Well, I have a lot of half-finished or unfinished projects, so choosing from them took me a while but I finally decided on my LD #17 entry “A Practical Survival Guide for Robots”: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?uid=321.

The plan is to make this game available on the Intel AppUp Store and probably the Mac App Store afterwards. (For free of course, I personally don’t think that anyone would buy this game if it would be a commercial product.)

What is the current status?

Since LD #17 I’ve been working on the game every now and then. So what exactly changed since LD #17?

• Rewrote the texture loader (The game is now fully working on Intel GMA 950 and similar Intel integrated chipset graphics)
• Rewrote major parts of the engine (With the might of inline the engine feels now about 2 – 3 times faster than before )
• The robot is now moving much faster (and since I implemented a delta time function in my engine, it’s moving at the same speed on all computers)
• The game is now resolution independent up to Full-HD (1920×1080 pixels): While the title screen image will be scaled, you just see more of the game world on higher resolutions than 1024×600 pixels.
• There are now always four islands at the starting point with a few resources to get you started
• Better alternation of day and night (instead of just getting darker, there is slight red-ish coloring in the evening and yellow-/orange-ish coloring in the morning)

Here is a screenshot of the current status (from last Screenshot Saturday):

What is planned?

• Originally, game tips and trivia have been displayed in the bottom bar as “Did you know?”. I intend to split that up. Signs in the game world will show game tips and the trivia will be labeled “Fun Facts”. (I already began this task, but I’m not done with that yet.)
• Chatting with aliens
• Trading with aliens (New items or boosters for collected scrap)
• New items: Flashlight (lets you stay awake longer), Compass (shows the way to your spaceship and nearby scrap), bigger reservoir (which can hold more energy and fuel)
• Energy, fuel and speed boosters
• Particle effects if you pick up energy, fuel or use boosters
• Better camera management
• One more thing that is bothering me that the game takes a while (about 20 – 30 secs) to load on netbooks but I’m not really sure how to fix that.