![\"FirstScreenShot\"](\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/FirstScreenShot.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n Next task is to implement some form of level generator with icebergs you must avoid.\u00a0 Then I’ll have enough to see if the fun is actually fun.<\/p>","time":"April 25th, 2014 11:08 pm","title":"Found a Mechanic for the Theme!"}
Wow, for the first two hours I was really sweating this theme.\u00a0 I blame the pre-thinking I did before the compo.<\/p>\n
I went in with the idea that I would do a top-down game with some sort of combat, and I would design the mechanics around the theme.\u00a0 But “Beneath the Surface” has a few contradictions with a top-down perspective.<\/p>\n
My first-five-minutes idea was this:\u00a0 There are tiles\/cards on the battlefield, and you can flip them to find out what’s beneath.<\/p>\n
That’s it!\u00a0 I even drew a little man, who accidentally turned out to be a cowboy.\u00a0 So a cowboy was flipping cards that did something, to help him do something.<\/p>\n
I was not pleased, because I like to have a physical mechanic at the core of the game.\u00a0 Inspiration was not striking.<\/p>\n
I opened a blank notepad and just dumped a slew of ideas into it, mostly trash.<\/p>\n
But then I struck on one.\u00a0 The moon of Jupiter, Europa, has water and is thought to potentially support life in our solar system.<\/p>\n
So here’s the deal:\u00a0 Europa has melted, and you are there in a spacecraft that can fly in the air and in the water.\u00a0 The trick is that while you’re in the air, you are being dragged down by gravity.\u00a0 When you are in the water, you are being pushed up by buoyancy.<\/p>\n
You have a limited amount of thrust that barely competes with these forces when you oppose them, but you can influence the bobbing wave path that results from the alternating forces.<\/p>\n
You’ll have to ride this wave, using your jets to adjust your path, avoiding obstacles and probably doing the obvious thing of shooting guns at hostile aliens.<\/p>\n
After a horrifying 20 minutes where I forgot to turn off the “Apply Root Motion” option of the Unity 2D animator (what an insane default to turn on, it WRECKS your physics completely!), I have implemented the bobbing ship.<\/p>\n