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Preamble

So if you’re unfamiliar with Ludum Dare it’s an online, solo game development competition. They release a theme and you have to develop a game using that theme in a forty-eight hour timeframe.  A large list of themes is created and after a few rounds of voting , the list is culled to a dozen or so final themes to vote on. After the final round of voting is complete, the theme is released and a sleepless, hectic weekend begins. I was rooting for “Randomly Generated” to be selected as the theme and was already salivating at the prospect of making a roguelike.

Over the last few years the only games that really stick out to me as being actually fun and life destroyingly addictive were the new wave of roguelikes. Spelunky, Transcendence, and The Binding of Isaac have taken a mostly inaccessible genre and made it almost casual. If a player can get over how masochistic these games are, it really scratches their drive for mastery. There is nothing that can foster that “Just one more turn…” effect better than these games. But I digress, this is a subject worth a post all on its own.

Spelunky was a harsh mistress

The weekend of this Ludum Dare coincided with a friend’s Christmas party I few hours away. I didn’t want to lose six hours driving back and forth so I opted for twelve hours by train. After packing everything for the trip I settled in and waited for the theme reveal. “Alone” ended up hedging out Randomly-Generated by a few votes.  Even though I was bummed over my pet theme losing, I figured I could still work Randomly-Generated into my concept. What I roughed out, was that you were a monster created by the government, you wanted to escape their pursuit and be left alone. I pegged the gameplay as a platformer with randomly generated level sections. I wasn’t sure about combat and mechanics but I was hoping it’d grow organically throughout the competition. My main goal was to produce something playable that had some random level generation in it.

Could you, would you, on a train?

What went right?

Flixel and Flixel Power Tools

Even with the minor learning curve, Flixel and Photonstorm’s Power Tools were a huge boon. Flixel itself makes blitting ridiculously simple.  Power Tools is so feature rich it covers the majority of your bases. Projectiles, quick controllers, collision, health bars, etc. Really looking forward to having another excuse to play around with Photonstorm’s plug-in, since I’ve only scratched the surface.

Randomly Generated Levels

I feel the time was spent better generating the random levels, than building a few poorly designed levels. As there aren’t a ton of game mechanics the best I could do with level design would have been in the realm of jumping puzzles or a vertical maze. The randomly generated levels toss in a little replay value, and lay a foundation for a roguelike in further development.

In terms of the actual generation it was pretty quick and dirty. Originally I had created a system that would take sections of 5 rows, 10 rows, and 15 rows, each being 13 columns across. You’d pass the length and width (in sections) and it would stitch together the random sections into the full map.

Each section looked like this:

00,00,00,00,00,00,00,05,00,00,02,00,03
00,00,02,00,00,01,01,01,00,01,01,00,01
00,01,01,01,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,01
00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,00,00,03
01,03,01,01,01,01,01,01,01,01,01,01,01

00 – Empty, 01 – Solid Tile. 02 – Enemy, 03 – Open Tile to Next Section, 05 – Possible entrance/exit door.

Due to the time constraint I wasn’t able to implement the 10 and 15 row sections. It definitely would have made the levels feel a bit more unique, but I think they come across as pretty varied just using the 5 row sections.

Pixel Art

First time playing around with pixel art, probably could have done better with the tiles, as the thick black outline doesn’t work really well. But otherwise everything turned out pretty swell. Animation was a bit of a pain, but I’m content with the results. The choice to make the main character limbless was a big timer saver.

My easily animated friend...

Organic Evolution of Mechanics

Setting out on Solitude my main goal was a Spelunky-esque platformer, but beyond the randomly generated levels I had no idea on what mechanics I’d need. Plopped in the basic melee attack and ranged attack. Bullet reflection when using a melee attack was a happy accident and a great alternative to making a shielding ability. Flight ended up being an accident as well. The terrain destruction was a response to the possibility of there being no direct path to a level exit.

Roguelike Resource Management

I didn’t have any initial plans for energy consuming attacks, but flight and and terrain destruction were easily abusable. Most roguelikes have a few finite resources that you have to manage I feel like I did a good job of integrating this with energy and life. You can only replenish energy by killing troops, and you need that energy to more easily traverse the level.

It doesn’t have a huge impact in the jam game, but I think it’ll be a much bigger deal if I continue on with development. Using a timer to push the player forward and keep the game fast paced, the health and energy trade off will be one of your main decisions.

Music

If I had hit the 48 hour deadline I definitely would not have had a chance to add music to the game, so the running over the deadline was a blessing in disguise. I had a friend put together my music. Ended up far better than what I could have ever produced, and has the perfect pacing for the game.

What Went Wrong

Time

Everything boils down to lack of time. Sparse mechanics, rough art, no sound, having to enter the 72 hour jam instead of the competition. Being tied up with real-life, and travel.

Arguably you could say my scope, goal, and choice of tech that I don’t have solid experience with is the real problem, but I set out to make a randomly generated game, make some pixel art, and learn Flixel. Those motivations went above making a fun polished game.

Difficulty

Seems to happen with every LD entry, but I think Solitude is too hard. You can only breeze through it once you start abusing mechanics. It’s likely you’ll lose interest in the game before you get that comfortable with the game.

It’s something I’m going to have to be more conscious of when pumping out an LD game. My group of friends aren’t the best for feedback in terms of a game’s difficulty. So maybe I should start harassing folks in IRC during the competition…

Conclusion

Unlike other LD’s there isn’t a ton of reflection to do here.  All in all,  really happy with the result of the LD despite my lack of time. Got to play around with Flixel and got to start off a bit of a roguelike.

Problem:

Trying to record streaming audio in a program like Audacity or Soundforge, but your Stereo Mix option is unavailable.

What? It'd make a good ringtone!

Solutions:

If this is your first stop in trying to record streaming media, lets troubleshoot:

1. Assume Stereo Mix is there, just disabled. Re-enable it.

- Go to Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Sound > Recording

- Right-click > Show Disabled Devices.

If this shows up for you, Yay! You're done! Otherwise soldier on.

2. If you have on-board audio, nab your latest motherboard drivers. Otherwise get your most up to date sound card drivers.

Still no dice? Well for whatever reason your hardware doesn’t support Stereo Mix in Win7. You’re left with a couple options:

1. Go buy one of these at the Source or your local tech shop. Patch it from your audio out into your line in on your sound card.

By the time I reach the car, I've already stopped caring about what I was trying to record.

So alternatively and preferably:

2. Download Virtual Audio Cable. Which virtually emulates the above solution.

Give the trial a shot, see if it works for you. The trial has an incredibly obnoxious 30 second purchase reminder. Despite that, VAC is a really solid piece of software with applications beyond what we’re doing here (isolating specific audio streams on your PC, to either capture or rebroadcast).

You’ll want to get the latest version of VAC, currently 4.10. Installation is a breeze. Once you’re done, check your Sound playback devices, you’ll notice VAC has created a new device for you.

Right click Line 1 and make it the new default device. This is now the input we will select in our recording program.

Now from here, we can play our streaming media, select Line 1 in our recording program and record, no problem. However you won’t be able to hear any of the media your playing since any audio being played is being sent to Line1 instead of your speakers. So if you’re only trying to nab a sound bite from a movie or if you’re trying to record voice communication you’ll need to follow a few more steps.

If you pop open the Virtual Audio Cable folder in your start menu you’ll see Audio Repeater (KS) and Audio Repeater (MME).  We could use either of these applications to duplicate the audio being sent to Line 1 and send it to our speakers. The KS Repeater usually interferes with audio recording programs, so we’ll be using MME.

Compared to KS, MME has a bit of delay. To compensate for this we can tweak it’s settings a little. This how I set up my MME repeater for the least amount of delay without any substantial quality loss.

Just remember the sound you’re hearing through your headphones using MME is a rough sounding duplicate, and doesn’t reflect the quality of your recording. When you’re all done streaming, just switch your main playback device to your speakers and you’re all done.

Hopefully this was of help to you as there are so many useless hits for “Windows 7 missing Stereo Mix”. You can check out the original post which lead me to VAC here. It contains a few youtube videos on how to set up VAC.

Credit where credit is due.

This was hugely time consuming for me as I didn’t have the first clue about writing a business plan. I cut down on industry jargon considering the folks reading the business plan may not have a Facebook account, so the first third of the business plan eases them into the concepts of free to play games on a social network and all that jazz. The rest is market research with comparisons to our own plans. Although this is geared towards a social network game studio, the format would work just as well for a Flash or XBLA/PSN focused business plan.

Download (DOC, 2.85MB)

If you’re in internet explorer, download the doc

It seems like a waste to let this while away on my desktop, and it’s a pain to find business plan resources for very small indie studios. So if you don’t have a “Business” guy hopefully this is a help to you. Only thing left out of this is our cashflow projections, which in hindsight, were a bit… off. If there are any improvements you want to suggest feel free to leave a comment!

• Develop a writing style, and figure out what my preferred content will be.
• Spotlight nifty bits of game design or tech things.
• Chronicle thoughts, ideas and things I may want to revisit later.

I mean, I’ve been dying to throw a blog together for a while, but I never really had much to say. In this past year there has been a ton of things that have really motivated me to write:

• Have plenty of post-mortem stuff from Sum Fighter that I want to put into words before I forget it.
  • Also a few XNA and XBLIG development and post production tips.
• Finally ticking off my New Years resolution of “be more active in online communities”.
• The enjoyment I have gotten out of blogging for LudumDare and 1MonthGame. Although it was a relatively small amount of blogging I loved the experience.

I guess the final spark was a call to arms from a Brainy Gamer podcast:

Its impossible to play everything and it’s silly to even try, I go back to the arcade era, and I remember when we all played the same games. Even when the Atari and later the NES arrived with a flood of games, it still seemed like we all basically played most of the same games, we had a common set of experiences. Now if you consider that the market includes mobile games, social games, flash games, PC gaming, console gaming, and etc, we have a flood of games in an increasingly fragmented market. I think if we had to identify common experience games we’d be hard pressed to do it. There’s now more than a single “audience” out there for games.

…To me, all of this is to suggest that now more than ever, we need smart informed people writing thoughtfully about games. Now, this isn’t just a matter of more hands on deck to cover the spectrum of games from casual to hardcore … I think it’s more about shedding our predjudices about genres and platforms and target audiences. I think its about finding ways to respond to games outside the existing frames of mechanical analysis, buy it or rent it advice, numerical scores, or other familiar methods of responding to games. More informed or alternative critical responses might be generated by other voices (outside of mainstream game journalism), and we need those voices in the conversation.

…What I am trying to say is, if you see yourself possessing such a critical voice, but you’ve remained on the sidelines because you see the writing about games space, hopelessly over populated, I encourage you to consider jumping in and adding your voice, add your perspective, add your point of view, become part of that broad conversation, that I think is necessary if we are to get beyond the kind of standard “play it, talk about it for five minutes and move on to the next game cycle” which I think we are mired in.

Reflecting on this, I know I’m offering another game developer voice amongst a sea of many, but it’s a voice I want to develop. All in all I’m not sure how this blog will end up. It could be a development journal, an attempt at game critiques, or even a smattering of random tech tidbits. At the very least I know the blog will help me find my voice, reflect on experiences, and let me flex my writing muscle a little bit.

“The unexamined life is not worth living”