So, here I am after my first Ludum Dare. For the occasion, Zhyr & I teamed up to save some time and have some fun instead of coding alone. Here are a few humble comments about the whole process.

Theme

I have to say that we both down voted the theme “Connected Worlds” because we thought it was too accurate to be really permissive and emergent in term of concept and game design. But once it was announced, we forgot about our own taste and decided : “What the hell, let’s make a game with a theme we hate!”

Concept

It came after 45 min of throwing random ideas : Zhyr proposed to simply create connections between planets to make them rotate around each other without colliding. We decided very quickly that game’s rules should be very simple and not involving complicated physics rules. I think we stuck to that pretty well.

Some examples of fake formulas we didn’t need to use in our game :

Development

So around two hours after theme release, we started coding… I will spare you some details and give you a short sum up :

• Day #1 : Boring interface & general stuff for me, maths & physics for Zhyr and his compiler Brain. First prototype works, but ugly game.
• Day #2  : Engine fix, polishing, victory/defeat handling, drawing planets, first levels designed. Zhyr & Argl : “”OMG we have a GAME!”
• Day #3 : Level editor added, Zhyr use it all day to create levels. He also adds zoom out for big levels while I kept polishing, composing the background music, adding sounds, settings, etc.

Universe by Zhyr

All along those steps we managed short pauses composed of : 3 hours sleep, Coffee, Tea, Nutela, Brainstorming, Bagels, Zap de Spion (french zapping) and random food to fuel the brain machine.

Conclusion

The game is here, as we planned! Amazing! Ideally we would have added a few more features (like destructible meteor and more levels) but we are really proud and happy to have actually finished something in time.

We worked approximately a total of 100 hours. I personally broke my but on a wooden chair while getting my right hand atrophied by thousand of stressful clicks. Zhyr started singing weird Canadian songs during night coding, probably due to the twelves cups of coffee he had that day.

But overall, we are incredibly happy about participating to this jam. It was pure fun, even during insane working sessions and now sharing our works with you feels really great. We reviewed 60 games so far, posting large comments, trying to bring some thoughts into them and we also enjoy reading each of your reviews guys, so thanks!

Try out our game if you haven’t yet : PLAY GALACTIC DUMP