This LD was a strange one for me: i almost quit several times, had no idea what game i’d like to do for most of the time and also had the stop working to attend to social obligations during the compo. It was a great recipe for failure, but somehow i managed to finish it, despite the game having bugs and lacking a lot of intended features. Ok let’s go over the traditional good / bad parts.

The bad

• Initial idea – I innocently started this ludum dare with the “beat’em up” style in mind. I wanted to make a final-fight like game with combos and different enemies. After trying to draw fighter sprites i “quickly” (see next bullet) realized my mistake: the hard part of this game type is the art and animations, especially for a programmer with no background in pixel-art (or any other kind);
• The map – Of course, as a programmer my first task was to create a map with the appropriate axonometric projection, the “cabinet projection” which was commonly used for fighting games such as Cadillac and Dinosaurs, Final Fight, etc. The problem was it took some precious time to make, and while the result was good enough, by the time i finished i had already scrapped the beat’em up idea and had to think what to do with this thing;
• The theme – Besides the artistic difficulty, the coup de grâce to my original idea was that the theme was ‘an unconventional weapon’ – i figured that using your fists was not unconventional enough and almost quit the compo. After some thought i decided to continue and in a stroke of craziness i decided to do a turn-based game. The theme was also a problem and i ended up with this “just-to-fit-the-theme” mechanic in which you have to grab enemies to use them as throwing weapons;
• Time / Life – I had two unavoidable social obligations during the LD weekend: a dinner saturday night and a lunch with my in-laws sunday. I didn’t plan ahead for this compo and had to pay the price, losing ~4-5 hours of development time;
• Art and music – I had planned a background for the game and some extra frames for the player character but couldn’t do it. I am still very bad at drawing humans, the player character looks like a giant-headed power ranger. I was planning an intro, menus and a much better and user-friendly UI also. And i couldn’t even touch the music generation programs i wanted to use, all because of poor planning and time lost at the beginning of the project.

The good

• Art – Besides having very few assets people who commented complimented the art style, which made this Ludum Dare the best one for me so far. This is a huge milestone because this time i actually used a drawing tablet and spent some time thinking about colors and the whole style for the game. I am particularly happy with the map tiles i created
• Cabinet Projection – Besides being a weird projection and some times hiding stuff (clickable tiles, enemies) this axonometric projection worked and will certainly try to reuse it in the future (hopefully making the beat’em up game);
• Turn-based – Alien escape is a very simple game, but it was the very first time i tried to do a turn-based one and besides having little time and some bugs the whole thing ended up working ok i guess. Of course the code is a mess but i think i successfully added the “turn-based” skill to my repertoire. I’ll surely make a post-compo version of this game!
• Completion – Every time you participate in the compo enduring the restrictions and finishing a game i think you gain valuable experience in the “finishing a game” skill. This one for me was more of a personal challenge: having a theme i didn’t like, completely changing my game idea and finishing the game regardless of these problems.

To summarize, even with all the unexpected things i really liked doing this Ludum Dare, it was the third time i managed to finish a game and i plan to keep participating – each time i do i learn a lot and i’m actually getting better at drawing!

P.S.: There is still a long way to go before i can really care about ratings – for now i only care about comments (criticisms, suggestions, bugs) and honing my skills.

P.P.S: If you liked this post and wish to try the game, here are the links: