Check out this short ‘trailer’ to see what it’s about or play & rate it here. (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=23493)

tl;dr: if you have an idea but think it’s not fun enough, try it anyway if you can’t think of something better, you might be surprised

The longer read

The theme was a tough one again, at least one where it was hard to be creative since the theme described something (of course it can still be interpreted differently) which would result in a lot of visually (in broad terms) similar games. Think of planets, space, a double sided platformer or any side by side worlds where two things happen at once, when you have a theme like ‘chaos’ there isn’t really something that’s described. Anyway, enough about the theme.

After brainstorming a bit we quickly landed on the idea of taking it pretty literal and physically connect planets in space, with the humorous twist that you’re there to provide the galaxy with internet. Connecting planets with an ethernet cable (because why would you do this wirelessly, everyone knows it’s more efficient to just lay a cable!). We figured the rest of the mechanics would come along the way while building the cable physics and topdown spaceship movement.

It didn’t, we wondered at one point what the fun would be just flying around and connecting planets. Would it be time pressure?, Impending doom? Snapping cables? After having the rope physics and movement mostly done on the first day the other two were mostly spent pivotting and prototyping several gameplay ideas. What if you would be attacked by ufo’s and had to connect them to blow them up or had waves of asteroids coming which would screw up your cables and you had to reconnect them? What if it was some kind of tower defense this way that you had to purchase turrets!? (some of which you can see gif’d here)

Eventually we were running out of time and we still (in our minds) didn’t find anything fun yet, so with around 3 hours left on the clock we decided we just build the original idea. Connect the planets, everytime you connect one you get this extra sound track layer mixed. Added to that was the turrets that we built, figuring after you connect more and more planets these ‘enemy’ turrets would come trying to destroy your cable. How to defend against them? Just connect them to your cables / powered planets and they become yours

We realised that this was pretty fun after all, it’s not hard but it we didn’t have much time to balance everything out. And to be honest, it’s better to have it a bit too easy than impossible or very hard, especially when someone will play it for a short amount of time.

Our main lesson is learned is, something in your head might not seem to be fun, but if you don’t have any better ideas just prototype it instead of just trying to think of something better. Especially if you’re working with a tight schedule 

Play & Rate it here