When the LD48 v.21 competition started I was on the Loas border taking a short break with my girlfriend. I contemplated going home to Chiang Mai but insisted to myself that cutting my holiday short would probably mean that I was inevitably going to get killed and I’d spend the next six months trying to Escape the wrath of my better half. So, I figured I’d leave it and enter next time. Usually when I want to do something, nothing much stops me.

I traveled from Chiang Khong on the border down to Chiang Mai, Thailand. A journey that took about 7 hours (4 of which I was chatting to a nice Swedish guy with a questionable hair piece) Anyway, I arrived back in Chiang Mai, got a taxi home and sat chatting to my work mate. The competition was well underway, so I didn’t think about it too much. I went over to my computer to see if anyone else had submitted games and couldn’t believe, there was a rook of entries already and I saw the keyword… That was it, 14 hours to go on the board… I need to make something. 😮

I needed an idea so I threw a couple around… “You need to escape from the government”, “You are a rioter, and need to escape from the police”, “You are dead and need to escape the afterlife”… you know, the non-sense ideas (Maybe the last one isn’t so non-sense) ^_^

A few weeks ago, the same friend bought an xbox, the first game he bought for it was “From Dust”, a game I’d found through @photonstorm via twitter and keenly showed my friend. (I’m still yet to play it, although I have seen the gameplay). When thinking about escape games, it jumped into my mind and even though it was demanding to write a prototype of such a game in Flash, I had a full 14 hours… 😉

The result is here: http://bit.ly/pCvKDo

OK… The rights and the wrongs.

RIGHTS

• It’s visually quite impressive for Flash
• I got more that a single level in
• Its nice to play with as a sandbox
• The characters have different walk speeds and recovery rates
• The game is quite small due to some procedurally generated environments using fractals
• Environments look organic
• The point and click mechanism is nice for a 3D game in Flash

WRONGS

• The game is unbalanced for the requirements of this competition
• I’m getting feedback that the controls are quite difficult
• I’m getting feedback that the CPU usage on some machines is high
• The camera is not bound and can pass through the terrain
• Level design is generally poor
• Game mechanics are lacking
• UI is poor, because my FlashBuilder trial ran out and I would usually have used that

All in all, I’m happy…because I was able to build a working game in 26 hours (remember the 12 hour extension? Yes, I needed it all- no sleep for 35+ hours)!! I had super fun with the hallucinating finish where pixels were moving and I was thinking…”Hang on, I didn’t code that in??”)- I loved the spirit of the competition.

WHAT I’LL DO DIFFERENT

Yes, I have the bug so hopefully LD22 will see an entrr from me next time and I’ll be prepared… In fact, that’s my main tactic, organization. Get my workflow for all game elements ready and use the full term. I think I’ll probably prepare a screen cast since I saw some of Notches screencast and it’s probably good to read back to see if there are any constructive comments within the flame flood. Anyway, thank you LD for a fun time and see you at LD22.

Peace