Crystal Keeper post-mortem

This was my first ever jam entry and it was a really fun and exhausting 72 hours. I was lucky and managed to get a great team together at the last-minute and nobody flaked out which was awesome! It was my first time working with a team; not having to worry about graphics/audio was great.

Willfor, the sound guy, was super fast despite working his normal job during the jam. He let me know clearly when he was free and, whenever I asked him for something, he'd send something within 15 minutes. I felt a bit weird saying which things I did/didn't like. I didn't imagine I'd end up being a sort of project leader but he iterated everything quickly and it ended up fitting the game well.

I really love the way the themes for the different worlds fit together when you swap between them. I asked him to make some switching-worlds sound effects but I ended up not using them because you couldn't hear the cool differences in the music so clearly. The sound effects are all great but I feel like it may be presenting the player with too much information with the crystal power up/down audible from all worlds, but that's a gameplay issue.

Gnap, the artist, worked hard for the whole time and created a great aesthetic for the game. I got a bit worried close to the end that some bits would end up with my terrible place-holder art but he pulled through and finished everything!

The animations look fantastic and I really like the palette for this game. Gnap mentioned it would have been good to start designing the interface earlier because it was something we began on the last day and took some time to get right.

I spent quite a while thinking about the theme and trying think of a game to fit it. I think I came up with a pretty good match in the end. I thought I'd get some more help from my team with the game design aspect but I don't mind; I like coming up with systems.

I think the game is pretty good gameplay-wise for a 72-hour project but there's a bunch of stuff I'm not happy with-

• The game isn't explained well-enough, especially right-click and the link between the worlds
• The difficulty was too high, as usual
• Level 0 was supposed to be a tutorial, I should have made it so you couldn't lose on it
• The nature world is a confusing concept
• The window size was a bad choice, I should have investigated the more common resolutions to pick a better size, especially since the text was screwy on some systems at half-scale

I think trying to make three games and link them together was a bad choice, it put a lot of strain on Gnap and I and ended up being a bit confusing for the player. I think if I were to start again, I'd scrap the rest of the worlds and make a world-connecting game using only the water world type mini-game.

The template I'd been working on was great for making a game quickly. I managed to re-use some tools I'd made in the past like creating outline images and cracking/exploding entire images. I learnt a bunch of stuff and am going to spend some time updating my template .

People on Ludum Dare seem to be enjoying it and I'm happy with how it turned out. I look forward to doing more jams in the future.

Finally done!

Click here to download. It was hard work getting this out on 72-hours. I'm not super-happy with the gameplay but Gnap & Willfor did a great job on the visuals and audio. I hope it works ok for most people at least.

I think I need a week off coding now!

Oh man

Forgot to come up with a name! Crystal something? Something balance?

Can't you do anything right, snakes!?

Not long left, mostly just interface code to do now.

You lose!

Managed to reuse the image explode code I made a couple weeks ago! It's a bit laggy on the first shatter, I'll fix it if I get any time.

Final stretch

All I have left to do is
- Loss animation/checking
- Victory animation/checking
- Tutorial
- Resetting
- Difficulty levels
- Implement some art
13 hours and counting, gotta work hard!

Snakes

Spending an embarrassingly-long amount of time fixing this snakey rotation bug. The tiles for this world are cool though! Sound effects are coming in too, it feels more like a game now.

Swirls

The gameplay for each world is working now. Now I just need to:

Get some sound effects from Willfor

Get more tilesets and good things from Gnapp

Add victory and loss conditions

Put in a very very short tutorial (I hope most of the gameplay is self-explanatory)

After that it's just general polish! I'll try for a browser version but I'm guessing that it's a bit complex for libgdx's html export.

UI Goodness

Gnapp's been working on some UI stuff and it looks super rad. Willfor has finished the musical theme for each world and they sounds excellent, especially when switching worlds.

The gameplay for the worlds is mostly-finalised. This one is a pattern-matching game, I can't wait to add in some sigil-looking tiles from Gnapp!

Water world!

The gameplay for the water world is almost done and Gnapp's tiles look phenomenal. This was super fun to code!

We've had to cut back a bit on the features, there were going to be spells and stuff you gain from spending time at a world that you can use elsewhere but I think that would just add too much complexity. I figure it's best to focus on making the three worlds fun and the game feel hectic rather than add more features.

Connected Worlds

The theme was released a few hours ago and we've come up with an idea for a game with three small worlds which each need to be tended in their own way. Each one helps you tend the other worlds and you need to try to keep them all in working order to win.

Willfor has already made some good progress on the music for each world and Gnapp is working on some tiles.

Ludum Dare #48

I've assembled the A-Team of gamedev:
- Gnapp, artist extraodinaire.
- Willfor, music and sound-effects genius.
- Tann, handsome coding rogue.

Together we are going to make a game in 72-hours, starting from when the theme is announced at 02:00 Saturday. Gnapp and I have never collaborated on a game before and Willfor is a two-time Ludum Dare veteran. Should be fun! I'm going to cook up a bunch of food and not leave the house for three days so I can get this thing finished.

I've spent today making a bunch of general tools I might use in the jam, I think I've got all the stuff I'll need now. If I get some time I'll post some progress reports here.

Explosion!

Working on the ship death explosion and I'm just exploding tomatoes for now. This was tricky to code but it was fun to get it working!

Everdraed

I'm working on a way of displaying the ships as separated by some distance and Everdraed made this amazing animation to help out! I'll be using parts of it for inspiration for how to get the impact feeling good.

Even updateder demo!

Download

Had some good feedback from my friends and IRC buds and I'm pretty happy with the tutorial now! I think I'll put the map on hold for a bit and work on a practice mode where you fight multiple ships and upgrade in-between so I can test ship advancement.

Teleport!

Found a stopgap solution to my previous problem and I've been working on map abilities. I'll probably change it but I kinda like this teleport effect.

Need to update my enemy AI...

The code for enemy movement is so simple and lovely but it has some issues... Gotta think of a nice way of solving this without breaking the rest of the behavior.

Everything is fixed!

That took a while! I know it may look exactly as it did before but now it's better.
If you're a programmer you understand.

Everything is broken!

I decided to make some structural changes to my tools to make my code a bit more reusable and it's tricky going! I've got a mini game-jam happening at my house in a few weeks so I need to get everything ready for it.