Well, this Ludum Dare(35) was my fifth one so far. Five game competitions and I haven’t changed my style a bit. I’m still using Java with Eclipse for code, GIMP for my graphics. Well, maybe I changed my style just a little. This time I added sound to my game, a first for me. I made the audio using LMMS, an amazing program which I found out about recently. I’m super happy with the way my background music turned out, and I can’t wait to make more music for the next Ludum Dare. Unfortunately I was not able to finish my game at all due to time constraints, however.  In the beginning of this competition, I wrote up an “ideas” list. I listed types of games, game themes, and different meanings for “shapshift”. I then picked some of them at random and ended up with “over the head puzzle/exploration changing the shape of other objects (as a lycanthrope)”. It wasn’t until a day later on Saturday evening that I actually decided what the goal of the game would be. To that point all I had was the background music, the graphics, and a very basic game engine that let the player move around on platforms. I was very busy on Sunday and didn’t really get much of anything more done until Monday, when I madly tried to make my game… a game. What I had in mind was a game where you traveled around the mysterious world you were in finding polygons of different shapes and sizes. You would then have to bring them to “puzzle areas” where you would collect them all. You would have to figure out which pieces went to which areas, and then you would have to fill in the puzzle area shape with the polygons. Sort of like a tangram, but instead of only making a square there would be lots of shapes all over the place to make. Then the real challenge would be that you could change the shape of your polygons by moving their points around. You couldn’t add or remove points, but you could move the existing ones around, so a diamond could become a square and a trapezoid could become a parallelogram. As you completed areas you would unlock more, and stuff like that until you completed the big puzzle and beat the game. Well, anyway, that was the idea. The game turned out far less complex than that. In the end, all you can do is collect shapes on a single level, then they’ll warp to the single puzzle area where you can arrange them to make a square. When you do make a square, nothing happens, you can just be happy that you made a square. And that’s the tale of my game. I think the graphics turned out pretty decent, and the music as I said I am really proud of, but I just didn’t have the time to finish the code. I did run into several large bugs during the process of making the game which I did not expect and took up very large chunks of my time(hours of it), but even without those I’m not sure how much better the game would have been, as my idea was just too ambitious to accomplish in 72 hours even if I did have more time. I always enjoy the Ludum Dares no matter how my game turns out though, and I’m already having fun playing everyone else’s entries.

If I could figure out how to post pictures, there would be a picture of my game here. But alas, I cannot.

Woohoo, I’m now an Author and can add pictures!

One of the two screens from my game.

I feel like I should also mention that I would not be posting this if there wasn’t a glitch that made me have to post something for my profile page to show up. Silly website. At least it finally got me to say something about my work, normally I just post my game and remain silent.