How did Speedgame go this year (2012)?

Well, I both am and am not happy about what I achieved. I did hope to have been able to make a game that would have at minimum had the minimum features and at least music and sound effects to accompany it, but on the other hand, My design phase and first day or two of development phase went on this big event here nearby and after that I still had to have a fought with my development machine to get it to work even. Therefore first of all I didnt have very good opportunity to think about the design at any point during the design phase, and I didnt get to start development until almost week had gone of the development phase already.

When those things took into consideration, Im sort of satisfied that I did get a playable game done anyway.

Things I had wished my game to be having had at minimum had been:

• Levels chosen in world map (and some freedom in choosing them)
• Pieces turnable by pressing fire (now you cant turn them at all)
• blocks falling down when blocks are being removed
• moving direction changed without bugs
• music
• facts checked
• Picture of Dr. Puzzlejones (Something with Indiana Jones hat)

The feature I feel most disappointed to be missing is the World map feature, with everything else I could have sort of lived, but this one was a big miss. It makes me even more sad that I realised what the problem was on last hours and didnt have time or rather strength to fix it anymore.

For unfortunately I had forgot that when plugin is missing (in this case ogg vorbis plug in), Hollywood simply crashed without giving you any error message. Since i was too tired at the moment i was joining map and game together, I was too tired to remember that anymore.

Im especially unhappy about the missing map since I think that was the key feature that would have made the game interesting instead of being just another tetris kind of puzzle game clone.

It also made the joke about Samw3 and Hanclinto fail that I had got into it such working way.

But otherwise I am quite happy. I had no one do me graphics, and I think I was able to dig quite good and working graphics without actually making them myself from existing sources. It was just unfortunate that i was actually using 1920 x 1080 resolution for the game, but I had to stretch most of the graphics to make them big enough. For example I would have liked blocks to be a size of 48×48 or 64×64, but since they were originally only 32×16 or something, i didnt dare to stretch them to more than 32×32.

Despite having much less time to work on my speedgame, i was quite happy that I was anyway able to schedule the game making quite correctly. Basically my only schedule mistake came from not realising how hard the reaction to collision in tetris actually was. I thought it would take me only a normal while to make, but I was actually stuck on it for 3 days programmings until I got it to work, and I still didnt have time to fix it to work also when changing falling direction.

Everything else took about the expected time., which made me happy by being able to make right time estimations.

Anyway, all in all very good competition again, and important lesson learned: Next year leave at least 2 days for unexpected things when making plan.

Our game entry, Fireflies, is now live at fireflies.bearhanded.com

If you want to play it…

• We strongly recommend you play it in Chrome or Safari – the Firefox performance is pretty bad.
• Play with multiple people – it’s a multiplayer game!
• We are tracking the scores, we just didn’t have enough time to implement a score board.
• The tree resets (levels reset) after 10 minutes of no-one on the site, or 30 seconds after all the levels have been completed.

For those of you interested in the source code you can find all that in our entry upload on the FTP site.

Enjoy!

The little engine that could.  At this point in the game, Clean3D has provided me with the character assets (and subsequently left on a family vacation).  We have a really, really cool menu, but the gameplay and environment need some considerable work.  PlantPerson has joined the party.  He’s doing environment models, and doing a really cool job of it.  I did some voice acting for the different characters.  Doing the helltower was creepy.  That’s about it for now.  One day left to go…

As the end of the speedgame approached, the painful realization that we were not going to meet the deadline settled on us. It’s not even the scope of the project, but rather the amount of time I felt I could put into it was severely limited. My time and attention were pulled in all directions. Regardless, even know, the time I have left to work on the project is cut short and so regrettably I must formally withdraw from the competition.

I originally wanted to title this blog post with lyrics from Frank Sinatra’s My Way, but I realize how wholly inappropriate that would be. I am under no misconception that my choices led to the lack of time. Some of them were a matter of prioritizing family over development, while others were deciding to relax with a game instead of coding. Some of them I regret, and some I do not. In the end, what the speedgame made perfectly clear is the gaping lack of balance I have in my life, and how I juggle work, family, home life, development, hobbies, and recreation. I have a million things I want to do, but I never seem to make time for any. If there is anything the competition left me with besides a half-finished game and frayed nerves, it’s the question of proper balance and priorities, and how to achieve it.

Being as it is, I want to credit all the teams that are sticking through to the end. For those who watch the speedgames but never participated, it is truly a grueling task. Rewarding in the end, yes, but it pushes you to your limits in your ability to develop, but also tests the fortitude of the balance of your life. To those especially with full time jobs and families to tend, their speedgame submissions are a true testament to their will, and you have my respect.

I hope to continue development on this project, but for now, to those who are will be finishing their projects, good luck and godspeed.

I finally got to work on this the last couple of days! Yay! When seeing the list of things accomplished, it doesn’t look so bad, and yet there is still much to do for a game. Even then the question remains: will I have something – anything – ready in time? Time to cut features.

We’ll have to have just 1 level. Simply won’t be time for more. I do want to continue developing this game after speedgame.

One bad guy type, probably. Cigarettes? Must be okay with an “incomplete” – but playable – game.

Deeper integration into my coming to the Lord won’t really be there. I really want/have to portray the results and the difference though. Okay… so there will almost have to be 2 levels. Eek.

Won’t be able to have geometry based levels, or even neat levels for that matter. Just enough to get by in this case. And they’ll have to use tiles since that system will be easier for now. [edit] Looking at the Bearhanded entry – I didn’t realize Tiled could use arbitrary polygons! Will have to remember that in the future!

All the cool moves, “power-ups”, different styles of play, and story, will have to go for now. There just simply isn’t time. This will be a bare minimum part of my testimony, and bare minimum game. It’ll be amazing if even this is done in time, but it’s possible.

It’s awesome we have through Saturday night! Of course, a close friend has a surprise birthday party all of a sudden that day and he lives 3 hours away, so at best Saturday morning will be spent doing the last of what can be done. Still… I thought it was midnight Friday so that’s at least a little bit better. Can’t wait to see what others have done!

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Next post will be what has been done so far, and hopefully a screenshot or two. It was fun developing an art workflow – never actually done that before! Basically, all pencil textures are drawn on white paper, which gets scanned in since I have a scanner, and then in gimp I simply make a layer mask from the grayscale version of the image and invert to get alpha. I was gonna go for shaders and stuff to make the pencil slightly randomly reflective but this actually looks fine the way it is in my opinion!

Next the textures are loaded into Stickimator and I just make whatever I’m making. Totally wish there was more time to make cool things and experiment, but alas, it is what it is. Back to work!