I’ll tell you my story. But first, if you didn’t played my entry, head here!

Saturday, I was really not feeling to make a Ludum Dare, especially after hearing the theme. It was a decision between either doing this Ludum Dare…or playing Dark Souls 3 !

I’ll let you imagine my conflict haha, but I said to myself, how was I able to make a Ludum Dare, just by myself, in 48h, as I wanted to do a compo? So, having lost my friday to Dark Souls 3, I started to brainstorm and making a rough prototype of my game Saturday morning.

This is what I was looking at, but without all the graphics :

But I encountered many problems, especially with this question : How will I make my shape fit in the holes in 2D ??? With my upward mechanic, was I going to make the level on different Z planes and move the player diagonaly, but with a orthogonal camera, so it gives the illusion of moving upward? Will I do the walls in 3D ? Will I put the camera in isometric and follow the player as he goes inside each hole in the walls ? Will I push my player on the Z axis with gravity on the x ?

So many questions that I was not able to find the answers…so guess what ?

…

Yeah, you guessed it. I returned playing Dark Souls 3 ! :3

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But this is not the end of my story.

So after a good challenging Saturday playing my favorite series of all time,  I kept thinking about a way to make my design work somehow with my game mechanic… I mean… Do I really need to make the shapes pass through the holes…you know, physically?

And then it striked me ! If this was going to work, well, it could fix all my problems.

So Sunday morning, I wake up really early, and I start prototyping more on my solution.

And the solution is:

Well, I could just make the wall detect if the form I’m trying to pass through the hole is the same shape, if yes, then when passing near the middle of the hole, change sorting layer order !

That was so simple, and with the right systems, it works with a charm ! So, having only 24h to make it for the compo, I tried all my might to make and polish the first level.

It was looking like this at the end :

I used a neat little graphic engine, it’s called Magica Voxel where you can create cool blocky art and I used music from Newgrounds as well as sounds from freesounds.org.

So when my level was done, I tried to apply to the compo. It was 9 O’clock and I know that there is an extra hour in order to submit.

But guess what, it was 9h05 and the compo option in the submission page…it was grayed out !!!!

So…all I did was for nothing.

But alas, I was able to participate to the jam, so I applied right there instead.

Having already submitted my first level, monday would be a return to work and I wouldn’t have much more time to work on the game, but I wanted sooo bad to add just another level.

So today, at my lunch break, I did another level in just 1 hour! It introduce another game mechanic, and I saw how it was easy and quick to do a level when all the systems are already in place.

So I said to myself:  “well, I don’t want it to end there, I must do a last level !”

So that’s what I did this evening, and this one will be a little challenging, but I’m really proud of how it turned out overall ! I’m really proud as I didn’t saw myself finishing this on the last day of the jam…and again, alone ! I’ll try to find a team next time, as it can give us better contents if the project is, of course, well managed.

Let me know if you have found my game interesting, and again, happy rating for everyone !

So… if you excuse me, I’ll return to Dark Souls 3…Dying…oups, I mean decompressing from this LD !

Tags: block, Shifto