I had some grand ideas for this game, but of course the 48 hour time limit forces one to be a pragmatist. It was going to be all the best bits of Age of Empires or Rise of Nations, mashed into a side-scrolling, minimalistic theme.

The list of “essential” features missing is endless, but i’m still pretty happy with the result.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=4380

http://aaroncowie.com/LD26/

The minimalism theme was to extend to the controls which should be all intuitive, gestural based with little to no HUD. Of course such a thing is hard to achieve while frantically debugging some of the most confusing bugs I’ve ever encountered (e.g. Flash/Flex classloader issues and circular dependencies… yuck).

The final game became a kind of ambient war simulation that you can just sit and stare at for ages.

Despite being a programmer, my strategy was to begin with the art. This was very out of character for me, but I thought I’d give it a go and I think it paid off pretty well. The focus on art forced me to distill exactly what I wanted the game to “feel” like rather than to stick my head into the code and lose perspective of what i was trying to achieve. I strongly recommend it to anyone who’s reasonably confident in their game dev skills and wants to try out a bit more game design.

Over the coming weeks I’m going to give this some polish and release it in some form (maybe android/iphone) and then move towards an HTML5 rewrite and fully featured version.

All in all a great experience. Will definitely being doing this again