I’ve participated in a lot of game jams and spend many weekends not sleeping and rushing to get my prototype done. My Ludum Dare experience was completely different.

I started late Saturday and met up with a few friends who was working on their own entry. We had some coffee and started brainstorming. I had already realized that I didn’t have the whole weekend to work on my entry and I had also realized that I usually work together with people doing sound and graphics. This time I had to do it all in less time. This affected my brainstorming process and I came up with some very simple ideas. The one I stuck with was: Avoid homing enemies and make them crash into each other.

Concept draft

I’m a programmer, but I probably ended up spending more time doing sound and graphics. However, at the end of my Saturday I had a playable game. A simple game, but very playable compared to other entries. I showed a lot people the game and got some feedback. I’ve tried to sum it up:

• What do I do?
• It’s too hard in the beginning (very classic when you’re the only one who have played it)
• I don’t feel in control of what’s happening. It seems too random

I used the last day to perfect my intro screen with some better instructions and balance the beginning of the game so the player can learn the basics without panicking!  I spend a lot of time on the “straight targeting” robots (the red bullet like ones) to make it visible that they are targeting you. In the beginning they where big walking robots, but I made them into bullet like robots that pointed in the direction they were moving.

Cause the game mechanics felt kind of almost done and polished (for a 48 hour game) I started improving the visuals with shaking camera, particles, combos and pretty explosions.  I love particles and explosions!

The original concept in my head was about a horde of robots that was crazy in love with this cute little monster and wanted to hug it (which obviously meant hugging it to death), but I couldn’t really express that in the art and sound due to lack of skill so I ended up with the robots just trying to kill the cute monster. However, I kept the title  “Robots <3 Monster” 😀

Introscreen

Ingame screenshot

Ingame screenshot with combo

The final game can be found here:Robots <3 Monster entry