If you are one of the people who have played Mandala<\/a>, and you received an orange flavoured candy<\/strong> from a little girl, please leave a comment. As many as 10 players may have encountered the girl, but I think only 1 or possibly 2 actually received an orange flavoured candy from her. I’m just curious to know who. I kind of think of that as being the “goal state” of Mandala, so if you received the candy: you beat Mandala!<\/p>\n Post Mortem<\/strong><\/p>\n This was not only my first Ludum Dare (you can probably tell) but also my first video game (you can probably tell), and I do have some thoughts.<\/p>\n My Ludum Dare started with @karlnp<\/a> — a stranger I met in a cafe — saying “just do it” about 24 hours into the compo.<\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n The Plan:<\/strong><\/p>\n I knew I should make interactive fiction right away. Mainly this is because I’m not familiar with any game engine or any graphical programming interface; it is also because I love @aliendovecoat<\/a>. I think Howling Dogs<\/a> may have been one of those formative nest experiences for me: when I googled interactive fiction, that was the first hypertext game that came up. I played it, and it was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to create. Moody, expressive, delicate, and at times nonsensical. At that time, I set out to learn Twine and Inform (both)… but didn’t get far before school got busy! So while interactive fiction was the only option I could really see for myself, I also didn’t want to take the time to learn enough Twine to be able to make a multiplayer game (I consider Mandala to be “multiplayer”). Apparently it is possible, as the master demonstrated, but I only had 24 hours!<\/p>\n So originally I thought I would make a minimalist multi-user maze, in which players would be able to leave hints and directions on the walls in chalk. The whole maze would be fading away, so that consistently clearing the maze would require co-operation (via the chalk). Clearing the maze would heal the world a little bit. This is a cool idea, and I think I may try to make it next, but when the idea for Mandala being a message about (my opinion of) the effect of tourism on secret places… I new that was what I would be making. I considered including the chalk and message leaving, but in the end I didn’t have enough time anyway (and what form would it have taken?).<\/p>\n So the plan was: implement a bare bones multi-user interactive fiction engine with the only tool I am decent with (Ruby on Rails); write a work of interactive fiction.<\/p>\n Problems:<\/strong><\/p>\n Make things easy for yourself. I spent a lot of time upgrading the method of input. When I started I thought, “oh whatever I will just edit the database seed file and write content directly into the db”. After writing a tiny nothing of a hello world I realized that wasn’t going to cut it (and it took about a half-hour to write!). So I spent a while adapting things so that I could write the content into a yaml file, and then load that into the database. Yaml is much easier to edit than… active record. I thought that would make things much easier, and so I proceeded to spend 2 hours writing the four rooms that make up the garden. Two hours for four rooms!? I quickly realized that what I really wanted was to be able to write prose with a minimal markup and process them into something database readable. After a few hours I had it down to the following:<\/p>\n #First Floor of the White House<\/p>\n The white house is much {bigger} than you thought it could be.|20|<\/p>\n –bigger: It is like, really really big, actually.<\/p>\n White marble stairs lead up to the [second floor | Second Floor of the White House].|50|<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Which was finally lightweight enough for me to be able to write some serious fiction. At this point… only 4 hours remained. The finished product, the game you can now see some of, is about half of what I had planned. Here, I’ve attached a map of the old Japanese house from my sketch-book:<\/p>\n
![\"sketchbook](\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/IMG_5952-225x300.jpg\")
<\/a>