Ludum Dare 18 and Jam - Enemies as Weapons - Untitled Game

[CrystalPickaxe]

I watch this every day because it's so fucking epic! O___o I love it!

[armchairarmada]

@CrystalPickaxe Thanks, I'm glad you like it.

[memiagaming]

I don't know much about computer graphics, but from my eyes, those graphics you made were much more appealing than alot of the other games I see and the speed at which you made them was insane - are you a good artist or can that stuff be simplified?

[armchairarmada]

@memiagaming One thing that helped was that I did keep it simple. None of the shapes involved are really complex (circles, warped rectangles, etc). Colors can play a big role in the overall appeal of graphics, so I tried not to use harsh conflicting colors. I don't consider myself to be a really good artist, but I tend to be a really hard critic of my own work. I need to remember that other people don't see all the little flaws that I do.

[xexoristo]

what programing language?

[armchairarmada]

@xexoristo It was programmed in Python using the PyGame module.

[nickm34456]

the life of an indie game developer seems so appealing to me, staying up all night programming code that will somehow turn into a game, sitting at your computer, drinking coffee and listening to music until you pass out just to do it all over again until its done, with no other care in the world, but that line of code, and that small idea that formulated in your mind one night, unfortunately, it's complicated to start, but it seems so fun once you learn it, I suck with art too :( one day

[ASMBrad]

Your music sounds alot like it was inspired by The Legend of Zelda.

[FanAsEW]

Sorry, where can I download it?

[Flashswifts]

Little did Armchairarmada know that Notch was competing in the same contest...

[armchairarmada]

@EpilepticElbow I don't know about "epic" -- it only has two test rooms -- and it was more like 2 1/2 days. :) I've seen other people do some much more amazing things for Ludum Dare -- for example, Mincraft creator notch (Markus Persson) made a sweet dungeon crawler during the last Ludum Dare.

[TehGameMaker]

very good. making games this fast must be difficult.

[armchairarmada]

@TehGameMaker It is. That is not to say that it cannot also be enjoyable, though. I've tried to participate in quite a few Ludum Dares and I have yet to complete anything. I'm always surprised at how much great stuff other people were able to make in such a short time! The hardest part for me is actually trying to have a full uninterrupted weekend to really be productive -- there's almost always something getting in the way of Ludum Dare.

[TheyCallMeConfucious]

is there a place where we can play it?

[zachf632]

How do you make the sprite sheets in gimp like that?

[armchairarmada]

@zachf632 The Gimp is not a very good animation program, but I managed. Basically I used layers (one for each frame). Layer transparency was used for onion skinning. The Gimp can export animated GIF files from layers, so that was used to check the animation a little. Afterwards I just copied and pasted the layers into a new image using snap-to-grid to align them with the grid size set to be the same as the sprite's size.

[zachf632]

@armchairarmada oh thanks that helps alot. also there is a plugin for gimp that forms a sprite sheet from the layers automatically.

[rop181]

Thank you, Could you make tutorials how to develop games? Because I really want to learn and I can't find really good tutorials on the Internet.

[armchairarmada]

@rop181 I've considered trying to make a few tutorials, but I'm not sure when I'll get around to doing that. In the mean time you could check out TheNewBoston's tutorials.  He has a Computer Game Development Tutorial playlist which covers Python and PyGame. I cannot say that I entirely agree with his programming style, but certainly you can learn a lot from him and it is a reasonably good place to start learning.

[KXTechnologies]

@armchairarmada TheNewBoston also has Java Game tutorials, but they're unfinished.

[rop181]

What prgrams were used to make this?

[armchairarmada]

@rop181 Programming language was with Python with the PyGame library, The editor was GEdit, Graphics was with The Gimp, Music was with LMMS, Sound editing was Audacity, Sound effects was SFXR, and I was using Ubuntu with a small screen capturing shell script -- all free or open source software. Most of these are also available for Windows and Mac.

[polon901]

6:06 which program its that?

[armchairarmada]

@polon901 That is LMMS (Linux MultiMedia Studio). It's a pretty decent free open source music composing program available for Windows and Linux. I think the crashing problem I had was more related to my audio drivers (or the settings I was using) than the program itself.

[ryanjones56]

What type of music is this in the background? :)

[armchairarmada]

@ryanjones56 The music used in this video is listed in the description. You could find out by clicking "Show More".

[ryanjones56]

@armchairarmada I know that, I mean what genre of music

[pudinthemushroomhead]

this is amazing! subbed! :D

also, could you maybe make a basic PyGame tutorial? Or show me where YOU learned how to use it?

[armchairarmada]

@MinecraftyMon In PyGame you can get a rectangle of a surface by calling the surface's 'subsurface' method. I am using a grid of uniform sized sprites, so I can loop through these rectangle portions of the surface and append them to a list of surfaces.

[drybonesGCN]

What size did you draw the main character?

[armchairarmada]

@drybonesGCN The character was drawn at 320x320 resolution then scaled down to 80x80 pixels.

[TheNordbjerg]

Great! Let me know if you continue working on this, it looks awesome :)

[armchairarmada]

@TheNordbjerg I'm not sure if I will do much more with this. Much of the purpose of this exercise was to see how much I could accomplish over the course of a weekend (plus a few extra hours on Monday). I am very satisfied with what I had done given the tight time constraints. If I do continue with this game idea I would most likely start the project over from scratch.

[asfdos]

This is just incredible. =O

[armchairarmada]

@asfdos Thanks!

[DragonCuber]

I love love to be able to do get into indie game development, I just have no clue were to start ):

[armchairarmada]

@DragonCuber There are a lot of people who have asked this same question. If you do a quick Google search you can find a lot of useful information about getting started with game development. Now it's probably easier than ever to get into game development without having much programming experience because of the many available development kits. Look around and see what appeals to you.

[brootalus]

damn! I want to have graphical skill like you ... well, at least. very cool :)

[armchairarmada]

@brootalus The simplicity of this art style helped make it appealing without taking a long time to make. The character's head, for example, is just a circle with a simple face. Appealing colors also help. Graphics doesn't need to be complicated to be aesthetically pleasing.

[ieatatsonic]

I don't typically like Python. I find it too hard to make a GUI with it. Scripting is easy, though.

[mstuie]

What is this game made in (Java, c++ etc) If it made in Java can I please have the source code. I really want to learn how to make a map with Java.

[armchairarmada]

@mstuie It was written in Python using the PyGame library.

Drawing maps should be pretty simple in most languages. For this I created an image large enough for the whole map to fit on. Then I copied the map tile images over to it. To draw the map simply draw the image onto the screen buffer.

Alternatively you can loop through the tiles that are visible and draw them directly to the screen -- which is a little slower in Python than using a single image.

[GreenlineGaming]

@armchairarmada That's freaking awesome to know that I could do this! I just started learning Python. Awesomest program language in my opinion. How long have you been using Python?

[armchairarmada]

@GreenlineGaming Python is a great programming language - easy to learn, easy to use. I've been programming as a hobby for most of my life, but have been using Python for a few years. If you are serious about learning how to make games go out and try to write a few. I've only recently began to understand how to structure projects because of my "failed" LD attempts. "Failed" was in quotes because I've always learned a lot each time, so they are not really failures. I'll finish one someday.

[GreenlineGaming]

@armchairarmada That's very cool! You've given me even more motivation to learn Python! :D

[augustuen]

What is that editor that you used to create the level called?

[armchairarmada]

@augustuen I simply used the Gimp to draw the level as pixels (green for grass, brown for dirt, blue for water). I then used 2x2 overlapping squares of pixels as binary bits to determine which tiles to use with either type (the tiles were drawn as binary numbers counting up from 1 to 15 with an alternate 15 for variation.) Water was done a little differently. It was to sacrifice some flexibility for rapid level designing. Earlier in the video I used Tiled to preview the tiles.

[Guruguru222]

tal tal height music :D

[MephilesSolaris]

I am amazed... I'd wish to make a some games though but... dunno how to make musics, and for graphics I suck. ><' Also I don't know how to build a game engine... Either ways you have my respect.

[armchairarmada]

@MephilesSolaris Nobody is born knowing how to do these things and you don't need to be the most talented to enjoy learning about game development. Most people can only do one thing fairly well. Don't worry about what you cannot do, just enjoy the process of creating and learning. With each attempt I guarantee you will learn a little bit more and get a little bit better.

[MephilesSolaris]

@armchairarmada Eh thank. I'll give it my best then. Besides, is the game finished/available? I'd like to know ^^

[augustuen]

can you send me the script that you used to record or atleast a link to it?

[armchairarmada]

@augustuen You you do a Google search for scrot timelapse you will find a few scripts that are similar to the one I've used. Since I switched over to Windows I don't have the script anymore. The scrot scripts would only work in Linux.

[gyuhankim]

what program do you use for your music?

[armchairarmada]

@gyuhankim I used LMMS (Linux MultiMedia Studio). It also has a version available for Windows. On my computer it crashed a few times, but that might have been more the fault of my audio driver settings.

[alek21496]

what do you use for screen recording?

[armchairarmada]

@alek21496 I had a script calling scrot (a Linux command line screen capturing program) every five seconds (If I remember correctly). The screens were saved as PNGs with timestamps as their names. I then used Blender's sequence editor to load the images (as it handles image sequences well) and it as an AVI. Now I'm using Windows so I'm going to have to find some other way of doing this.

[sikpowner]

Can we play it?

[armchairarmada]

@sikpowner The game was not completed in time to submit it to Ludum Dare, so work on it has slowed some. At the moment all I have is a small level for testing engine features.  I hope to build a little bit of a game world and release it as a small simple free game, but I'm not certain how long I would need to finish it up. You can test out how it currently is at temp.natewm.com/prog/ld18_10_0­9_05.zip

[Magnumi]

So much work and effort. Any ideas of how many lines of code it took?

[armchairarmada]

@Magnumi I had my revision control create a copy of the project as it were by the end of this video. I ran sloccount and it said that there are 1,248 lines of code. It also said that it's estimated cost to develop was $34,093 -- though I'm certain it actually cost significantly less than this :)

[Magnumi]

@armchairarmada Impressive! I would have thought it would take a lot more code than that. Must be super efficient stuff. =)

[armchairarmada]

@Magnumi It's written in Python, which can allow me to do more with less. Also, with a few simple abstractions, flexible code can be written that can easily be adapted to my needs. For example, my sprite class has some built in functionality that would make the creation of any type of sprite fairly simple. All the enemies are derived from an enemy class derived from the sprite class, so the individual enemies only need a custom behavior method. Adding a new enemy will need only a few lines.

[FallForYou55]

You can script and Draw/ Paint Teach me ur painting skills :p

[armchairarmada]

@FallForYou55 I'm glad you liked the artwork.

[FallForYou55]

@armchairarmada Your welcome but TEACH ME :D

[FallForYou55]

@FallForYou55 Oh and Forgot to add What program do you use?

[armchairarmada]

@FallForYou55 For the graphics I simply used The Gimp. It's a free cross-platform graphics editing program. I'm using it in Ubuntu, but there is also a Windows installer available.