So this is my third attempt at entering a Ludum Dare, with the previous two times not going well due to other commitments throughout the weekend. Thankfully this time around I’ve got less to deal with over the next day or so and over the last couple of years I have been practicing with a number of personal programming projects, so hopefully I’ll be able to come up with something vaguely presentable by the end of it. I’m currently using Unity and Visual Studio 2015 to produce my game, working in C#.

My interpretation of the theme was to produce a platforming game in which the entire game takes place on a single map; as the player progresses the camera gradually zooms out until the whole level is displayed on the screen at once:

At the early stages this concept is fine, but as the camera zooms out it gets harder and harder to see anything of importance. In order to counter this I decided to implement a ‘magnifying glass’ feature, in which holding down a specific key will overlay a second image over the first displaying a zoomed-in view of the player. However, the magnifying glass both obscures the zoomed out map and is zoomed far enough in itself that to rely on it too much will leave the player vulnerable to hazards that they will be unaware of until the last moment.

As it stands the majority of the code is in place – barring tweaking the player movement script to solve an issue in which moving towards a wall while in mid-air will cause the player to stop falling, the main things that I need to work on tomorrow are expanding the level design and updating some of the art (I might stick with the black-and-white theme, but that placeholder stickman really needs replacing). If possible I’d also like to look into ways of expanding the functionality of my game – barring the expanding and magnifying glass concept, there’s not an awful lot that separates my game from every other obstacle avoidance platformer out there.

See you in the morning!