just right. It seems it either feels a little too floaty or feels a little too heavy. Hopefully I can manage to find a happy medium.

Here is a screenshot, because that’s all most people care about.

The theme has been announced. It is ‘alone’ and I don’t really have a clue what to make at all. I plan on brainstorming for a little bit tonight and if I manage to think of something good I will work on it for a couple hours. That is all.