Invertigo – Woah nelly I finished it!

Hello! This is my first Ludum Dare entry, I’ve always wanted to get involved but lack of coding skills always prevented me. Middleware is so good now though, there’s just no excuse! Making games is for EVERYONE! 😀

GAME – Check it out whydontcha

INVERTIGO! Shoot sprites! Jump! Invert the world with switches! It’s a fast-paced action shooter platformer, and I’m super beaming at how it turned out. It’s not an adventurous style of genre, but it’s one that was easy enough for me to make a working game out of.

What went well:

* Stencyl. I put this together in Stencyl, and it’s superb for rapidly putting ideas and working games together! Also plenty of options for a chump like me who’s learning ActionScript and needs to be able to slot code together like legos.

* It’s not an eyesore! The minimalism theme was perfect for reducing asset creation time, as simple shapes could look alright without too much faff!

* It plays pretty well! Possibly a bit too floaty for some, but I quite like my platformers to have soft, unrigid movement. Hangtime baby!

* Got saving/loading working without causing myself a world of pain and horrors with bugs and things.

What didn’t go so well:

* I didn’t start making levels until about 6 hours before the deadline. That is dumb! I spent so much time in a little whitebox arena tweaking visuals and movement and stuff, I just left the important bit until way too late. This means…

* There aren’t enough levels! The game is fun and I want it to be longer 😐

* I think I broke the design rule about making the game a challenge for yourself, and therefore making it way too hard for everyone else! The game is hard, but this is because I didn’t give myself enough time to tweak and balance levels yadda yadda.

* Triangles man. Didn’t stop to think that it’s hard to tell which way they’re facing… whoops. Makes shooting a bit faffy sometimes!

* Spent too much time faffing with extra design elements. Originally had a level that synced the inversion with the bpm of the music, but had to cut because I didn’t have enough time to make it playable and fun! Also the ability to invert the world at any time the player wanted.

* I started making the game with a beta version of the software, and quickly ran in to some problems with missing features, so had to re-start the project about 6 hours in. Fool! Don’t use beta software when you’re in a hurry!

There’s not much in the way of a design journal as I sorta just got my head down and made, but there’s some sporodic tweets on the twitters www.twitter.com/unusualcadence

Thanks! Go play 😀