What a weekend this was, and not in a totally good way. Hopefully it was just one of ‘those’ weekends, where Iwas sluggish, out of ideas, and wrong-headed to participate in the compo, as I usually do. MY ideas were trash, my coding and art more so, and so it was with a heavy heart that, on Saturday, I hung it up and said ‘This isn’t happening, I’m done.’ I marathoned the rest of the first season of 24, drank a bunch, and took my mind off everything.

Was I done with game development? It just didn’t seem to hold the same shine it did – and I was becoming painfully aware of my shortcomings as an artist and coder. It was pretty depressing. I had a decent rest of the weekend – played some soccer and had fun. But these LD weekends have always been something special, yet this one wasn’t…

So at work today I’m thinking about it all and I finally just do what I’ve always wanted to do – make something in a few hours. So I did. My game, Bathysphere, took 4 hours to complete from start to finish – all assets, ideas, coding, everything. This is what I love to do – rapid design, coding, thinking on the fly, and above all else simplicity in mechanics and execution. Bathysphere isn’t anything complex, time-consuming, or hard. You sink to the bottom of the ocean and rise again – along the way, you can collect fish and treasures. My head always seems to be in the clouds, so an idea grounded firmly in the possible was refreshing. More refreshing was finding out that my coding skills are very good, and simplicity in art is a great gift.

So play some Bathysphere and let me know if you enjoy it. It is simple and done – and that is very good.

Here are some technical notes, if you want them: I used the ImpactJS game engine for development, Paint.NET for graphics, BFXR for the sound effects, and Audacity to cut and convert the audio. All of the sprites are at most 20×20, except for the UI elements. I used three colors – white, black, and gold.