Rescue Mission

LD46 was one of my favorite LudumDares. I had the house to myself, and outside of food preparation and a couple of hours of sleep, I just made a game. I scoped small, and cut a bunch of stuff out of that, and ended up with a game that had a start and an ending, and some gameplay in the middle.

One of the biggest problems I've run into in past jams is coming up with ideas when the theme is announced. I generally like to come to the jam without any preparation, but when the theme is announced I end up completely blank for a long time.

This time, I held idea jams every day during the week or two leading up to the theme announcement. What I did was to pick a random theme, give myself ten minutes to spam as many ideas as possible, and then pick the three best ideas and spend ten minutes each expounding on them. After 40 minutes, I'd have three great ideas with basic plot, core mechanics, and art style/genre already figured out, and could then pick one to move forward on.

It worked really well for the actual theme announcement, and even though one of my least favorite themes was picked, I was able to immediately begin brainstorming, and ended up with several plausible game ideas in less than an hour.

During a pre-jam mechanic testing session, another thing I had never done before, I came up with a physics-based rocket engine that worked really well, and I ended up using the same idea as the core movement mechanic for Rescue Mission.

I spent much more time on art than I have been able to in past jams, which was pretty great. I had borrowed a drawing tablet from a friend, and it worked out well, even though I did decide to crunch the size down drastically since I'm not much of an artist.

For this Ludum Dare, I did interpret the term 'base code' more generously than I have in previous jams, and took the rocket engine code, some pieces of an enemy spawner script, and a tiny music manager script from some of my other projects. While this did cut down the coding time some, it was almost more of a pain trying to get everything to work together than if I had written it all from scratch, so I'll probably refrain from doing this too much in the future.

Audacity and my headset mic were giving me timing issues, and I couldn't get two tracks to sync up even with a click track, so I ended up just recording the different music tracks in single takes. I'll need to get a proper mic and a better DAW next time I do live music.

Anyway, the compo itself was a great time and very enjoyable, but on Tuesday, I came down with a bad cold, and was out for two weeks, so I wasn't able to participate in the play and rate portion of LD46 as much as I'd like, and only barely managed to squeak through with 21 ratings on the last day.

But in the end I made a game in 48 hours, had a lot of fun, and ended up surviving, all thanks to Providence and maybe 30 cups of Mate.