You can find Army of BOTZ here.

The week before the compo, as anyone should do, I have voted for the themes. This time during the voting I was VERY negative; I gave -1 to most of the theme.”10 seconds” though appeared to me as the most interesting of all. I didn’t really brainstorm much as to what I should do if any theme is chosen. Early in the week, I had a revelation: I have had an idea for a while now about a game in which you can control robots by programming them before the level. That idea was inspired by a Minecraft mod called Computercraft (which I used to use al LOT). My revelation was that I should finally give life to that idea and combining it with the “10 seconds” theme should it be chosen. As it turns out it was, and so I ended up making the game which became “Army of BOTZ”.

Ludum Dare 27 is the fourth LD compo I have attempted but only the second I managed to finish. At first, knowing making “Army of BOTZ” was probably going to be complex, I wasn’t certain to make it in time. But nonetheless, I somehow made it! Along the way, many things happened; some of which were good, others were bad, and some were ugly.

The good:

-> Making the idea come to life:  As I said, at first this idea seemed quite ambitious. Using Game Maker : Studio, I thought that handling certain elements (such as executing the programs) would be complex. However, I was supprised to see how fast I managed to progress on the first day, as by the end of the day, the whole programming interface was done and so was transfering the data to the computers.

->The theme : This time, the theme was more interesting. And as a result, before the compo had even started, I already had an idea.

->Time: Working suprisingly fast, by the end of the first day, most core mechanics were done.

The bad:

->The sound: I did record some sounds but for some obscure reason, they wouldn’t be played ingame. I tried to change the file formats but nothing worked…

-> The level design : Initially, I had planned to make at least 20 levels for my game. In the end, only 15 were made since I had wasted a lot of time.

-> The web version? : I am still not sure what the problem is/was, but for another obscure reason, the web version of the game wouldn’t load for some people. I my self tried a first time but it didn’t work either, and then a second time it worked…

The ugly:

-> The graphics: Lets face it, the graphics are ugly. They were only mad in about half an hour…

->Uhm… I don’t have any other ideas…

Next time:

I certainly hope there will be a next time. I will try to come up with an other innovative idea and manage to make it come to life. I will also try to spend a bit more time on level design, sound, and graphics. And if I get enough feedback, I might just try to keep on making this game and possibly one day sell it.

Anyway, I have had a lot of fun making Army of BOTZ and I hope you will have fun playing it.