https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/cosmic-collapse

Gonna be honest: "Running out of space" was not a theme that immediately stirred the muse. All things considered, though, Cosmic Collapse turned out much better than I was expecting: the game was fully implemented to my satisfaction, and it ended up (accidentally) fitting the theme as well!

When first confronted with the theme, my mind immediately went to strategy games: "you're stuck on a shrinking landmass, trying to gather as many resources as fast as possible before you run out of room." I considered a couple of variants on this before I realized I was probably better off not trying to make something as complicated as a strategy game; however, thinking about the theme itself, a punny approach came to mind: I could make a game involving running, and set it in space. Hence the concept for Cosmic Collapse. Funnily enough, it ended up fitting the theme anyway, as you're always running out of breathing room: the ships taper off, giving you less room to maneuver, and the wall of annihilation dogging your footsteps approaches faster and faster, giving you less room for error.

I drew most of my art assets before I actually started coding; most notably, I got the "ship breaking up" effect implemented before any of the actual gameplay. (I know, I know, serious "cart before the horse" here, but the better my games look, the more motivated I feel working on them.) All the art was done in Aseprite; the spaceman, however, was also animated using Spine, an awesome program for making puppet-style 2D animations. Sound effects were created using Bfxr and Audacity, and the music loop was made with Bosca Ceoil. I tried to keep the sound effects and music on the quiet side so they would have impact without being annoying; I've had a bad habit in the past of making games with really annoying in-your-face sound, so I decided to err on the side of caution this time.

One funny bug that had me stumped for a couple hours involved the player suddenly failing to collide with objects for no apparent reason. When I tracked down the source of the glitch, I couldn't believe how dumb I'd been: my collision routine was checking whether collidable objects were between the player's last frame position and their current frame position, but the way the player's movement math worked out, if you were running at top speed and then teleported, the player would effectively start running between objects. Fixing it was a simple matter of changing a "<" to a "<=".

Between a theme I wasn't feeling, procrastination, and an overall lack of energy, I was worried that Cosmic Collapse would end up another "playable but not really finished" project of mine, but I'd call the end product one of my better and more polished Ludum Dare entries to date. My own high score is around 800, but I invite you to smash it into the dirt. ;)