Well well, how did that one go?

It’s not always easy to be a Panda-shark-man.

Considering we spend closer to 30 hours working rather than 72h and that I hadn’t touched multimedia fusion in over a year, not too bad.
Also, first time in ages not doing a platformer and leaving Art to someone else!

We kept the project simple enough though to limit risks. Pandarmageddon is a fairly classic top view survival brawler where you fight endless waves of increasingly tougher robots . What was cool was how you used both buttons of the mouse to use Pandarm and Sharkarm, one being a good damage dealer the other better as a crowd manager.

What went well:

* The game isnt too buggy. I’m an artist and not a coder, so that’s good.
* It took a while for the game to feel any fun at all and I almost abandonned it cause it didn’t seem to go anywhere by the end of saturday. At some point I said f*** it and decided to try to completely mess with the parameters and made the robots 200% faster. That helped a lot – just trying something that seemed silly and totally messed with the gameplay. It gave me a new perspective on how the game could go. The game felt a lot more intense and the shark suddenly became life saving.
* I think the sillyness of the game was fairly successful. I’m glad I had time to make the ennemy robots talk politely while trying to kill you as your character casually walk flailing shark and panda around.
* Jill’s music rocks and makes crushing robots way more epic. 😀
* The game has potentially interesting mechanics between the struggle to find food for your arms while keeping robots off but also while being really carefull not to step over UFO tractor beams! I was usually able to maintain two of those goals in mind and then mess up the 3rd one, I realized after playing a bunch I had to really focus to actually get a good score which is a good sign for a brainless brawler.

What sucked:

* Not finding the fun in the game earlier. I feel we could have had a lot more if we found it on the first day.
* Classic one but still true: not enough content. This kind of game is a lot more fun with many ennemy types and bonus. The game has 2 ennemies and a variation of one + 4 pick ups.
* general amateur feel of my coding.
* Multimedia fusion. Its OK for jams and prototypes but I’m not really learning anything useful using it. I gotta get to Unity!
* No combos :c
* Only one level

Overall it was a great LD, and I think we ll add a couple things to the game. There s a few funny ideas that can be explored with the conflict in between a vegetarian and a carnivorous arm!

Pandarmageddon:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=12252

-blob