Now it’s time to talk a little bit more about ACS and how the dev went…

…Here comes the traditional… Post-Mortem!

Technical stuff, the engine

If you’re into that kind of thing, you can grab the game source code.

I quickly knew I wanted to make something “Gauntlet-style” for this Ludum Dare. Basically, the top-down engine is pretty much the same as a platform engine without the gravity.

I already made many platform engines with the sacred “KiSS” principle in mind (Keep It Simple & Short). I use a common “Entity” class for all the things in the game which can move or interact. This simple class manages movements, gravity and collisions.

So the engine was done pretty quickly. I implemented a basic crowd collisions system to make sure entities could push other entities. There again, magic trick : resolve crowd collisions and recals, THEN the X wall collisions/recals and THEN the Y wall collisions/recals. This will unsure that wall collisions always prevail. Keep it simple.

Gameplay

The game was too ambitious here. To make it properly and balanced would have required another 12-24h I think. I made a few mistakes:

• the Chest should cost 10 pts and give 5 pts when picked up and not 10pts to install / 10 back when picked up,
• the Ghosts should have twice more health,
• the game really lacks a basic fixed turret (shooter) to add a little bit of tower defense gameplay to the mix.

The Chests were clearly the major flaw here: easy to use and abuse.

Music & sounds

At first, I prepared a Wolfram tones soundtrack. But someone pointed me at the rules of their website: “you are not allowed to use it“. Too bad.

I searched for alternatives and found an amazing Python script called Autotracker (with another variation here which uses triangle waves for the main instrument). The name says it all: random chiptune-like music generator. I host the script here as it is damn hard to find online. The results are quite repetitive, but it helps greatly when you need a complete music track quickly (“quickly” as in “10 minutes”, including downloading).

The rest was almost entirely made using the amazing LabChirp, plus few things with Sfxr.

What now?

During the Ludum Dare, I thought to myself that simply watching the hero rampaging a dungeon was fun. Spawning mobs is cool too, but the passive hack & slash gameplay proved to be interesting.

Therefore, I might try to make a Progress Quest like game using the same engine: just watch your hero crawling a dungeon picking loots. The player would just have to make choices like opening inventory to switch weapons, drink potions, ..etc. Again, something like Progress Quest, but with visuals :)