7 Days Bad Luck - my first game ever, made in 7 days!

[Katamori]

Hy everyone,

I'm a semi-beginner programmer, who have found LÖVE recently. I swear this is the best libset I've ever seen - I wouldn't have thought that there's anything better than Allegro.

Anyway, I'd like to participate in Ludum Dare 27, but before that, I had to learn about LÖVE (and Lua) and try to create something quickly. This is it!

Here's a screenshot about the titlemap:



And here's a download link for the executable. LÖVE file is attached.

All the graphics were made by myself, with Paint.NET. For sounds, I use SFXR.

Feel free to tell your opinions (it also helps a lot) and enjoy playing! (however, expect that it may be either too easy, or too hard, since I didn't have much time for playtesting)

EDIT: small plus information, since it seemed to be a bit confusing: when you start the game on the right side of the titlemap, you get a long text on black screen. That gives you the story, the goal, and every necessary instrucions.

[davisdude]

Protip: Everybody likes it a lot more if you just post it to the website.

Another Protip: Don't post .exes. You can't run them on Macs, they are often associated with viruses.

I tried playing the game, but I'm not all that sure about the goal of the game. A bit more information would be nice.

Nice little graphics, though!

[Mermersk]

Could you tell us some instructions? What can you do here besides look at the inventory and walk around the area that is in your screenshot ? I kinda like the graphics and the premise of this game. The stuff you can do with the inventory/menu at the bottom of the screen looks promising

[Katamori]

Protip: Everybody likes it a lot more if you just post it to the website.

Another Protip: Don't post .exes. You can't run them on Macs, they are often associated with viruses.

I tried playing the game, but I'm not all that sure about the goal of the game. A bit more information would be nice.

Nice little graphics, though!

To the website? What do you mean?

Also, next time I'm gonna upload the .love file, sorry!

For you and Mermersk : when you start the game on the right side of the titlemap, you get a long text on black screen. That gives you the story, the goal, and every necessary instrucions. =)

Thank you guys anyway!

[davisdude]

To the website? What do you mean?

Okay. To upload things to the website you can do the following:
1) Scroll down until you see three options: 'Save', Preview' and 'Submit'
2) Look down a bit farther an you will see a blue box with a smaller dark blue box right of it theat says 'Upload Attachment'.
3) Click that box.
4) Follow the instructions displayed.

Also, next time I'm gonna upload the .love file, sorry!

That's alright. Just thought I would let you know for future purposes.

[Katamori]

To the website? What do you mean?

Okay. To upload things to the website you can do the following:
1) Scroll down until you see three options: 'Save', Preview' and 'Submit'
2) Look down a bit farther an you will see a blue box with a smaller dark blue box right of it theat says 'Upload Attachment'.
3) Click that box.
4) Follow the instructions displayed.

Oh, I haven't attached files to any forum posts ever, so I haven't thought of it. Thanks! LÖVE file is attached.

Anyway, glad you like the graphics! I'm not good at drawing so I wasn't sure that this is good enough.

[davisdude]

Anyway, glad you like the graphics! I'm not good at drawing so I wasn't sure that this is good enough.

There is usually a reason programmers are programming and not pursuing artistic goals.

About the game:
Maybe the player should start near the thing that tells you the instructions. It would be easier.

Your English is remarkably good, but still has some errors here and there (and that is to be expected, even native English speakers make mistakes. It is a very hard language to learn, seeing as ~90% of the most common verbs follow no regular conjugation pattern )

I don't think q and e should take away your health or anything, since you shift through your items using those keys.

For the temperature I'm not sure if it's in Fahrenheit or Celsius.

Animations (such as walking) would be a nice addition to your game.

Background music wouldn't hurt either. (Never Mind, just read death message)

How do you use items in your inventory?

[TimeLoop]

I love this kind of Atari-retro-looking game!!!
Keep up working on it. It looks amazing.


Just a pair of tips:

1- If your game requires the player to repeately press the same key over and over, such as moving around the board/field, I think that you should use "love.setKeyRepeat()" to avoid the player the need of spamming his/her keyboard keys, which is really anoying, if you ask me. Unless your game requires a lot of precission in the movement, like a sokoban game that moving accidentaly one square may translate into losing the game.

2.- At first sight, I couldn't figure out how or what to do, until I saw the WASD+F in the bottom of the screen, which, in fact, is a bit hard to see and read. Some kind of clearer instructions would make things easier.


Other than that, I enjoyed the theme of your game a lot, and if that is your first game ever, I think that it looks better than most of the "my first game" 's I saw ever.

[Katamori]

Anyway, glad you like the graphics! I'm not good at drawing so I wasn't sure that this is good enough.

Maybe the player should start near the thing that tells you the instructions. It would be easier.

Your English is remarkably good, but still has some errors here and there (and that is to be expected, even native English speakers make mistakes. It is a very hard language to learn, seeing as ~90% of the most common verbs follow no regular conjugation pattern )

I don't think q and e should take away your health or anything, since you shift through your items using those keys.

For the temperature I'm not sure if it's in Fahrenheit or Celsius.

Animations (such as walking) would be a nice addition to your game.

Background music wouldn't hurt either. (Never Mind, just read death message)

How do you use items in your inventory?

answers in order:

Okay, I'm gonna do that next time!

At the first time when I joined an English community, I've always put an "excuse me for my poor English" line to my posts, but there weren't many people who have critisized me, to I found it unnecessary then. I still make mistakes, though. I was in hurry when I wrote most of the texts of this game.

Q and E consumes energy because I put the decreasing functions immediately after "love.keyreleased(key)", which means that no matter what do you press, it goes down. I didn't think about this case. Small mistake.

Temperature is in Celsius. Assume that the protagonist doesn't have much clothes so he can hardly bear cold.

Player was made during 10 minutes and didn't have neithermuch idea nor will for animating it. I can't do anything in 7 days.

There was a plan for background music, but the music creator friends I have make only MIDI song and LÖVE didn't seem to play it properly - and I didn't want to record it to wav. Same as player animation.

Inventory items can be used by pressing X.

I love this kind of Atari-retro-looking game!!!
Keep up working on it. It looks amazing.


Just a pair of tips:

1- If your game requires the player to repeately press the same key over and over, such as moving around the board/field, I think that you should use "love.setKeyRepeat()" to avoid the player the need of spamming his/her keyboard keys, which is really anoying, if you ask me. Unless your game requires a lot of precission in the movement, like a sokoban game that moving accidentaly one square may translate into losing the game.

2.- At first sight, I couldn't figure out how or what to do, until I saw the WASD+F in the bottom of the screen, which, in fact, is a bit hard to see and read. Some kind of clearer instructions would make things easier.


Other than that, I enjoyed the theme of your game a lot, and if that is your first game ever, I think that it looks better than most of the "my first game" 's I saw ever.

Thank you! I've designed a bunch of 8x8 tiles previously, maybe it helped some.

1 - I have no idea, why I didn't do that actually! Maybe I wanted to finish so quickly that I didn't want to rewrite the "button system". I'm thinking about writing a custom code snippet for detecting button press-down holding.

2 - WADS+F was made this way because it was quicker to do than implementing another love.draw() textdrawing "script". Also, a similar solution was made in one of my favourite games, The Binding of Isaac.

Also, it's just my first finished game, but not the first attempt - previously I've tried to make some kind of game in Stencyl game making software (actually, I can even provide two playable demos) and then in C++ coding with Allegro. I could never finish anything either because of the lack of enthusiasm or the lack of technical knowledge.

[TimeLoop]

1 - I have no idea, why I didn't do that actually! Maybe I wanted to finish so quickly that I didn't want to rewrite the "button system". I'm thinking about writing a custom code snippet for detecting button press-down holding.

You don't need to rewrite your code, just add the love function setKeyRepeat in your code.
That will allow to detect the key-holding action when you keyPress() as if it were multiple keyPress() calls.

2 - WADS+F was made this way because it was quicker to do than implementing another love.draw() textdrawing "script". Also, a similar solution was made in one of my favourite games, The Binding of Isaac.

Never heard of such game "Binding of Isaac". I got something to search for in google, hehe

In addition, I think you have some concept error. I don't want to annoy you, or say that I'm a good programmer, but you should only have one "love.draw()" function in your program, then use a variable to switch between different game states, for example:

Code: Select all

function love.draw()
    if gameState == "mainmenu" then
        -- print the main menu
    elseif gameState == "playing" then
        -- print the board, the player sprite, the monsters, etc..
    elseif gameState == "helpscreen" then
        -- print a help screen
    end
end

Also using canvas is the best way to go, otherwise you may want to draw things outside the love.draw() function but they will not be draw. But you can draw to a canvas in any part of the code, and then draw the canvas itself to the screen in love.draw()