Today I woke up early to start Ludum dare. I had seen the previous polls and was sure the theme would be either destruction and creation or afterlife, So I already had an idea of what I wanted. My original plan was to make a platformer based around explosives set in hell where the goal was to bomb yourself out of hell.

Then I red my email: the theme was minimalism. This I did not like at all, not only were my ideas useful, I could not think of anything interesting to do so I simply started googling a bit. After a while I tried imitating Piet Mondriaanand I got something looking like this.

After that I started implementing the mechanics; Normally you cannot pass through the black lines and you must have touched both the red, blue and yellow parts to go to the next level. By pressing a key you can slip through the black lines, but If you make a mistake you fall off the screen and have to redo the level (not that the levels take very long). After some time I had the genius of laying a piece of paper under the printer. I then used my gimp skills and improved the graphics by making every texture based on paper. (also added custom shadows, but they are subtle). The same level as above looks like this now:

(There actually is a potato hidden in that level, but it’s hard to find).This actually looks presentable, and I choose to stick with this style. I have also already settled on the name: “Between the Lines”. My main concern is that since I have started many games, but never finished one, I might end up with an unfinished game. So I put a lot of focus in making the game presentable.

I succeeded. I have a custom loading screen, a “Menu” an ending and have even implemented the potato sub-theme. Here is a screenshot of my collecting a potato.

The good news is that the Game is going pretty well and could already be submitted.

The bad news is that it is still kinda short. I would like to make the game have 30 levels. Right now there are 15 levels and I can finish the game in about two minutes, which means that a new player would probably take 10 minutes. This is probably enough, but somehow it feels to short.

I’ll update tomorrow to let you all know what improvements I have made

Tags: between the lines, minimalism