Ludum Dare 15: Caverns

The theme is a little bland, really. It's like the theme being "fields" or "playground" - it's a place, not a thing, not a theme. With other places, like "mountains" or "valley", there's more than a place - there's a resolution, a complete object. Maybe you need to climb the mountain. Maybe you need to escape the valley, or find the secret at the centre of the valley.

I started in GIMP yesterday and sunk some chilled hours into spriting. I actually love spriting, it's really cool. I get daunted by the big tasks but it's no big deal, really, once you get into it.

It's not coding though, is it? Coding wise, I got to that blank page and hit this wall. My game is a tunnelling game where you need to collect resources and build underground complexes, and fight mad blob things that eat your dudes. The problem is this: how do I populate the entire grid with dirt, the occasional cavern, and stick a starting point on there? I guess I got scared and I was pretty tired and just wanted to make some dinner and spend an hour with my wife before collapsing into bed.

So I did that, and now it's 5am, and I have about a hundred and fifty unread LD48 blog posts. Fuck that. I also had a bunch of tweets, but they're only short, you know?

So I've got some cool ideas bubbling away here, but I think I know what to do: get a playable version as soon as possible. Like ditch the graphics and worrying about getting their hands to match up with the ladders. I can make a dot game. Hmm. I'm just not sure how to make negative shapes and have those be the objects, you know? Rather than defining all that dirt, define the absence of dirt. Yes...

Mini LD 10: After School

After School is a game I made for the tenth Mini Ludum Dare compo. Play it at yoyogames.com, download it here, and see the original compo post here.

design

I made this using GM7. I don't even have the pro edition. There's a pretty major bug for XP users, and a couple things I'm not happy about.

-it's not clear if you're stuck in an infinite loop - players could quit and miss the final message.
-the art sucks
-some of the writing isn't great
-the fonts have weird fuzz on there
-there's no sound
-the animations are corny
-it really sounds like I hate it, doesn't it?

But I don't hate it, not even a little, because this is the first game I've ever made and it was an education to persevere with it. I came up with the idea for a game you couldn't win because I thought it'd be insensitive and ignorant to make a game where you can just talk the abuser out of being violent - these people scumbags have already given in to their urge to hurt you, to shatter your confidence and make you feel ugly and threatened on every level, and all you can do is A) be a victim, or B) hit the escape key.



code

I used a couple things. GM7 works with objects (which are secretly classes), instances (which are secretly objects), and scripts (which are secretly functions). I have a dude called Kubrik; he's a persistant object that contains a very clumsy List of Shit To Do. How it works is, Kubrik runs through a loop with a value called "step". If step = 1, print the title card (this is a couple of dialogue boxes). The dialogue boxes are programmed to tell kubrik when they are done. If kubrik makes three of them, I have to tell him to wait for three of them to finish. This isn't automatic or sexy in any way.

Then I have an object called dialogue_response, which is an object that prints text and detects if the user moves the mouse onto that line. If so, it highlights it red, and if they click, it passes a value to kubrik, then kills itself and all other responses.

This value is Kubrik's new value for "step". So, right away, my program doesn't remember the result of previous decisions. It's also pretty limited to dialogue, characters walking on a flat plain, and stupid animations. I don't have many tricks up my sleeve at all.

And it has a bug where XP users can't highlight dialogue options.

life cycle

I started off wanting to make a game where you start as a baby, then become a kid, a teenager, and a young adult, at which point a certain thing happens. I won't say what the thing is, because it's libellously close to something that happened to a real person. Suffice it to say, it's the ugly pinnacle of everything "domestic violence" has to answer for.

The game also was too large, and not interesting enough. When I came up with the idea I did, I was pretty pleased at how concise it would be. That was on day 2, though, and I was having trouble just getting things to print on the damn screen. In the end, it took me four days to actually finish it, and a couple people had nice things to say. I emerged a wiser developer. Then the bugs starting raining from the sky.

Still, I'm tempted to release a slightly better version. Hmm. Any thoughts?