Well, I’m going to pack it in tonight, even if it’s just 4 hours in, it’s time to get some sleep today, so I figured I’d share what I had so far.

Being my first Ludum Dare, I wanted to start off small.  I’m doing the Jam since it means I can have a partner-in-crime.  I’m programming in Unity3D (I love you rapid game development), and my friend is doing the art and game models.  With the Escape theme, we tried to make it match what we’re familiar with.  So this is what we came up with:

Your main character is a prisoner on a prison world, who manages to get free and hijack a small shuttle.  You lift off into a corridor on your way to escape, while you are chased by a massive menacing security craft.  From a gameplay perspective, your ship continually gains speed while traveling down a corridor, while dodging fire and collisions with small security drones.  getting hit only slows you down, but if you lose too much speed, the great big menecing object chasing you will catch up and take you down.

So really it’s a chase game expositioned as an escape.  I wonder if that’s cheating, they’res an awful lot of overlap between the two themes.  Oh well.

So far, our game looks pretty unexciting with just stand-in graphics:

At this point it’s already playable, although it’s lacking a bit in the fun department.  The exposition part is also completely abscent.  Still, I think it’s a promising start.

I have a playable build up right now, feel free to try it out and let me know what you think!

http://dodsrv.com/Unity/Ludumdare/Night1/WebPlayer.html