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Archive for May, 2013

Long time, no see… :\

28 May

Well, this is becoming usual… DayJob is kicking me hard, I’ve been doing so much overtime that when I get home, I don’t even feel like playing games… I don’t recall the last time I spent an evening playing a good game (not that there has been a lot that catch my eye)…

Anyway, LudumDare results are up, you can see my score here.

I scored #102 on the overall and #109 on the fun, which are the categories I’m mainly interested…

Considering there were 1610 games on the competition, I scored on the top 10%, which is great!

Although this wasn’t my highest score (Conquest was in the top 5%, An Old Man and His Quest was on the top 8%, don’t know about older competitions), it was one of my best games yet, I think… Very complete and fun to play, in my opinion…

One of these days, I’d like to have another go at this one, but I’m kind of stuck on the visuals, on how to improve the look of the game without spoiling the gameplay… maybe play around with a more dynamic environment (more plasma, less squares).

On the other hand, the little time I’ve been having, I’ve been using it on Grey, rebuilding the skeleton system, which is a pain…

Hopefully another couple of weeks and I’ll be back to a more “regular” game development mode… although it isn’t sure… a lot of stuff happening in the next couple of months, both at a personal level in the professional level.

 
 

Leviathan Warships

08 May

This is probably one of the best trailers I’ve ever seen, by it’s humor and by causing me to want this game very badly:

It looks like the ship bastard child of “Frozen Synapse” and “Gratuitous Space Battles”…

It came out on the 30th April, so I’m getting this as soon as I can liberate some funds from my wallet… Winking smile

 
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Postmortem: Particles

03 May

After almost a week after the competition, here’s the postmortem for “Particles”, my LD #26 entry…

screen11

What went right

  • Again, my wife helped me with the brainstorming of a simple idea that was doable early on, which let me focus on developing soon, instead of just dicking around with some concepts
  • Theme… Although I wasn’t a big fan of the theme this time, the fact remains that it restrained me a bit and I managed to pull a very complete game.
  • Time for level design: this time, I budgeted and got to work about 3 hours or so in level design, which was great for the overall feel of the game, making for a more interesting and cohesive experience.
  • Development plan: making a development plan early on really helped me keep the game on track… Although I could only “finalize” it later in the first day, it really gave me a good perspective on what I could achieve
  • Focus on gameplay mechanics: I’m more of a story guy, but that usually lead to games that require a lot of content, which is kind of a no-no in 48-hour compos… This time, by focusing on the gameplay, I could fine tune the game and add the extras I wanted.
  • Motivation: since I was seeing cool stuff happen on screen (and I did it fast), it started getting my creating juices going, which helped me keep me motivated for the 20+ hours it took me to actually develop this.

 

screen09

What went wrong

  • Music: I usually use Wolfram Tones to build the music, but someone pointed out in a previous compo that their user agreement doesn’t allow to use it in this way, so I had to find another way to make music… But I don’t have any decent tools for it and I couldn’t find anything that really allowed me to create something fast that I could master easily… I tried out iNudge and some other stuff, but I ended up resorting to a friend of mine that’s a musician. He has all this gear so he was kind enough to teach me how to use it and leverage it to make at least one music for the game… although it took me 3 hours to get it right!
  • Particle physics: It took me forever to fine-tune the particle behavior, since the standard “magnetic” equations weren’t making for a fun game, which is kind of more important than actual being physically correct… I ended up by having lots of small parameters to adjust and specialized code to handle some circumstances so that the game felt right without being right.

 

All in all, it was one of my best entries ever, and considering the feedback I’ve been having so far, it seems people are enjoying the game…

This is why I intend not only fixing some bugs reported, but also improve the graphics a bit (get rid of Comic Sans, for example!), besides adding levels and new mechanics to the game in the near future…

You can download the game here, and the source here. If you took part on the Ludum Dare 48-Hour competition, you can go here to vote for my entry.

If you’re too lazy to download and play stuff, you can always check the video below:

 

Solomon/Gollop interview

02 May

If you’ve been following this blog, you might have noticed that I have a huge crush on XCom (both the old and the new)…

So, in light of that, here’s a totally awesome interview:

 

If features Jullian Gollop (the creator of the first XCom) and Jake Solomon (lead game designer of the newest installment)…

Very interesting stuff in it, specially the part where Jake Solomon looks like a teenage schoolgirl meeting his idol! Smile

 
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