This is the 5th Ludum Dare I’ve participated and my first 48hr compo. Before I used to go on for the Jam, sometimes solo and others with a cool team. I experience this compo, for me, was really “extreme”. Not like the jam, were I had a bit more freedom and time, but this is good. I like to work with limits. I had a really hard time trying to figure out what I could do for the game. I decided to discard all obvious ideas I had with the theme. So I was looking into ideas and I stumble upon this really cool game called “Glitchspace“. I thought it was genius and it gave me the base idea for creating my game. I couldn’t have  created a new programming language and interface in just 48 hours, so I just decided “why not just expose properties”. Exposing the properties would be like seeing under the hood of the game, seeing beneath the surface.

The First Day

I didn’t do much really. I had a vague idea for a game I started prototyping, but it didn’t feel right. It was to dull. I stayed up until 4 am working on this prototype and I just decided to discard it and go to sleep. I was just about to quit this jam.

The Second Day

I woke up at 12 pm not feeling inspired at all. Very unmotivated about not being able to find a good idea for my game, so I just continued my day as if I was not going to participate anymore. After having some dinner and watching a movie I started checking out what new games had come out and that’s when I found Glitchspace. I immediately felt inspired and motivated and started programming the base object, which I called Hackable, that could allow me to modify any property I wanted in real time. So I just started pushing the idea. This was my first result:

It was very simple, but it showed the power of what I had created. That was good for me. From now on was mostly thinking on how could I implement this into a real game.

This was a very difficult task, but finally I decide to go with a simple platformer puzzle type of game. This was my first result with it:

Then I started creating some levels. I had real hopes about making about 20 levels, but after I started drawing the tiles on my tile editor I began to feel that was far to what I could accomplish. So I just decided to go with ten. This is how the first 4 levels looked like.

After this I felt I couldn’t really get to 10 levels, specially if I didn’t have any art, sounds, or even a main screen. I just left the game with only 8 levels. Now it was time to focus on the art. I had the make a couple of iterations about this because I wanted the game to look nice, my first approach was  to make something really detailed, of course this didn’t work out because of time issues. At the end I just went with a more simple style with bright colors. I thought it look good.

For me the game was done after this, at least I thought it was, until I showed it to a couple of friends and the first reaction was “the controls suck”. This was a huge problem! I had to figure out this asap! I had almost no time for fixes. I tested a lot of controls. I went from mouse wheel to on screen buttons to finally just using hotkeys for changing values. I didn’t want the player to feel frustrated about changing values, like gravity, that were huge values. At the end, I think, the controls aren’t perfect but are useable and don’t interfere much with the game flow.

The Bad

– Designing the controls was a very hard task, I think I didn’t accomplish this perfectly.

– Working solo is hard. It’s always good to have a team who can support and give instant feedback.

– I couldn’t take complete advantage of the core mechanic because of time reasons.

– No music. I was working on a track but the exporting to wav got messed up and only one track was playing so I discarded it.

– Bugs. There were some bugs I couldn’t fix because of time problems.

The Good

– I believe it’s a nice concept. I like the approach on the theme.

– I really enjoyed creating the game.

– I got some really good feedback and I feel this is a game mechanic I can explore more in depth for a future idea.

Thanks a lot!

You can play my game here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=13148

Cheers,
Felipe.