This was our first Ludum Dare as a team, and the first Ludum Dare ever for 2/3 of us, and we’re so pleased with how things went!

The idea of our game is that you plan out your turn and then watch it play our over the course of 10 seconds. You get to select your ships’ flight path, where to fire, and can divert/prioritise power between shields and fire-power if you like. Repeat. The first team to destroy the other wins!

Here’s a gif of our game doing some things:

Click the image to play!

Anyway, let’s dive in shall we?

The Good:

• We’ve created a game that we find fun to play, and that will serve as the basis of a future project.
• We’re happy with the overall visuals, including a parallax background.
• We managed to implement ship variations with different characteristics. These include: differing health, movement, damage, and AI behaviours.
• We find the ability to divert power between Shields and Firepower to be a really neat feature. We didn’t think we’d get around to implementing it!

The Bad:

• As a team we weren’t always on the same page. It’s hard developing over Skype when tired.
• There is no sound, which is a bit of a problem. Its lacking existence is definitely something we regret, and something we’ve all vowed to improve on vastly.
• The planning phase is not the most intuitive system, and could really do with an overhaul.
• The game would benefit greatly from a tutorial, or more in-depth instructions.
• Multiple levels with a difficulty curve would have been an ideal way to introduce game systems and slowly ramp up the amount of units.
• The screen is a little too tight. A wider view, or the ability to zoom in and out, would be a greatly beneficial.

What we’d like to add:

• Music and sounds – Bleeps and bloops and perhaps electronic “target selected” voices. That sorta thing!
• Improved Movement System – one that shows you how far the ship can move in the period of 10 seconds, to allow for more precise planning.
• Ship upgrading and purchase – An upgrade or ship purchase system between missions, perhaps with each ship having a certain amount of points to allocate between various stats and slots for upgrades.
• More specialised ships – We’d like ships to to able to use special abilities, or provide some kind of bonus when in the radius of certain other ships (or sometimes if not in a radius).
• Friendly Fire – We’d like to find a middle ground. Not too much damage dealt to yourself, but there still should be the penalty. We’re very into the idea of having the smallest ships not deal friendly fire to one another when fighting as a close unit.
• Improved Power diversion – The ability to divert power between Shields, Firepower, and Thrusters would be pretty rad.
• Multiplayer – Yes, multiplayer would be grand.
• Radar – This would be a nice way to figure out location of enemies and allies really quick, or incoming asteroids.
• Slight Auto-aim – It would be worthwhile for us to investigate a slight bias towards the bullet flow.

So there we have it! We’re so chuffed with the feedback we’ve received, and we can’t wait to work on the game further, right after we get another project out the door first.

Ludum Dare has proven to be such a great community, and the weekend was so motivating and inspiring. It’s been a growing experience and we’ll be back for more!

If you’d like to play Cosmic Commander, you can do so HERE. Bonus points to anyone who spots a rare cameo!

– Unorthodox Games