Ludum Dare 26 was certainly an interest ride. The odds seemed against me, from missing pets to frantic coding catch-up, I was a bit surprised that I was actually able to complete my game on my first attempt at a Ludum Dare competition.

A lot went good about it, some went bad. I have been learning Go Game recently and playing it quite a bit. When the theme of “minimalism” was revealed, I was pretty excited that a board game would be a perfect fit for that. It didn’t take all too long to come up with a plan to build a game that is very similar to Go Game, but uses a different ruleset, and thus vastly different strategy.

The biggest asset I had was that I had a very clear picture of the final result after only about an hour or two of planning. There was a direct end goal that allowed me to code the game without following a bunch of tangents along the way.

The game itself was actually very simple to implement, which was nice.  The rule system is quite simple, and fit very well with the theme of minimalism: high strategy to win, all you have to do is place a game piece into an empty space on the board.  Every occupied surrounding space becomes yours.  That’s it, that’s all.

The most difficult part was coordinating the multiplayer system and keeping everything in sync.  But thanks to the excellent SignalR framework for .Net, it was fairly simple to handle the realtime communication with the server.

All in all, I was happy to finally finish a game.  And on my first Ludum Dare attempt to boot.

I have been online as much as I can to help other people with play testing, as I didn’t create a bot opponent to allow for single player mode.  Some gameplay experience has helped me to identify some potential gameplay issues, which have been adjusted in the second version:

• A few dead squares to prevent mirroring
• In-game chat
• A “pass” button (not yet implemented) to allow you to skip those empty pairs at the end of the game.

I am looking forward to completing that pass button and having a really good game ready to go.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=10626

Thanks to everyone who has played my game.  I appreciate every vote!

-CrazyCage