It took almost two weeks of 14 hour days to program this game | Hacker News Reader

It took almost two weeks of 14 hour days to program this game

newgrounds.com

36 pointswindsurfer28 comments

Nice game.

Do you know about http:///www.flashgamelicense.com/ ? If not it's a place where you put flash games to auction and the big portals pay to get their branding put into your game before it's distributed.

Wow, I may just do that. Thank you!

It's worth checking out .... you make good games (played hats the other week at reddit too) and if the big portals like them they'll pay thousands, and in some cases for some lucky guys 5 digit amounts, just to have their branding in your game. It's also a great community for testing, getting feedback and improving your games and how you make them.

I don't know if you did everything yourself during those two weeks but if you did can we get a more detailed breakdown:

1. Time spent on graphics

2. Time spent on level design/creation

3. Time spent play testing

4. Time spent programming

5. Time spent on sound and music

I worked with an artist on the game. He also did most level design.

How do you gauge things like this? I mean, does coding the interpreter or items in the game count as level creation? What about prototype levels? We each made at least 5 testing levels to see how they worked and started that about 5 days ago.

Play testing with other people only occurred sporadically for the last few days of development. Getting feedback from sites like Hacker News is a kind of play testing. I'm still tweaking.

Programming is the big one of course. Unfortunately I can't really say how long I spent on it as it intermingles with things like level design and graphics. The levels themselves have a lot of custom code - I wasn't about to make a real level editor for such a short game. And, this being flixel, I wasn't using the Flash IDE to create this. It's mostly code, so I guess almost all the time not drawing, level editing, or making sounds was spent coding.

I got a buddy to make the music, but I made the sounds as they were needed using a synth :) I might have spent 2 hours tops.

Can you discuss your approach to game design and development? Do you use well-known game libraries for a lot of the game mechanics or do you roll your own?

How did you go about populating the game world? Did you create your own game editor?

Great game!

I used Flixel. I had to add a lot to get most of the game mechanics in a reasonable way. Flixel provides the basic platforming phyiscs, but I had to add things like variable jumps, dialog screens, pickups, enemies, inventory, etc.

The world is actually a collection of text files in a format Flixel uses to make the basic physics. Each level has three files: background, widgets, and enemies. I modified the file parser so I could spawn enemies, doors, and triggers easily.

We used a free level editor to make the text files.

Nice work.

A few comments:

I found that some NPC characters placed themselves in front of things I wanted to use (doors, computers etc.). Perhaps they should either have a minimum distance, or just be mobile so that they don't stay around for long.

A full screen map would be nice, with the areas that you have visited marked in gray. It would make the navigation a bit easier.

Reminds me of cave story in space.

Your game has been saved, Huzzah!

I enjoyed it for about 5 minutes. I'm pretty impressed with what you can accomplish in 14x14.

First think about what small feature you can add to the game to make it even more addictive. Can you take advantage of social gaming (comparing scores, multiplayer)? The model you have could skyrocket with the right small touches.

I'd wish you luck, but you don't need it :D. Game on!

Thanks!

We'll be adding achievements for sure. And hopefully more levels soon. Some sort of currency/experience would be nice, but not sure how to implement it...

The game is fun, but I can't get over <Up> not being jump. Any reason you used <x> instead?

We thought the controls would be familiar to those that played cave story, and also if we used UP to jump, how would you aim up?

Yeah, yeah, I know. I could just never get the hang of that control style. I suck at Mega-Man, I suck at Contra, and I suck at your game... But that's me, not the games.

No alternate kb layout support...

Yep, I'm using a kinesis... instant hand cramp.

Awesome game, I keep coming back to it. Heads up on a typo, though: all the health machines say "You health has been restored", should be "Your health...". Other than that, it's pretty amazing.

really digging the animation/feel of the game. Also, I died =), hit continue, and the music stopped.

Best of luck man, looking forward to seeing your other games.

Minor suggestion: put the intro to narro the scrapdealer on the load page and lose the keyboard instructions page altogether.

Okay, how would I tell the player the controls then...?

Did you contract out the voice acting? The wizard performance during the player setup screens is pretty good.

I lost interest around the fourth room, and those blob guys were really annoying because of how far they jump. They always getcha.

Ditto. Most unforgiving "tutorial" mode I've ever experienced in a platform/shooter... )-:

Thanks.

I've since updated the green guys to "giggle" before jumping at you. It should give you more time to kill them. The changes should be up in an hour or so (I've had too many views for instant-updates).

It took two weeks to program an ancient IIS error page? I could have done that with cut and paste in just a few minutes.

I don't have control over newgrounds, but is it still an error?

No, it worked just fine for me. Well done on the game, BTW.

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