Game Development – Jimbly's Wanderings

Ludum Dare 42 Post-mortem: Escape from the Alliance

For those unfamiliar with it, Ludum Dare is a thrice-annual game creation competition in which you must create an entire game from scratch (including art, music, etc) in 48hrs. Participating is a lot of fun and really forces me to exercise my game designer muscles and dive into other parts of the game development process that I rarely spend time on. When I started working full-time on indie games at Dashing Strike, I vowed to participate in every Ludum Dare if possible, and this past one marks my 10th Ludum Dare in a row!

For those that haven’t played my entry yet, it’s a spaceship management game where you alternate between phases of fighting a wave of enemies and choosing which piece of equipment to remove from your ship, making you weaker but able to carry more refugees to safety, with a few little special events that influence your choices.

You can play the game here: dashingstrike.com/LudumDare/LD42

You can rate the game (if you competed in Ludum Dare), or see what people are saying about it here: ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/escape-from-the-alliance

What Went Right

Scope – My game idea was fairly complicated, had very ambitious coding goals to finish it in time. I managed to implement most of what I planned, making a fairly complicated game (for a Ludum Dare entry), and after the tech work, I just barely ended with enough time to do sound, music, and add a little polish.

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Indie Exhibiting at PAX East

When preparing for PAX East I saw this article from another indie dev, found it quite useful, and thought I’d share my experience, also as a first time exhibitor, complete with lot of interesting numbers.

My Booth

I exhibited Splody, my multiplayer action game that supports any number of players. I wanted to showcase this, so opted for a larger 20’x10′ booth and planned on having both an 8 player station and a 4 player station. I used two 55″ TVs, hooked up to tiny, cheap UltraSlim computers, with wireless controllers for all. One TV I put farther in the back, on a lower table the convention provided, so that I could get 4 sitting and 4 standing in front of it. The other TV I put on a stand, as high up as is comfortable to look at, closer to the aisle, so that people walking by had something to look at.

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Ludum Dare in Geneva Day 2

Slept in quite late, I think I slept 10-11 hours, feeling a bit groggy, but probably over my jet-lag. Feeling a bit sad about time lost to sleeping that could have been working on my Ludum Dare submission (or touristing), but recovering from jet lag is important.

PIC_0036 Sun Lunch - Croque Madame pub food — Sunday lunch – Croque Madame. Delicious.

Spent the morning programming, and then went out to find some lunch. I sat down at an outside seat at a nice little pub, which was completely empty, that had reasonably priced sandwiches, placed my order, and then it started raining hard and gusting wind, so I moved inside, as did a bunch of other passerbys and in moments it was a pretty popular place. Continue reading “Ludum Dare in Geneva Day 2”

Splody showing at GitHub / Ludum Dare GDC Party

Last night I attended the Ludum Dare / GitHub GDC party in San Francisco at the fantastic offices of GitHub. I have no idea where their employees work (perhaps another floor?) but their gathering space was fantastic, and they even had a nice big TV with a dangling HDMI cable set up which I was able to snag for an hour or two of showing off my game, Splody. I turned the TV over to Shnipers for the latter half of the night, as that was also a fantastic local multiplayer game, and had a chance to play a bunch of other indie games around the room as well.

The showing of Splody went quite well, often had 6 or more people playing at once, everyone seemed to be having fun, and quite a few were really excited about the game. It was great to have so much positive feedback! Everyone unanimously enjoyed my simultaneous multiplayer character customization/control test screen.

Simultaneous multiplayer character customization and control test screen

Now, I just need to channel as much attention as possible into getting Greenlit on Steam, so, if you have a Steam account, please go vote on my Steam Greenlight Campaign, every vote helps!

I did learn a few things that hadn’t came up with my previous demos – as this demo was to a bunch of random people at varying frequencies, and most of my previous demos have been to larger captive audiences. I need a good way to show the game to just a single demoer – playing a 1v1 match against me, a tournament-winning Bomberman player, either doesn’t go well for them, or feels like I’m just committing suicide. I think I’ll throw in an option to pad out a match to a fixed number with AIs, so if there’s just one person demoing, AIs can fill in so there is at least 4-6 players on screen for a better feeling of what a party game can be, though obviously playing against AIs isn’t as fun as stomping your friends. The other thing was with one particular game mode, Mount Control, which currently has a bit of randomness in it which can lead to rather long matches, and I think I can do a little tuning so that the expected match time is a lot more constrained which would lead to much better conference-floor demo experiences.

Oh, and the other thing I learned, or, rather, already knew, but keep forgetting, is that I really shouldn’t play against a set of people and win 3 to 0 to 0 to 0 to 0 to 0… but some people playing the demo get really competitive and I have to give it my all to give them a fair fight, and the I forget to tone it down a notch for the next group. Best solution is probably to continue talking about the game constantly, as me paying half attention is probably the right skill level for most people ;).