After submitting around noon yesterday, followed by emergency sleep and even more emergency grading, I’m finally going to make a post talking about my compo entry.

It’s Full of Stars – Play Here

So, I’ve been in a bit of a design slump, working on a long solo project. My last two LD entries weren’t very exciting and I’d felt really down after them. This time, though, Ludum Dare was just what I needed. I’m happy and a bit proud of what I made, even if it’s not really all that amazing. I had fun making this little thing and I really feel like I know what I’m doing (even if I don’t). I’m even happy with the music, and I hate every bit of music I’ve made.

It’s Full of Stars is a result of constantly being asked where my work is positioned, who I’m connected to as an artist (I’m in an MFA program) and all these things when I really just want to make things that mean something. There’s also been a lot of talk about constellations lately, so I decided to make something with that.

I went the easy route with two-button controls, and made it mouse-based. If the theme had been *just* two-button controls, I’d have tried to make a pun of the theme like I do with a lot of them (after grumbling a lot about prescriptive mechanics not being a theme). Growing was really the focus of the game, but I wanted to incorporate both themes. We’re probably never going to have this happen again, so might as well, right?

I really wanted to pass an image out to WebGL and let people save their constellations. This is easy for the Windows build, but I was too tired when I was figuring it out to try more than once to get the extra JavaScript working.  The other thing I regret about this project is that I couldn’t figure out a good way of making it more gamey. It ended up being a bit more like something you play with. Adding in “society moves” was my way of doing something towards this. The mechanic with this is that as your constellation gets bigger, and the further you reach to add a star to the constellation, the more likely “society” will notice and add something to your constellation. So if you keep things small and close to home, you might not get noticed, but you can’t make something that looks good or says what you want it to say. If you reach out and try to make something, then you’re more likely to get noticed and for people to make up connections that you wouldn’t yourself. Other ways I could have done it would have been to try to match a particular constellation as closely as possible, or something like that, but this would require some image comparison concepts that I don’t even want to comprehend, or making this into a set of puzzles with specific set star locations. I didn’t really like either option. I’m open to ideas for gamey elements to consider.

Anyway, if you want, check it out! I’ve also got a video of a full play of it below.

Tags: compo, constellation, it's full of stars, ld34, postmortem