Progressing quite well with my first entry, just added a few graphics so thought it’s about time to post a screenshot.

The premise behind the game is that you’re an alien race attacking a planet. You control 4 hive queens (the ellipses in the corner of the screen) that spawn ships that are attacking the planet. By clicking on one of your ships you cause it to sacrifice itself. This transmits it’s essence and DNA back to the hive mind (ala Battlestar Galactica). The hive mind then integrates this into it’s future ship production. So for example if the planet’s defences start producing faster ships then you need to start sacrificing the relevant ships of yours to shift the hive queens into producing ships of the correct type.

This is still all in development, so whether or not this will work with the amount of time available for balancing is yet to be seen, but I’m giving it a go!

Current progress is as seen in the screenshot – crude graphics (which will probably unfortunately remain that way given my artistic skills), enemy and player ship spawning, collision detection and the framework for AI.

The next task is to get the mutation and behaviours in for each of the ships to see how the idea actually pans out. We’ll see!

Current progress is on github at https://github.com/jamiehales/ludumdare_24