This is the first time I have participated in LD.  Generally speaking, it was awesome!

First of all, when the theme was announced it was 4:00 AM where I live, so I went to bed just after reading the keynote. I didn’t like the theme, it is too mechanics-oriented and leaves not so much room for interpretation (I expected to see a flood of platformers with characters using bread instead of swords, kitten cannons, and other stuff about the power of love). It took a lot of time before I came up with an idea and the work has begun only at 5 PM.

The idea was to make a game about a conventional weapon that has unusual properties, such as, for example, emotions. So I googled classifications of moods and emotions and found this:

This classification fitted the game design purposes greatly. After a while, the vision of my future game was finally formed.

Gameplay wise the sources of inspiration were Gods Will Be Watching and Long Live The Queen.  I arranged 8 emotions into 4 scales of opposites. Each emotion influences cannon characteristics in a way and the player has to find the right combination to make the cannon shoot. It seemed a bit simple to me so I decided to add also 8 feelings, each one formed by a pair of emotions (see the image above. For example, joy+trust=love). And this was a big error on my part. The implementation of mechanics has taken about 90% time of development. As a result, I had only 40 minutes to make graphicsand there remained no time to record music and sound effects (I expected it to be the fun part of development), and there was not done any work on balancing at all. So,

What went right:

• I have made a game.

What went wrong:

• I shouldn’t have added 8 feelings, it took too much time and made the game balancing even harder. As a result:
• No sound
• No balance
• Game mechanics are too unpolished
• Some minor features were not implemented.

I’m going to release a post-compo version which should be more polished.

You may play the game here:

See you next time!