TDWIWEEHF (LD22 Post-Mortem)

Last week-end, December 17th to 19th, it was time for another Ludum Dare.

I took part in that Ludum Dare, just as my colleagues did, with our in-house game engine, the RedBox Engine.

TDWIWEEHF

The game I worked on is called 2011 : TDWIWEEHF. That title was not initially gibberish, but the line of thought I had with that original title was discarded once I realized I could not convey what I wanted to in the time I had. The game's source is available at its bitbucket site, but not everything is made easy to build right now. I was mainly making use of BoxFactory for development. If you want to make it work, you will need to copy the libraries folder from the RedBoxApp starter project and call libbuildtool on that.

While I know that this game lacks certain elements proper to games, like a fulfilling gameplay, I'm nonetheless pleased with my accomplished results. I really like the look the game has and in a calculated nineteen hours of work, I'm okay with the fact that the gameplay is lacking; after more than half the available time was up, I still didn't know what the gameplay would be like.

LOOK AT MY GAME

You can take a look at my game here, with the videos or, you could still download it.

And here's a timelapse of me making that game. I'll soon post more infos on how I made the timelapse and the gameplay capture.

More informations about things.

By looking at the timelapse, some glimpses of wolfram tones can be seen. I would have loved to use the songs generated by wolfram tones in my game, but it seems that their Terms Of Services are not allowing that kind of usage. I tried contacting them through theirtwitter account, but I still haven't got a reply.

For the music, I actually used Autotracker-C, by "gm". It outputs it files, which are Impulse Tracker files. I used them with chibi tracker, but I modified the file to make it sound so eerie. Main change: dropped the tempo from 125 to 44.

What should I do better next time?

I should not learn new things during the Ludum Dare. You can see me fool around with the animation of a character. This is the first time I animated something. It took about five hours, but the fact that I knew the tool that I used, even if it isn't made for animating, did help with not losing too much time.

The other thing I should not do next time? I should not do other things than the Ludum Dare. This time, I started about 11 hours in and stopped midway for about 5 hours for a party. Then, I slept a bit, making me lose about 20 to 24 hours for the compo. Then, I took three hours the next day to have something ready for the jam.

Next time, more focus should be spent on having interesting and fulfilling game mechanics.