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I’m in the UK, so I waited for the theme to be announced and then promptly went to bed. By morning I had my idea – the theme didn’t say “The Player Is The Monster”. It addressed me directly, “You, Wooltech, Are The Monster.”

So how would I make a game where the developer is the bad guy?

My main problem is always artwork. As in I can’t do it, so my first Ludum Dare used pixel-sized characters, the next was text only. This time, my workaround could be photos. Of me.

One thing led to another, and soon I was at work making the old school style RPG you see in the screenshots.

There are four main elements to the game itself:

MOVEMENT

Movement was going to be actual movement through a 3-D maze, but I ditched that pretty early on. Again, it took quite a while before I settled on the unlockable, clickable buttons that replaced it. Not ideal, but I hope it retained the sense of exploration.

HEROES

Orginally the three buttons under the Heros were ‘Attack’, ‘Skill’, ‘Item’. There were going to be player levels, unlockable skills and spells, collectable items to loot, buy and sell, equipable weapons and armour, consumable food and potions. The works. Oh, there were going to be multiple classes to pick from too.

Obviously – too ambitious. Especially as real-life took away more of the 48 hours than I expected.

Late Sunday I finally cut all that and came up with a more streamlined version of three skills per hero, and each encounter directly increasing stats rather than using XP. I think it works.

ENEMIES

The enemies worked out pretty much as intended. They have almost the same stats behind the scenes as the heros have. At the last minute I decided to gave them unique abilities too – a simple hardcoded check for which enemy type was attacking, and a percentage chance for it to do something interesting instead of just roll to hit the Hero. Eg. Ratkin may flee, White Mage may heal a random enemy, and so on.

And, yes, they are all me in various LARP costumes. As one commenter put it “you’re not very shy are you? ha”

DIALOGUE

I put together a fairly simple but robust system for branching dialogue, with me as the evil developer talking directly to the player. Another last minute addition was an option to reward stats after each dialogue choice.

It was disappointing to realise I’d spent too long on other parts of the game and didn’t have time to develop the full story I had in mind.

Originally it was going to be a lot more fourth-wall breaking and really play with the idea of the developed-as-enemy. Things like healing bad guys, switching buttons around, popping up a debug menu to fully heal the enemies mid-fight (with a heal-player button that you could hit if you were fast enough), fake logging into the player’s facebook account to post stuff, and more.

I’m happy with what I ended up with, but it could have been better. Isn’t that always the way?

TOOLS

I made this using C# in Unity 5 as I wanted a reason to figure out the new UI stuff. I also intended to use 3D for the maze exploration element, and to suddenly twist away the flat UI and reveal a matrix-like thing behind it and…well, other stuff that was again way too ambitious for the time limit.

It was literally uploaded with 5 mins to spare, so there are not even any beeps and clicks as you use the buttons. Next time I’ll remember to get audio together early on as the game feels pretty empty without it.

It was fun to make, and one day I’ll polish it up and add all the crazy ideas I had to cut out.

For now, I’m spending my time playing other people’s entries – as always it’s amazing what everyone has achieved over a single weekend.

You can play “I May Have Misunderstood: RPG” by clicking here.