First off, a big THANK YOU to Ludum Dare and the guys who run things behind the scene. This was my first game jam and I had a BLAST! I slept about 4 hours each night, but never really felt tired. I also had about 3 hours I had to be away for a prior engagement, but still managed to finish my game. This is the first complete game I’ve made in a long time, and the first time I’ve ever done something publicly. So I’m pretty happy with the result. So far I’ve played and rated about 20 games I think and I’m continually being impressed by what people have done.

The Game

I made the game Save Them. I guess you could call it an arcade / simulation. You’ve got space ship crew coming out of stasis (ie spawning) every 10 seconds and you need to get them to the escape pods in another part of the ship. They walk in a straight line until they hit a wall and then turn in a random direction. If they pass a door, they will go through it. You can open and close doors to direct them, but every 10 seconds the ship also goes haywire and opens and closes random doors.

To help you guide them, every 10 seconds you get some random movement tiles that you can place. These tiles redirect the crew and last for 10 seconds themselves. Your goal is to save as many crew members as you can before the ship explodes (after 20 ten second cycles).

Fun Times (The Good)

I’m a programmer by profession, but I had a ton of fun making the graphics. They took me a long time though! I estimated I spent around 30 hours in total working during the 48 hour window, and about 12-14 of those hours on graphics. So almost half my time. But it was worth it to see my own creations come to life on the screen. The programming all went smooth, with only one bug that stumped me for a good hour and a half right near the start. My code however, is pretty ugly! I quickly gave up trying to develop smart, modular code, and quickly went with hard coding and doing whatever was fastest.

In terms of sleep, I actually felt great. Slept about 4 hours each night. A couple hours before submission I was pretty much done everything I knew I could accomplish and just focused on polish and fixing up some images, colors etc. Thats about when it all hit me and I started to feel pretty tired.

Seeing other people play the game and rate it, is very rewarding too. I am definitely looking forward to more of these!

The Bad

Not a lot actually! I spent about 2 hours brainstorming and working through a couple ideas before I had finalized on this one. I had plans to add a couple more features, like a random room catching fire every 10 seconds, and air lock doors which would randomly open. I was then going to have tiles you could get in your inventory that would put out fires or close airlock doors. So if you had those tiles great, otherwise you’d have to be more clever with keeping crew out of those rooms and closing off rooms with open airlocks. But I quickly realized I wouldn’t have time for that, and with the limited ship size and movement areas, it would have really added to the chaotic feel

I feel there is a bit too much randomness in the crew movement patterns and the move tiles you place disappear too fast. Maybe increasing their duration to 20 seconds would have helped.

Sound was my biggest issue. I have one sound effect. For starters, I know nothing about generating sound and had downloaded cfxr ahead of time. But I hadn’t used it much and had a hard time generating the effects I wanted. Every 10 seconds when the doors scramble, I wanted to play a sound of them opening/closing which I think would have added a lot to the game and the 10 second cycle theme. But I just ran out of time. A couple more sound effects and some appropriate background music would have really helped.

My Entry

Please give it a try and let me know what you think!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=25089

Once again, thanks to everyone who helps run Ludum Dare, its a great event and I can’t wait for the next!