Tube LD29 Postmortem – Part 1
The Theme and Initial Ideas
The theme for LD29 was ‘Beneath the surface’, initially the theme didn’t fire up my imagination. It had obvious connotations of mining and deep sea. Once I did a bit of brainstorming I started to come up with ideas around emotions, controlling complex mechanisms with simplex mechanics and political systems.
This brainstorming around these areas led to about 16 ideas, which I then whittled down to 4 ideas which included the following
Building Shelters
You have to protect creatures that live below the surface of the world, these creatures are very vulnerable to the elements and you have to build structures to protect them while they navigate to their new homes.
Creating Patterns on a Surface
This idea and the basis in how old Cathode Ray TVs illuminated pixels on the screen. In this idea you would be using electro-magnets to guide a beam to a given pixel and then illuminate said pixel for points.
Herman’s Head
Do you remember the really crappy US TV ‘comedy’ Herman’s Head? If not, lucky you! This trailer and wiki page are enough to give you an idea what the show was like.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman’s_Head
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8tzXFagaso
The idea is that control different aspects of a persons personality to complete tasks, the important thing was to keep everything balanced.
Political Corruption Games
In this game you would be control the hidden forces which lurk beneath the surface of a supposed Democracy.
I basically decided to go with the Creating Patterns on the Surface idea as I believed that I could limit the scale of the project, I also liked the idea of playing around with simple mechanics and finally I really liked the idea that you where not in direct control.
Constraints
Obviously because this project was part of Ludum Dare the biggest constraint of all was the time limit of 48 hours, I also added an additional time based constraint to myself by deciding to have a normal sleeping pattern. Usually in a Jam situation I would stay up for as much of the 48 hours as possible but I couldn’t do this for Ludum Dare as I had a bunch of work to do on the Monday after the Jam.
The next constraint was my skill base, I think of myself as a Games Programmer. My art skills are pretty much non-existent and I believe that I don’t flex my design muscles enough to really have a very polished game system. With this constraint in mind, I decided to keep the art style very simple(basic shapes and colours) and keep the main mechanics very simple but with enough design space to enable some interesting mechanics to come out.
Part 2 – can be read here and my entry can played here. Please play, rate and give feedback. Cheers!!!
I am not a big fan of wordpress, so I was using my Tumblr to post very intermittent dev diaries of my LD29 entry, these can be read at the following link