my entry for this LD

click this to view my entry

this game is about shooting a jumping apple with limited bullet every stages, in the first few stage, you will only just see some apple jumping. after that you will begin see some purple triangle that can bounce your bullet. in some level, you have to bounce your bullet to shoot the apple. another thing to consider when playing this, is that combo mechanic. you will get a message showing like ” X combo!!” when you shoot more than one apple with one bullet. this message mean to encourage player to try shooting all apple in one shoot.

enough about the game, now I want to write about how I get into making this game.

ludum dar compo consist of 48 hour or two days. in my country, ludum dare always start in saturday morning, around 9 am. so usually I know the theme just several minutes after the anouncement. for this ludum dare, I spent a whole day thinking and brainstorming about idea and mechanic of the game with minimalism in mind. what I had in mind other than minimalism, is that I want to make game that only controlled by mouse. this kind of my own goal that I haven’t reach that time. so for a whole day thinking about that and there’s no idea come out. actually I try to code some idea I have in mind, but stopped because I think it’s unfinish and still need more thinking to make a concerete game mechanic. what I want to implement about minimalism is in game mechanic. I want to make it simple but still enjoyable and maybe can bring more depth in gameplay. sunday started and I still struggling with idea, I fear that maybe I can’t make it in time. and than around maybe 10-11 am, I got the idea about shooting some object that bounce or jumping, first I’m thinking about rabbit but ended up with apple, I don’t know why. after the arrival of my idea, I rushed to my laptop and start coding. after the core mechanic done, and creating a few level. I need to add more mechanic to enhance the gameplay. that’s when I got the idea of bouncing bullet. actually this idea is a bit hard to implement for me, because I  don’t know how to simulate a real bouncing physic and I got a deadline just few hours ahead of me. so I make those triangle thingie to somehow fix the angle of bouncing and somewhat make some sense and easy to understand. after that, it’s time to make a levels. after all those coding, this is the hardest part when you make a game that based on stages or levels like angry bird, cut the rope, etc… I need to make every stages challenging but not too hard. because all my games before this ended up too hard. and even it’s not challenging I too like stages that refreshing, like maybe you can shoot all those apples in one shoot and the bullet bouncing through all corner of the stages.

monday morning, I wake up and remember that I’ve submit my entry last night. if I’m thinking how it ended up like this considered that I nearly frustrated in the first day, but I kinda like how my game turn out, comparing to my two others entry ld 24 & 25, this time my game feel more complete but still not polised. maybe I need to thanks to onegameamonth & mcfunkypants. because all those experience I got when making games every month really help me in this LD. I hope my game for this month 1GAM turn out great too.

sorry for my english XD

Tags: post-mortem