My usual approach to Ludum Dare is to spend Friday night on pure concept design, Saturday on all the tech stuff, and Sunday fleshing out content (graphics, sound) and tuning and polishing the game.

I like to do the very first stages of concept design on paper, because it doesn’t tempt me to start dicking around with code or task lists or any of that before I’ve figured out what I even want to do. So here’s what I came up with last night:

I’ve spent today writing all the code that makes that stuff work. Since I haven’t spent any time on graphics yet, it’s a little underwhelming:

But! There’s a fully-functional 2D shmup there, with procedurally-generated enemies and behaviors, and the scaffolding for having those enemies mate and produce offspring which combine and mutate their traits.

I’ve got an art style in mind too, which should start showing up tomorrow. No concept drawings or anything though, largely because I’m terrible at that sort of thing. 😛