Fish Tank Commander features:

• Multiplayer, turn-based tactics game (similar to Advance Wars…or chess!)
• Four exciting unit types: The Speedy Seahorse, the Tanky Turtle, the Brutal Betta, and the Cheap Goldfish.
• Elo ranking system (like in professional chess) and XP earning for each game. See how you rank! Challenge people of your skill level!
• Built-in map maker and a voting system
• Notification system lets you know when it’s your turn…or when your opponent concedes! (Coming soon after LD: Optional notification by email.)

Tools Used:

• Ruby on Rails and JavaScript
• Sublime Text 2
• Photoshop and GIMP (turns out Photoshop sucks for pixel art)
• Twitter Bootstrap
• Git, Github, and Heroku

What Went Wrong:

1. Discovering that none of my several available web servers were running Ruby 1.9+ and being unable to upgrade them. I ended up having to sign-up with Heroku to do the hosting, but this was indirectly good — see below.
2. The AJAX interface for moving the units can be a little laggy. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time (and expertise) to develop a WebSocket solution — this will come after Ludum Dare is finished.
3. Not enough time for me to play the game, so some good balance tweaks only became obvious to me after the deadline when I could get in a few matches.
4. Not enough time to implement the several pages of additional features the game deserves! Especially automated matchmaking and email notifications. Hurry up and finish voting so I can improve the game!
5. The battlefield doesn’t look quite as much like an aquarium as I had hoped. It needs some kind of border around it that looks like fish tank walls. One art please.

What Went Right:

1. Really knowing my programming language. In LD #22 I used Unity 3d, which I’m not very experienced with. But I use Ruby on Rails every single day for work. This was still a learning experience as I don’t use RoR to make games, but it meant that I didn’t have to use documentation as extensively (just occasionally to check parameter ordering for complex functions).
2. A great schedule. Just as with LD #22, my plan was to use Friday for ideas and a skeleton/outline of the app, Saturday for core gameplay, Sunday for “fluff” like finalizing the art and adding auxiliary features. Despite complaining about not having enough time to do everything, I actually did much, much more than I thought would be possible in 48 hours. I think that midway through Saturday I felt that I had enough “game” to have been satisfied with submitting then.
3. Working with Heroku. I’ve been wanting to play with this sort of dynamic, cloud-like hosting for a while and I finally got the opportunity to do so. Even the the fact that I wasn’t able to use my existing (and therefore effectively “free”) hosting is going to be a boon, as I’m feeling more motivated to complete all the features I want to make a very professional product.
4. Good, high quality food at the ready. I made a pork roast on Friday night and had plenty of pre-washed spinach, lettuce, and other vegetables ready to go. Saturday and Sunday morning started with a huge breakfast, and I made sure to consume a lot of high quality food the rest of the day. It kept my energy levels high.
5. Going for walks. It only took me 10 minutes to go around the block, but the four or five walks I took throughout the weekend were great for recharging my batteries.

What Went Awesome:

1. Streaming the whole thing and having hundreds of my YouTube viewers keep me motivated (and provide me with a to-do list of feature requests that will keep me busy for the next year).

Once voting for LD #23 is complete, I’m going to get back to work on this project and turn it into something really, really amazing. I can’t wait.

http://fishtankcommander.com/

• Users can sign up
• Users can create their own maps!
• Basic combat system designed (but not implemented)
• 4 basic units programmed: Goldfish, Seahorse, Turtle, and Swordfish

It ain’t much to look at so far, but I’m loving my progress.

But now, time for bed!

EDIT:  The repo!  https://github.com/quill18/ld23-tiny-world

Am I missing anything?  (No carbs allowed!)

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Artificial Life: I don’t know what the “game” will be, but I love simulations and especially stuff that falls under this category.  I miss playing SimEarth and such.

Limited Resources: A puzzle game? An RTS? Something about environmental awareness, or maybe just a MacGyver experience?

Explore The Universe: Combine this with Limited Resources and you have a game about finding a habitable planet before your spaceship runs out of food/fuel/oxygen.  Or heck, maybe it’s just you in your backyard with your telescope, looking for things.

Randomly Generated: This was done recently for a mini-LD and also isn’t very specific.  I’m hoping it’s not picked.

Evolution: Ties in with Artificial Life.  I’ve always wanted to do something that really simulates evolution well, maybe with some kind of binary DNA. Again, not sure where the “game” is though.

Alchemy: Magicka is an example of one of several games where you have to combine ingredients to create a desired effect.  Doing something like that with Alchemy could be great fun.

Exploration: Pretty vague — could be anything, really.  See “Explore the Universe”, above.

Death Is A New Beginning: Imagine a very lethal dungeon crawler, but where the dungeon isn’t reset between deaths.  You just keep flinging character after character into the pit, getting a little further each time. “I only had to suicide 25 ccharacters to finally kill the dragon!”

Castles: Building castles are awesome. Smashing them is also awesome. Good opportunity for asynchronous multiplayer stuff?

Discovery: a.k.a. Exploration? This could also be something like scientific discoveries.

Minimalism: Already been done. I hope it doesn’t get picked.

One Room: Now THIS is a fascinating theme. Restrictive and yet vague at the same time.  Are trying to escape from a room?  Are we very tiny, and one room is effectively a whole world for us?  Is it only one room, but we skip between parallel universes where things are subtly different?

Survival: Not terribly focused for a theme, but I might want to do something like being stranded on a deserted island or something.

Indirect Control: Lots of excellent possibilities.  Maybe it’s a game where you are trying to program instructions into a robot to achieve things?

Build It, Then Use It: Build a spaceship to reach…

The Moon: …?

Castles In The Sky: Are we building castles out of clouds?

Ruins: Pretty vague.

Minions: Lots of potential cross-over here with ideas for “Indirect Control”

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Summary of the warmup experience:

• GOOD: The ease of creating editors for data is awesome.
• GOOD: Whereas UI’s are a pain to make in most game engines (including Unity), using HTML/JS as a front-end makes this trivial.
• BAD: The “mouse” part of the UI still sucks to implement.  I mean, it’s no more work than anything else (and some types of drag-and-drop are REALLY easy with a little help from jQuery), but it’s still tedious and prone to glitchy behaviour.
• GOOD: While my warmup didn’t include any multiplayer, certain types of multiplayer will be easy to implement.
• BAD: Latency. Communication between the client side and server side can be pretty quick, but isn’t as instant as something running entirely on the user’s computer.  Anything that requires near-instant real-time response will not be appropriate to this.  (I mean, you can make fast web-based apps if everything runs in JavaScript or Flash — but that’s not exactly what I’m looking to do.)

So while real-time action games are straight out, good UI + centralized data storage + multi-user = awesome potential for having users create and share stuff with each other.

One of the mistakes I made in LD22 was making an entirely mouse-driven game experience (“for simplicity”).  Well, it wasn’t simple to implement and even the game itself became a lot easier and simpler to play when I just switched to keyboard movement.  The less “fancy mouse stuff” I try to do in this game, the better.

I’ll try to keep that in mind.

That being said, not every theme will fit well with the idea of a web app multi-user experience, and for all I know I may end up using Unity anyway!

*** VOTING FOR THE LD23 THEME HAS BEGUN! ***

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I’m going to be spending a few hours livestreaming my warm-up for LD, so if you’re interested in watching drop by http://twitch.tv/quill18 and make sure to hit “Follow” to be alerted when I go live.  I expect I’ll put in a bit of time tonight (around 7-9 EDT), plus a few more hours on Saturday and Sunday.

I figure that the best way to do the warmup is to random from 1-100 and get a theme from the list at http://sos.gd/themes/?view=results — but since I don’t want to spend a full 48 hours I’m going to roll ahead of time so I have a chance to think a little before I dive in.

Roll Result = 46.  Theme = “This is your dungeon”.

Interesting.  I always love roguelikes and even old-school text adventures, so that gameplay screams out right away.  But the “your” part of the phrase is making me think that maybe the player should have some ownership of the dungeon.  Should I be looking to Dungeon Keeper for inspiration?

Post your suggestions!!

I have several hours to think before I can even start programming, so it’ll be interesting to see where my brain goes.  (Programming Language: I want to do a web app with lots of server-side stuff in Ruby on Rails.  Front-end will be HTML/JS.)

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It also felt stupendously good to finish a game, which I know a lot of other programmers can relate to. It gives me hope that maybe one day I’ll quit my job and turn to game development full-time.  In the meantime, I have LD23 to look forward to!

Last time around, I made a game in Unity 3d.  I’m a huge fan of this framework, though because it’s only a part-time hobby my actual expertise with this (or any game framework) is relatively limited.  This limits my ability to perform as efficiently as possible and prevents me from dabbling with the more advanced features, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a 48-hour compo.  I may use it again, depending on the theme.

However, I’m wondering about doing something that is far more inline with my day-to-day expertise. It would be different from the “standard” submission, which carries both good and bad baggage. It’s also possible that I’ll be spending more time than I’d like with “low-level” functionality.  Namely, I’m thinking of developing a game as a web app that would include considerable server-side functionality (as opposed to doing a JS/HTML5-canvas thing — though such features may make an appearance).  Programming in Ruby on Rails is what I do every day — could this translate to making a game?  There’s considerably latency implications, though this can be minimized depending on the type of game and through AJAX techniques (or web sockets, though this WOULD be new/unknown territory for me).  Dungeon Crawl Web Tiles is a really impressive example of what’s possible.  It also opens up certain multiplayer possibilities WITHOUT needing to muck around with the more complex issues involved in typical multiplayer games.

I may make a test/practice/warmup game to experiment with these techniques, though April is looking VERY busy right now and I’m not sure when I’ll find time.

LD23 takes place April 20th-23rd, 2012.

• Glasgow, Ayr, and Edinburgh in Scotland
• London in England
• Brussels, Strasbourg, Waldersbach, and Paris in France
• Black Forest in Germany

Any suggestions of things my wife and I should be seeing in these places?

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http://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikes/comments/rfzl0/dcss_i_feel_that_this_is_going_to_be_wasted_on_me/

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