You can play and rate my game here

Back in LD#26 , I made a crappy puzzle game that was neither finished nor fun. In LD#27, I finally made a finished game called “10 second roguelike”. Although it only ranked #450, I received a lot of comments that were both helpful and inspiring. It was nice to hear others enjoyed your game especially when you are not a professional game developer. It was also really satisfying to see other people played my game. Therefore, I decided to join this Ludum Dare again to have some fun and yea it was definitely a hell lot of fun.

I decided that I would make a strategy or tycoon game this time around since I’ve never made one and I love strategy games. I was hoping the theme would be Alchemy or Fortress but it turns out Connected Worlds is a also great theme for making a strategy game (as you can see from so many entries being a tycoon game). My game was inspired by a super old KOEI game call Aerobiz Supersonic (yes, I love old KOEI games as you can see from my attempted to remake Uncharted Horizon 2).

Let’s now talk about what went well and what went wrong in this LD.

=== Things that went well ===

– Using an iterative approach was good because it turns out I have to throw away A LOT of the original design due to time limit

– Try out new things.  I used Java + Libgdx which I was familiar with but I had never made a tycoon game nor that I know how to use scene2D to create GUI and I learned a lot.

– Play testing is important. I finished early as a jam entry because I was aiming to get into the compo, but it turned out to be good because the first comment pointed out I had some game crushing bugs. It also let me have time to play test it myself which enables me finding out my original version was way too simple.

– Music is important. It made my game feel much better after I added background music.

– Getting into flow. At some point I lost track of time and it felt great to keep on coding. I was amazed by how much I had done when I finished. I also need to thank my girlfriend for her support

– Separating the data with the game logic simplified my play testing because I only need to run the game again to see the changes I made.

=== Things that did not went well ===

– Time Management. I was aiming to get into the compo but I ran out of time to replace the place holder arts I found on the Internet.

– Poor Tutorial. I thought it should be easy for people to learn the game because I included in-game help info. It turned out I did a poor job and everyone complained about the game having a really steep learning curve at the start.

– No test run before start. Libgdx changed a bit since last time I used it and the documentation wasn’t kept up to date. I spent quite some time fiddling with the code to get some of the GUI element right.

– Forgot to buy groceries before the compo. I ran out of food to cook during the day and I had to go out and buy stuff which made me lose an hour of coding.

– Need more play testing when making a strategy game. I still feel my game is too easy.

Overall, I had a great time last weekend and I will definitely come back for the next ludum dare!