Well, I got to say, this LD was a lot of fun for me. I'm going to share some of my experiences I've had to with creating Match Strike, my LD#41 entry.

There's still time to play Match Strike and give me your thoughts! And if you want me to check out any of your games in specific, just reply back here.

Day 1: Ideas and Early Implementation

I checked the theme with some trepidation; The sort we all feel, where we expect it to be a weird theme that we will blank on. I know we've all been there. "What do I do?" "I can't think of anything?" "Maybe I should just...make a 2D platformer and shoehorn the theme in?" :grin:

But this time? I was prepared! No, I don't mean that I had already looked over the theme choices and individually crafted an idea for each one. Some of you might be able to do that, but my brain is too small to hold all those possibilities. What I mean is that instead of having tons of ideas, I had been thinking about a flight sim. I don't know why, other than watching longplay videos of F-15 Strike Eagle or Red Baron (great DOS games), and waxing nostalgic for those old flat-shaded 3D polygon worlds.

So when the theme landed, I knew instantly what I had to do. A flight sim as genre #1. But what about genre #2? What would be the worse thing to combine with the high speed, low accuracy of a flight sim...? I barely had to think about it. A match-tile game! Let's call it Column Strike!

Originally, I wanted to do a match-3 game, such as Candy Crush or Columns. (Hence the name.) You'd be tasked with flying to parts of the world and pick up combinations of blocks, and then fly them to the target. Right! Vague idea, but I got it. Let's start work.

It didn't take me long to sketch up the basics. First was the plane. I didn't want a realistic flight sim (since that would take too much time!), so I modeled up a futuristic looking craft that had some basis in the real world. At least, the concept art of what the F-19 fighter was supposed to look like...

Once I had the plane, making the world was simple. Pixel-art up a flat terrain, and I'm done! No need to be fancy here.

But the next step? Making a flight HUD. This part was fun. Lots of fun! In fact, I think I spent most of my time on this for day 1. It was complete overkill to have a HUD with altimeter, airspeed, artificial horizon, and so on. But I just wanted it. So bad. And it was worth it, as that HUD would act as the foundation for every other decision I would make about Column Strike.

My end of day I was nearly done with all of this. The artificial horizon wasn't working properly, but I was pretty tired at this point, and the math part of my brain wasn't math-ing. I put it aside and then went to bed for some much-needed sleep!

End of day 1!