bubbl.us

The Brainstorming online tool bubble.us is really useful, as it eases mind mapping through its ease of use. All the game is now in bubbles. Check by yourself:

Levels, enemies and events

The levels, or the chapters should I say, will follow the 12 "stages" of the Hero in Joseph Campbell's "The Hero With a Thousand Faces". As there are only twelve parts in the game I think it is better to avoid repetition, and it's not a game of challenge so unique details and visible "sotry" seduces me more. This induces me to create and invent more elements and thus more work! But I'm getting used to this workflow so it souldn't be a big deal.
So the 12 chapters are listed on the link above (this is Campbell's titles; TGDOR won't use the same). We will try to reverse the heroic adventure to fit more with the hero's death (being his "objective", his release). The first one will be the intro. No interaction at all, just to understand what's going on.

Let's move on to the enemies. Following my above rule, the player souldn't be able to meet too many times the same enemy. Ah, and Radus is not able to fight. So the player will have to find a way to do not die. For the moment I have about 6 or 7 enemies in mind. I shoud draw them properly and maybe animate a few of them tomorrow. Follow the blog to have more details tomorrow!

Ah events! Under this goes two categories: unique events that immerges the player into this strange world AND platformer events, like jumping and other dexterity demanding things. This last categorie is the most hard: I try to avoid linear and basic platforming but the game shoud still be a game, so I must ipmlement these things. I have not really thought about that for the moment.

Levels...

I am designing the twelve levels of the game. It is a hard work to get them done. I try to make them really atmospheric and even depressive, while respecting the evolution of the game. Unity is the key!

I first use Tiled to make a tiled level and then I make a picture from it when the raw shape looks good. (I am actually here) From that picture I add non-tiled details and many other things. And then I should quickly assemble them in Construct 2 to try them. And certainly go back to the previous steps because everything wasn't perfect!

Cool inspiring cloud animations in Braid

Th game Braid has some cool animated cloud. They have an obvious painted look and feel but here comes the interesting point: the animation. Considering a change of color tones, they might work for TGDOR. I'll try to get my clouds such animations. I also invite you to play to this game to see those clouds but also because it's a great game.

Continuing, after a deserved small pause!

We are taking a short break (until tomorrow). We really need it - in the good way: we worked a lot so we are a bit tired now! Creation is energy consuming, and don't have enough energy to support this work cadence. Just a few hours before returning to the process!

Just a message about what we said a few days ago about Stencyl: It is certainly a great tool but we had no real experience of it so we lost our temper with the number of problems and the pressure of time. All Stencyl users: we apologize.

Team name!

We are proud to announce you that we have a "work" name:

Jambon Frites means Ham & Chips in French

JambonFrites Games blog - JambonFrites Games Facebook page

Early Postmortem

This is the postmortem for the October Challenge, not for the game itself. After two days of full work, we can now take a look back at what we've done, what was good or bad.


What went right

 - Appealing idea
The earl ideas and concept art were appreciated by the other people. It helps a lot to start a project to be encouraged by others!
 
- Workflow
In two days we created a lot of things. Far more that I imagined. It is certain that Stencyl bugs slowed us but nevertheless we went really fast (we worked 12h+ a day!)

- Powerful tools
We used tools that are really efficient and that we knowed before. This makes a huge difference in the overall developpement. It does not only speeds up the creation process but it kind of motivates more due to the rarity of problems.


What went wrong

- No prototype
Seriously, we had no prototype! This should be easy with the engine(s) that we used, but we never got one. I know how important it is to always have a "working" thing during the developement but we never had something that looked playable.

- Lack of time
On the whole October month we started on the 26th. Looks a bit suicidal, given that we never participated to a Ludum Dare! We started the Design earlier but it's only about 10% of the work!

- No knowledge of the tool (the reason that we left the Challenge)
We, or I sould I say decided to use StencylWorks, because it works on Macs (I never used it before but more than that, I am not the programmer!). So when you use a new tool that gives you a lot of problems, there might be some kind of mistake somewhere!


The last words...
Even if we did not submit our game to the Challenge, I think that we learnt a lot from it, and that is the real purpose of Ludum Dare! :)