First time I took part in Ludum Dare was LD32, this was my second time. I only considered joining LD38 the night before the event started. I messaged my friend asking if he was interested in participating with me - and luckily - he had also considered joining. Funnily, last time he took part in LD the theme was a tiny world. He lives in :flagfi: and I am based in :flagmy: so we had to deal with a 6 hour time difference. The night before the event, I prepared an empty unity project with Bitbucket + Git setup, so we could jump straight into development.

Procedural Exploration

Eventually, we joined the jam 6 hours late and started brainstorming for an idea for a small world. We came up with this idea of having the player stand in the center of an area of 5x5 or 10x10 tiles and having an algorithm procedurally generate the world in the direction the player is moving, based on the neighboring tiles.

This would mean the player has extremely limited visibility of the world (a small world :upside_down:), but it would allow us to do some interesting visual trickery, like making the world materialize out of nothing. We considered doing something like Proteus, where the gameplay would be based on wonder of exploration.

Procedural Bullet Hell

After prototyping the system for a while, we felt a bit lost about which direction we wanted to take the game. It was probably because we didn't really have any interesting gameplay elements that we could develop the game around. We then decided to turn the idea to something more simple. After some coffee and more brainstorming, we decided to turn the game into a shmup.

Turning the world to a health system

We kept the core idea of generating a world on the fly as player moves around, but we turned the world into a health system - also changing the shape of the world from rectangular to circular shape.

Everytime the player takes damage, the world canvas shrinks.

When player heals or destroys enemies, the world canvas expands.

The health system proved to be very interesting;

• The player will be safe if he just stays still, since enemies appear only when world is being generated
• Staying still reduces the chance of survival, since the world keeps shrinking in size
• The smaller the world canvas, the faster it shrinks
• World canvas can be enlarged by killing enemies and also by collecting the health packs dropped by them

This system enforces player to be active and engage in combat with enemies. One inspiration for us was the combat system of DOOM (2016), where the player gets rewarded with extra health drops by taking risks and engaging with enemies in close combat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXk3MMRXbjA

If you are interested in checking how the health system works in action, you can play our entry here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/quantum-catburetor/

Or just grab the game from itch.io https://jushiip.itch.io/quantum-catburetor (Windows, Mac & Linux Available)

Thanks for reading! :grin: