{"assets":[{"original":"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/Screenshot-2014-01-11-03.16.41-300x163.png","local":"\/data\/posts\/2014\/01\/eaedf2730f3a7e1bbf0805ec03023d20.png"},{"original":"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/Screenshot-2014-01-13-03.18.49-550x426.png","local":"\/data\/posts\/2014\/01\/7aceb52d3673824897181e60948ad21d.png"},{"original":"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/Screenshot-2014-01-13-02.40.12-300x163.png","local":"\/data\/posts\/2014\/01\/e807900dd47e81f7f488973832fa7f66.png"}],"author_link":"author\/thewhitellama\/","author_name":"TheWhiteLlama","cat":"MiniLD","categories":["MiniLD"],"comments":[],"epoch":1389556800,"event":"LD28","likes":6,"metadata":{"p_key":"81699","p_author":"TheWhiteLlama","p_authorkey":"0","p_urlkey":"290816","p_title":"We Rule The World","p_cat":"MiniLD","p_event":"LD28","p_time":"1389556800","p_likes":"6","p_comments":"0","p_status":"WAYBACK","us_key":null,"us_name":null,"us_username":null,"event_start":"1386892800","event_key":"20","event_name":"LD28"},"source_url":"2014\/01\/12\/329343\/","text":"

To slow?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hello to all you programmers! I think I might have been a little bit slow this weekend. Honestly I was not, but the idea of the game that had grown in my head got bigger and bigger in such a short time. The last LudumDare I could stay focused on what I really needed. This time some things were just different.<\/p>\n

First of all: I forgot an appointment, not any appointment at all, but the birthday party of my grandma. I used that gap of some hours for brainstorming and getting ideas. Which worked very well by the way. This was on saturday. On Friday I already started with the old core-engine of the game \u201cWe Rule The World\u201d. The basic concept behind the idea was, to get in control of the whole world by growing your influence all over the world. It looked nice in the first place:<\/p>\n

\"We Rule The World\" old concept<\/a><\/p>\n

But after some hours of testing I realised, that it was\u2026. more or less\u2026. ugly as hell, and the performance was also not the best. So, my decision to completely turn the style of playing the game was made by me on saturday noon. \u00a0The concept of \u2018tiny\u2019 triangles that shaped the continents of the world was forgotten quicker than I thought and was replaced by the concept of national capitals influencing the world\u2019s population.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The basic idea<\/strong><\/p>\n

And that\u2019s not all. By the given theme \u201cConspiracy\u201d I formed a gameplay that felt in my head like a mixture of \u201cpandemic or plague inc\u201d and some sort of realtime strategy game with the mystical charme of \u00a0the Bilderberg-group or Rothschilds. The aim of the game should be to gain influence all over the world by installing systems to get in control of the population of each country \u2013 or at least enough \u2013 let\u2019s say 90% to win the game. Not every system is being liked by every nation. Or do you like surveillance-systems? National capitals should also influence each other by connections between them. Not every nation is connected to others, but if they are, a dangerous cocktail of fast growing connections and wrong trusts starts to run riot.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

New style<\/strong><\/p>\n

The new style of the worldmap satisfied me completely. It was simple, not to much effort to get to this result and easy to display in the game itself.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Coordinates & data: hell on earth<\/strong><\/p>\n

The hell on earth is really non-generic data. No wonder they came up with crawlers, searchbots, etc. to get rid of this hell. Really, I lost about 2 or 3 hours by putting some data: Capitalname, Coorinates, Countryname, Population, Density of the Population from wikipedia, in my game. And all I reached was maybe the half of the data I needed for the game. There were still about 150 or more capitals missing.<\/p>\n

This was the reason I came to my friend Andrian, also a very clever programmer and data-specialist who had certain experience in writing scripts that can catch data from websites, hyperlinks and their content inclusive. He offered me his help and wrote a script in about an hour which worked perfectly good and could also put the data in the right order and forms! I finally had 212 National Capitals in my game\u2026. but I still missed so much time.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ideas, concepts, Icons and Texts<\/strong><\/p>\n

I got another helping person, Hamster2K ( Also on twitter @Hamster2k) who helped me very much this evening. We brainstormed about concepts of the gameplay and ingame systems, that would make the game believable and much more realistic in an abstract sense than I planned it to be. Thank you very much for this Hans!<\/p>\n

I made Icons for the systems by the given information he searched before and put in the funny, intelligent descriptions of the systems, so that it looks really really nice at the moment.<\/p>\n

\"We Rule The World\" Selection<\/a><\/p>\n

\"We Rule The World\" Shop<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to say, that I give up. Of course I don\u2019t want to. But I think the time might be to short to finish the project with the concentration and abandon it now deserves. I\u2019m still working on it(\u00a0http:\/\/www.twitch.tv\/thewhitellama<\/a>\u00a0) I thinik for at least an hour or so until I go to sleep.<\/p>\n

The MiniLD was more a practice for me than a competition. Fixed limits of time and an appointment to stick to. It was more a practice to get used to the fast thinking, programming and organising and to get the right feeling for the LudumDare comming in April. But at least: I\u2019ve got a new really really interesting game, that is almost finished to work on. And I got to know some interesting people during the MiniLD. These facts make it hard to say no to the next Ludum Dare \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Thanks for taking your time reading this article. I hoped you liked it. If you wan\u2019t to know what happens next, just follow me on twitch or twitter. I will work on it.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The WhiteLlama<\/p>\n

Christian Ringshofer<\/p>","time":"January 12th, 2014 8:00 pm","title":"We Rule The World","title_was_empty":false}