Ok, I just finished setting up the application skeleton. Probably I had to do this before the contest begins, but I wasn’t sure if it was allowed by the rules, so I decided to do it in the first hours while thinking about the game theme. I use Ruby on Rails, CoffeeScript, and Spine.js framweork, so setting up everything wasn’t really a problem – most of the things are generated by the frameworks.

Theme & Game Idea

Evolution. I didn’t expect this theme at all, was thinking that it will be either Kittens or Abandoned (which was top voted). Spent about an hour forcing myself to stop thinking about making a Spore clone, especially the first stage of the spore where you hunt in the ocean, which I consider the most fun part of the game. I didn’t want to make another platformer or maze game – I don’t like such games by myself. I prefer puzzle games so I wanted to do something simple and yet fun to play for average Facebook and iPhone players. Probably it’s not the best way to win the Ludum Dare contest, but I definitely want the game to succeed in the long term perspective.

Suddenly the idea came to me:

The game will be around colonizing planets with an EvoProbe. EvoProbe is a special mechanizm developed by Creturians (you play for this race), it travels across the universe and looks for the planets that Creturians can populate. When it finds such planet, it lands and starts the controlled evolution process from spores it carried. All species from Cretur are tri-gender so you need to combine 3 specimen to evolve spores to fungi, fungi to plants, plants to creatures. When the probe finds that the evolution process made a creature that is large enough, it loads the information about the Creturian race to its brain, making it the first colonist on the planet. The colony continues to evolve until it’s ready to send another probe to the next planet.

The gameplay should be simple enough for even average casual player. I’ll post the first screenshot as soon as it will be available. Stay tuned