HEXCORP Post Mortem, or how I stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb
Before I start, PLAY IT HERE
TOOLS USED:
ENGINE: GAMEMAKER
ART: ASEPRITE/PHOTOSHOP
SOUND: Zoom H3 and a printer
MUSIC: Korg Volca Sample, AUDACITY
I started this Ludum Dare late, with only 30 hours to complete a compo game I had to think quickly. Shape-shifter. Shifting shapes. I came up with the idea of a game where you work an office job coming up with shapes for clients. This seemed like a fun idea and I gauged that the most difficult part would be coming up with this:
The drawing-shapes mechanic. How wrong I was, I had this done in 4 hours and of course had prematurely patted myself on the back. The tough part was coming up with a way to gamify this mechanic. I wanted the client to be able to specify the number of sides, whether you could cross lines, provide an image for you to copy,
Unfortunately, my basic knowledge of geometry and trigonometry soon told me that the equations for working out whether 15 lines are crossing each-other were too complicated for my simple mind and computer-vision is particularly difficult to implement in gamemaker in 48-hours. So I settled for two checks, right number of sides for a shape, and distance of the first and last points to check that the shape is joined up. After a brief crisis of realisation, I had to come up with a way to make my mechanic work as a game without having the complicated checking algorithm so I introduced the manager:
He was inspired by JJJ from the spider-man series. I was rather proud of his speaking animation with the moving cigar. He was supposed to give pithy comments on your artwork but once again, I was running out of time with that one so I decided to go a bit left-field after another existential crisis:
I'm in a buggy mess of code, my game isn't fun, it doesn't work. Welcome to #LDJAM
— Jim Bruges (@nebulaictoaster) April 17, 2016
Enter the robot:
So my game was so buggy it gave out random amounts of cash to you when you handed in a shape (not intentional, just the code was broken), some parts were really sloppily made (like the text and the fa machine sprite) so I decided to run with it. How do you excuse some crappy parts of a game? With a weird story-line involving a social experiment gone wrong, of course! I added in some strange replies from the manager some strange collectibles:
And finally a meeting with a sentient triangle who causes the manager to reveal his true form.
Overall, it was a bit slap-dash. I’d like to think I made a few people chuckle but I ran out of time and copped out a bit in terms of gameplay. Next time I really want to have learned Unity, I tried for this one but exams got the better of me… I’ll try to make time so that I can do the full 48 hours too, that will help.
Thanks for reading my post-mortem. I had so much fin making this and I am really having a great time playing all your entries. As another personal plug, outside LD I’ve just finished a twine adventure called MINUTEMAN where you explore an abandoned nuclear bunker and discover the troubles of lax password security. It would be great if you gave it a play 
Gracias and see you next time,