This is my second Ludum Dare, and it was a much bumpier ride than the first one. In LD34, I already had an idea brewing in my head for the better part of a year that just happened to fit the theme. The added two button control limitation simply kicked everything in place forcing me into decisions. It was great.

The competition started at 4 am for me. I chose not to set an alarm, but woke up at 3:50 and decided to stay up. Checked the theme and was very disappointed. I feel shapeshift is a very rigid theme without enough room for interpretation, it could be a theme tacked on anything, but it didn’t drive any interesting mechanics for me.

I tried thinking outside the box, what can shift? the player character is obvious. Maybe the levels? Maybe something else. I came up with a sort of neural network idea. Entities moving across nodes through connections, and the player changing the connection to achieve some goal. For some unknown reason, I falled back on an idea I had a long time ago, of remaking a version of the board game Dominant Species. This was a big mistake. I didn’t think it through, and didn’t properly estimated the time it would take to implement. I should have stayed with a neural network idea, where each node changes the entities moving through it.

At the end of the first day I have not made enough progress, I had an ugly UI that didn’t convey shape shifting at all. I went to sleep unhappy.

7 am on Sunday, I woke up with the decision to scrap the game and start over. Having a much more limited time, I had to choose something very simple. Inspired by an old game called Blast Chamber, I decided to make a chamber you can shift around. I initially wanted to make it multiplayer, local, but thought I won’t get as many votes, so made a solo experience instead.

Hard at work, I finished the core game, playable and all, in about 12 hours. I decided I wanted the game be polished, so spent 5 hours adding graphics, sounds and menus. At about 11 pm Sunday I was burned out. I stopped short of prettifying the menu, and spent the next hour uploading and editing pages.

What went well:

• The second game is really solid with an interesting core mechanic.
• I managed to polish it fairly well and happy with the resulting aesthetic.
• I’m really happy I finished a game in spite of initial unhappiness, I pushed through and I finished it.

What went badly:

• Pigeonholing myself into an old idea because that was what worked last time.
• Not correctly estimating development time on initial project.
• Designing a UI that is contrary to the initial design, which was entities moving, and ending with a circle with numbers inside for nodes.
• Pushing forward on Saturday while I already knew the idea was a bust.

All in all, I’m really happy with this game, and if I find the time and motivation, I intend to work in some more content. And I’m looking forward to the next LD!