http://dl.dropbox.com/u/75065952/LD25.swf

YES

It’s coming together. The monster gives you control beyond the y-axis – without adding more keys – and its building skills foreshadow some interesting puzzles. Right now, with the game mechanics (and the source code) being a mish-mash of completely different types of games, there’s some tedium when it comes to resource collecting.

The iterative nature of the game is one successful thing about it: your building decisions decide what troubles you’ll face. Puzzles are emergent and you’re your own worst enemy until you figure out some gimmicks. The intrusive time limit is gone, so the pacing is up to you, increasing the feeling of being in control. But there’s tasteful real-time elements when you do decide to pop out some items.

I also have a neat idea to give variety and an incentive beyond survival, known in the gamedev circles as “spam items randomly wololoo”. Holes with loot open in the background, and you have to build a way to get there. Otherwise the screen will gradually fill with loot for the pesky adventurers to collect, leaving you with that infinite queue thing again.

So with the time have left, more game, more polish. I could really use visual representations for things like the item queue. And a theme song is on the way.

Tags: it's not a dinosaur