Here it is, my entry for the mini-Ludum Dare competition. The competition theme is “biggest fear”, and one of my biggest fears is a meaningless life. Not only that, but a meaningless eternity. Pictures for Sad Children has a very similar theme at times and it helped inspire parts of this game (though I couldn’t find a good way to work in “monster most vulnerable when heaving with sobs”).
This was my first 2 day competition and I’ve learned some things. First, two days is a long time. Second, having real tools would make me very, very happy. Third, I thought that doing all the art and all the programming for a game would be hard, but it seems to use different parts of the brain, so when working on art the programming part of my brain is relaxing and vice versa.
This was the first moderately legit game that I’ve done all my own art on (title screen and chest graphics contributed by Lana). Also, my first game with a 4 color grayscale pallet. And additionally, my first major undertaking on the Pixie platform.
Working with the Pixie platform had some serious trade-offs. JavaScript is a surprisingly productive language with it’s functional and dynamic nature, but it has a harsh and brutal syntax. The platform libraries helped a lot to smooth some things out, and as they become more complete it will get better and better. I have high hopes for CoffeeScript, now that it is getting close to 1.0 I’m going to try using it on all my new projects and hopefully never go back. Another advantage was the tight art and code integration. It was trivial to create an image and have it appear in the game seconds later. The biggest drawback of Pixie right now is that the code “editor” is pretty much just a text area. There are no tabs, no integrated source navigation, no auto-save, no version control, and all kinds of other terrible issues. Also, there is no real tile editor, though Noel Berry pioneered the way by using the pixel editor as a tile editor before, and the surprising thing is that it’s actually not too bad.
Using Pixie to make art is awesome, but the game “platform” is not fleshed out enough for me to recommend making an entire game in it to everyone yet.
A special thanks to everyone who helped playtest and discuss various elements of the game throughout it’s stages: Boltz, McGrue, DavMo, Lan, MW… props.
So check out the game and let me know what you think. By making heavy use of Pixie, especially in time limited competitions, I hope to really iron out the core usage scenarios and make it amazing.
The future is bright and full of meaning.
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