What it is

This is what was done by 3 hours after Jam closing. You can spam the “3” key (no other key does anything) and lightning enemies will spawn at random locations and swarm the Goat Ship. The Goat Ship will attempt to target the nearest enemy until it’s dead, then target the next enemy, and so on. Since the lightning ships can’t actually shoot lightning yet, you pretty much have to spam enough up them to overwhelm the firing rate of the Goat Ship (4 shots a second). The 10 in the upper left corner is the number of enemies that are currently being tracked (two are in the process of exploding). There needs to be around 40 to overwhelm the Goat Ship.

What it was supposed to be

The bars at the top of the window are different kinds of energy. You press the corresponding number key to spawn an enemy that uses that kind of energy. If the enemy damages the Goat Ship, you get more of that energy back for your bar, allowing you to spam more enemies of that kind or allowing you to save that energy up for the final battle.

In the final battle, you are the end boss. The end boss moves around the screen in a pre-determined or random path (the player has no control over this) and you can use your energy stores for attacks. Only the end boss can kill the Goat Ship.

What went wrong

On theme night I lost 6 hours due to not coming up with an idea that I thought was completable in 48 hours. My initial idea was a platformer where you’re the end level boss (very similar rules to those stated above), but I thought a platforming AI would be a bit beyond my ability. It wasn’t until nearly midnight that I realized the idea could still work so long as I didn’t have any pesky platforms to have to jump around.

The next two days development was pretty slow. I did get a decent amount of content done. I spent entirely too much time playing with autotracker-bu and Open-MPT (generated approximately 50 songs), and though I’m quite proud of my pixel art, it took me a while to get it done. Most of the real hardcore development occurred after the compo deadline and during the final jam day. But that just wasn’t enough time for me to get through all the little oddities I hadn’t expected to come up. In hindsight, nothing really sticks out as something that tipped the failure point though.

What I’d do different

I don’t know if I could do anything different about theme selection – if inspiration doesn’t hit you there’s not much you can do short of just going with a bad idea. But once I had an idea, I should have got the core mechanic in without any assets. I wasn’t very motivated this weekend, and having something in front of me moving and playing is one of the best motivators. While I had a Goat Ship in the game on Saturday and the lightning ships in on Sunday, they didn’t do anything in game except animate in place until late Monday!