So, I realize October is gone for a while, which ultimately means I failed at the October Challenge. Oh crap!

Still, I’d like to share some of our progress here, since this game started as a Ludum Dare game and at this point I feel our game owns so much to this community. This is how it’s looking nowadays:

Now here’s a little visual story of that. Back in August, 2012 we participated in Ludum Dare 24 and made a little game called Singularity, which was born from our desire to test some ideas on procedural generation. Not a particularly great game, for sure, but I think it turned out fun considering it was basically a tech test! Here’s how it looked:

Still, I felt the melee combat mechanic was really lousy. We were already developing The Journey of Eko back then, but it was essentially a physics-based platformer with linear progression and no procedural generation whatsoever – and in Eko, the combat also felt lousy despite the time we had put into it! I felt bad that we couldn’t manage to get it right, so during a 2 weeks vacation I took as a small side project to tweak Singularity’s combat mechanics and feedback, so that if I struck on any insights I could apply those to Eko. I imported some of Eko’s art assets and made this little test:

It is Singularity with improved combat and Eko graphics instead of silhouettes. It was almost October, and we decided to take the October Challenge and try to make something that we could sell out of this test. We worked on it and, eventually, what we were calling The Journey of Eko was this game, not the old, sluggish, overcomplex physics based thing we had before. Oh yeah, October was gone and of course we didn’t have anything to sell, but it’s ok! It became our main project, after all, and it surely deserves the extra time.

Since then, we’ve been developing, developing, developing… The first video on this post is from a January build; I hope to soon be able to replace some ripped graphics of our current build, so that we can share our recent progresses!

The reason I’m posting this here is that I feel we own so much to this community. First, because our game in fact *IS* a Ludum Dare game (there’s still rushed comments made during LD24 in the middle of Eko’s code, and some of Singularity’s silhouette graphics can still be seen even in our latest video)! Second, because when we started participating in LD, we developed a certain way of thinking that ultimately made us much more capable as developers. We were all about looooong development cycles planned entirely on paper and we were always afraid of tossing away what was already completed. Now it’s all about getting things done, playing, having fun, getting feedback, redoing what isn’t working, and adding stuff that we feel is necessary or that would be fun based on our experience with actually playing our game (not only planning it in our heads). For that alone, I’ll always think of Eko as some kind of legacy from Ludum Dare.

Love you all! Keep doing what you do! <3

Gabriel – @pixel_cows