Angry viking post mortem

So three days before the start of the Ludum Dare 26, we decided to enter the competition. I was in charge of programming, Julio took care of the art and Ruben did the music (Alex, our other programmer, was out for the weekend). The previous day, we started to think about the different themes that could be chosen between all the “final round” themes. The only thing that we had clear after all the talking was that we wanted to create tiled maps, so we decided to start using Tiled. We played around with it for a few hours until we got used to it.

But before prooceding with the post, I want to point out the tools we used to create our game:

Language: ActionScript 3

IDE: FlashDevelop

Framework: Axel

We already had previous experience with all these tools, so it was the best choice for us if we intended to finish the game in less than 72 hours.

On Saturday, finally, the Ludum Dare theme was announced: Minimalism. We thought it was the worst theme it could be chosen as we thought of it more as a visual style rather than a theme (like it could be space or water, for instance). So at first we thought the only way to do something minimalist was by using cubes or circles, just simple shapes. And we didn’t like this, so we thought out of the box and we decided to treat the theme in a different way.

So we started by creating a story. It didn’t took us so long as we started to write down the first ideas that came to our mind. After thinking about it, this was our final story:

Minimalist hipsters discover a portal that takes them to the viking era, and all they see is blood and skulls. They want to change that to something more minimalist. But ByeKing is not going to allow it. Now he is angry and he wants to kill all the hipsters!!

As you can see it didn’t took us longer than 1o minutes to think about it haha.

Then we started thinking of the mechanics and the graphic style. Here are some desings that Julio did:

Talking from the programming side, the most difficult part was the procedural map. At first we started by making a fixed map, but as more we thought about it we saw that if we wanted to do an infinite map this was a mistake. On sunday we started coding the procedural algorithm. I said “we” beause Alex helped me with that part. In a couple of hours we had it working. The problem now were the graphics for the tiles we had to use, and because we didn’t had so much time on Sunday we couldn’t fix it. And here is the final aspect of our tiles:

Yes, I know, a little bit funky right?

On Monday we worked only on the gameplay and we added local scores. We wrapped up all the music and sounds that Rubén made and we submitted the game 3 hours before deadline.

Angry Viking vs Minimalist Hipsters

So to sum up everything:

What went right

• Finished the game
• Procedural algorithm worked (could be better, but it worked)
• Achieved most of our goals (local scores, tile procedural maps, hipster mini AI…)
• Music was great

What went wrong

• No leaderboards
• Tiles were a mess
• Sunday, we had few hours to work

Thank you for reading!