Ludum Dare 30 was my second Ludum Dare and took place about a year after I started really learning how to program games. In April, I was happy about my entry especially for my first Ludum Dare, but I felt like it didn’t have enough gameplay, and it didn’t. I also thought that the art and music were decent, but could have been better. I set a goal for myself to create something with more gameplay, better art, and better music in Ludum Dare 30

At first, I was stumped on what game to do. There were a couple themes I was hoping to not be the theme, and this was one of them. I had guests over for about 2 hours at the beginning of the dare, and spent those two hours trying to come up with ideas in my head. Interplanetary Messengers was one of the first game ideas that I came up with. I dismissed it thinking that it would be too hard and overly ambitious, but when I couldn’t think of better ideas, I decided to try it.

Everything went smooth. I stayed up until 4 in the morning the first night, slept for 3 hours, woke up at 7 and kept working. I had trouble implementing the jobs, and had to delete code and try again a few times, but eventually I got it working, and that was really exciting. That was my first problem. My second challenge was implementing the minimap, however after writing some things down on paper, it was fairly easy to put together.

Towards the end of the compo, about 5 or 6 hours from the deadline, I thought I was finished. After playing the game, I realized that there really wasn’t any point to the game. You flew a spaceship around and delivered jobs, but you couldn’t win or lose. I decided to make it so that planets could get mad at you for not delivering to them, and they would stop delivering. That was all fine and dandy to implement, but while doing it, I changed something with the jobs that completely broke the system. I was very frustrated and it took a long time to figure out why, with lots of System.out.println calls and that. I eventually pinpointed the problem. I had a String wrong. One string was jobImage when it should have been planetJob and that broke it. Facepalming was a big thing here.

I was really happy with how the art turned out. I spent a week or two before Ludum Dare just practicing pixel art. I looked up tutorials, learned some stuff, then had my friends tell me random objects to create. I feel that this really helped me improve. The music was decent. I’ll repeat what I said to a friend, “If I had a dollar for everything I know about Music Theory, I’d be in debt.”. Making the music for me was just putting down some random notes and hoping that they would sound good together. In the end, they did, which was good.

What I did wrong

When I did the game, I was a little suspicious about planet distance. It took about 2 minutes to get to a fairly close planet, which seemed like a long time. I made it so that the player could buy a boost and a speed upgrade at the shop, and thought that might help. After I submitted the game and got some feedback, my suspicions were confirmed. The distance between the planets were indeed too large, and that made for it to become boring pretty fast. People said that they made it to a planet and died right before they actually got there, which spawned them back at the original planet, so they quit.

What I will change

I plan on working on this game to improve it and make it better. I will change the distance between the planets. They’re too far and it just took too much time to get to different planets. I also will tweak the controls. I got reports saying that the controls were a little difficult too. I agree with that too. Right now, the mechanic for respawning is that the player respawns at the last planet visited. For some people, this has caused some frustration, especially when they died very close to the planet. I might change this so that the player spawns at the planet they are closest to.

I really appreciate all the feedback that I have gotten. I also have really enjoyed playing submissions. I have played 33 games so far, and I plan on playing lots more. Great job everyone and to the jammers that are still coding: you can do it!!!

Play Interplanetary Messengers here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=25675