If you don’t already know what Hunger Clock, Literally is, or know about Ludum Dare, go here to get the scoop before reading this. But basically, I made a game in 48 hours for the Ludum Dare game making competition. Here’s my thoughts.
This weekend was pretty fun. It was my first time doing something like this. I had a lot of crazy ideas at the start, but I knew I had to play it a bit safe if I wanted to get it finished. So while, innovation was important, it took a bit of a back seat to the rest of my goals.
In the end, besides the primary goal of completing the game, I also wanted to make it fun, challenging, and rewarding – hopefully most of that shines through this relatively unpolished piece. The main personal goal for entering this competition was to force myself to learn some new things and try out some techniques to add to my arsenal of game development. I capitalized on that aspect as well. I am happy with the result for these reasons.
HTML5 is great for these kind of competitions because I had people playing and testing while I was developing all simultaneously. I think that sped up my development process a lot. I was originally going to try out Phaser, a recent HTML5 game engine, but was having a lot of issues with physics and collision. In the end, I decided to do it from scratch and the result was a lot smoother, but I definitely wasted a bit of time testing Phaser and then coding my own systems. Time which could have been spent doing some of the stuff below.
If I had more time, I would of fixed up some of these things:
Better Internet Explorer 9 & 10 Support
Foolishly, I assumed IE9/10 had nearest neighbor scaling for canvas. I was wrong!
More Mario!
I know I wanted to use some pretty advanced jumping physics. I got most of it in, like arcing, imprecise corner jumping, corner boosting, friction, dynamic jump heights (based on input); however, on smaller jumps the arcing isn’t noticeable or effective. I would also perhaps like to implement jumping momentum like in Super Mario Bros 1/2/3 where your jump forces you into a direction a bit more so you can’t just stop dead in air.
Music
So quiet… we need some trashy chiptune stuff going on! Sadly, my skills are quite lacking in this department.
Content
While there is a decent amount of content for a 48 hour game, I would maybe like to push that more. More power-ups, more block types and mechanics, better randomization/templating. Who knows, maybe even some real enemies?
Mobile/Touch Support
It’s an HTML5 game, right?! So, ideally, with some more time I could of added some touch controls for this to work on mobile and touch devices.
All in all though, I’m very pleased and look forward to the next Ludum Dare! Who knows, maybe I will expand on this one after all.