For this Ludum Dare I was so hoping for another theme than 10 seconds. The reason: for the last LD I made a game called 20 seconds and I didn’t want to create the same kind of game again. I was pretty disappointed when it became the theme with such a huge lead. Even though I was hoping for some other theme I also thought about what to do for 10 seconds. And this is my game:

Alien Attack

About the game:
Because I already did it, I did not want to create a game that was made of many games that last 10 seconds. I decided to create a game, that would get more features over time. So every 10 seconds, this game gets a new feature. In this LD version these features include graphical updates, sounds, enemy types and a simple message system/achievements. There is a lot more I would have liked to add.

What I liked:

• For the first time I made several status updates and regularly deployed the current version. This allowed me to get a little bit of feedback and see whether the idea itself was good or not
• I really liked the way the pencil drawn and scanned graphics worked out. Wouldn’t have expected explosions to look so cool when drawn with a pencil.
• The way I do the loading of required resources. Only 10 seconds before a feature becomes active, I start to fetch the required resources. So at the start of the game neither sound nor other graphics are loaded. This keeps initial loading times low

Things I learned:

• I did not do any collision detection for polygons before. Read about it on Saturday and started to implement the algorithm while reading about it.
• How to do (single frame) explosion graphics. They were the last thing I added on Sunday before I submitted my game. I just was too tired to make them right, so they are kind of cut off.

Things that went wrong:

• The name. I forgot a name for the game. Didn’t want to call it some variation of ten seconds. Came up with Alien Attack when I filled out the submit-form, because the player ship looks kind of alien. By now, I’ve come up with a name I like much more: Featurama. If I am going to add more features to the game I’ll definitely rename it.
• Implementing collision detection for polygons in the evening is kinda bad. I added some bugs and never got it running in the evening. Only in the next morning I was able to see the bugs and fix them. Should have gone to bed earlier.
• Graphics. I don’t like creating graphics and I don’t like the graphics I create. But as with the explosions, at least I still seem to be able to learn a few things. So maybe I’ll get better. Hopefully.
• My submitted game contained a bug that made the game freeze up. It didn’t do so in my development environment but if I had tested with another browser I would have realized. So, another thing I learned: Test your game one last time, even if you are too tired to go on.

With that, another link to my game and I’m off to play and rate a few more games of you.