* Is this what you want!? *

When I went into this Jam I said to myself, no matter what the results, I won't get upset at my rankings. I'll make a great game in the 48 hours (Even though I had 72 I gotta work on Mondays) and my friends will love it. And yeah, that's what happened. Until... Well I watched a streamer play my game a day after the deadline. sigh More on that below

(My prep game)

Day 1 - Friday

I had an unachievable game I originally wanted to do, till my buddy came along and said "Troy, you're doing too much. Use this idea instead" It was so much simpler. So much more fun across the board. I jumped right to work, writing down on paper how the game was going to work. What I was going to do for AI. A lot of other things. I completely forgot to tell the musician what the new concept was... We'll that'll be taken care of tomorrow.

Day 2 - Saturday

Alright we had a false start, lost many of music hours building a track for a game that won't exist for now. We moved on and I started coding. I got the basic premise down and working, I was able to move the character around on the screen and collect the sheep. Sheep moved around in some what random seeming locations, but if a boy sheep touched a girl sheep... well... nature happened. Had the logic working where the boy sheep(The rams) would get angry and charge at you if ate a lamb. Everything was working kinda well. That means tomorrow I can spend all day on polish.

Day 3 - Sunday

Got a good nights sleep, ate somewhat healthy save for a few Red Bulls. I started putting in the graphics. This is the first Ludum Dare in over a year that I actually didn't do the graphics for. It is also the second Ludum Dare that I used sprites for and not vector graphics or 3d models. I tried to put together a simple animation engine without learning how Unity does things properly. Then I threw in a few screens. From the very beginning I wanted to have a screen that appeared on top of actual game play... And that's where I failed(see below).

(The after)

What went right * I successfully made a game, that had somewhat decent AI, save for a few hiccups. * I made a game that's 2D that I'm quite proud of. * I made a game that was so simple I people could pickup and play without any complications. * The music, I'm in love with the song used for the game * It's cute in a way I'm not use to.

What went wrong * In making my "clever" title screen. I disabled sheep breeding. Without this, the screen would slowly flood and after 10 minutes the computer would start to crawl as it tried to calculate physics and ai for the large amounts of sheep. * Barking didn't have a visual effect to let the player know that, that was the only way to calm down the ram. * It's too hard to tell what is going on at times. When you eat a sheep, your mouth is full. When your mouth is full any close by ram attack. * The AI is so, complicated that it looks like nothing is happening. The ram attack when you eat a lamb, their mate, or a sheep in front of them. * My not wanting to ever fix a Ludum Dare game while voting is still happening

Give it a try. And if you enjoy it the first time, hit refresh to get play again and get the sheep to respawn. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/eat-love-prey