And we’re off!

Taking about an hour at the start of the compo to both work out and think, I ended up basically going in two directions:

• A falling sand style game, only with discrete ‘bubbles’ with different particles / physics
• A puzzle platformer based around portals that split you into two realities you play at the same time

Of the two, the second has the advantages of 1) actually sounding like a game (that’s always been my problem with falling sand style simulations) and 2) being much easier to code. I’ve worked on falling sand style games before (Sandbox) and they take a lot of tuning to get reasonable performance. Certainly worth doing… but not the best idea for a 48 hour time window.

So of course I’m going with option A.

About 6 hours in, and so far this is what I have:

You can click and drag the blocks around and the sand will from from box to box. At first, I was trying to figure out goals where you could–for example–use water in one box to put out fire in another. But right at the end, I had an even better idea (hopefully not just the long day talking): SANDBOX BATTLE! Basically, some sort of multiplayer / AI madness, where you are trying to steal the other box’s sand before they can steal yours… I’m going to have to think about that…

Anyways, if you’d like to see a bit more (some of the cooler bits of the code, along with a functioning prototype), head over to my blog: Ludum Dare 30: Sandbox Battle! @ jverkamp.com