God of the Elements is light Mix and Match game with relaxing atmosphere. You start as a god of a barren realm, match Elements and evolve your Sectors towards prosperity.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/god-of-the-elements

What went right

This was the best theme so far, at least the most inspiring for me personally. I figured out what kind of game I wanted to make early on(in 2 hours or so), which was great. I have always loved making puzzle games and space theme is close to heart. combining these two seemed a good fit for me personally.

I started making the game as a free platform, where you could put everything everywhere. This approach was pretty chaotic and I ended up changing it to a grid based system.

Game was first going to be fully 2D, but I decided to add slow rotation to the realm. In this point I made full commitment for 3D. I think going 3D was the right choice in this case.

I really wanted to juice up the discovery and curiosity part of the game. I kept this in mind while making the music. The song has same instruments as my precious LD game, so it was familiar and fast to make.

Progress and timing on the development went pretty smoothly. I changed from coding to art and sounds quite organically when I faced a creative block. It's always good to do something else for a while when such block occurs.

I ended up getting 6-7 hours of sleep which is very important to keep working on such a hard phase. I think the "flow" of the Jam, in which things work out has been improving every jam, so that's pretty neat. Also remembered to eat, drink plenty of water and have relaxing breaks.

What went wrong

I scrapped my AI plans due time constraints. I planned on having civilization sectors interact with each other. Wage war, trade, generate Elements and eventually Nuke each other. This however ended up being too much to do for 48 hours so I simplified. I left the Nuke in as a kind of an Easter egg. It serves no other purpose than to destroy a sector.

I originally planned on having more content for the end game but ran out of time. Instead my time went to polishing art and making sounds for my game. I didn't have time to generate all the sound effects I would liked to. I ended up releasing with minimum viable sounds I felt were needed. I mostly used my mouth to produce sound effects, it's easy and fast. My roommate must have questioned my sanity as I sat the whole weekend on my room, occasionally trying to sound like a cow or a child..

Unity was OK with Raycasting concave 3D meshes in the editor but not in the build, which was weird. After the build, my mouse over code wouldn't register at all. This caused lot of headache and eventually I gave up on using concave meshes. Due to this change in workflow only base of the sector changes color.

Overall the best Ludum Dare Jam so far for me. Hope everyone else had good time too! :)

Statistics after voting period

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