Hey,

I wanna share my LD38 story. I participated on my own this time, I like the challenge of the compo. The time constraint and having to come up with something and finish something entirely on your own. I actually didn't manage to finish in 48 hours and had to switch to jam, and here is why:

Game Idea

My original game idea was a puzzle game set on a small flying world that you have to strategically destroy using bombs. In the end you had to reach a certain area to win. The more of the world you destroy, the harder it gets to maneuver around the world.

Later the destroy everything idea turned into destroy crystals. Level design was way easier when you only had to destroy a certain part of the map.

Day 1

I quickly realized that the map should be on a grid so I wanted to make a tile map tool that allowed me to iterate on levels quickly. My original idea was to just write an ASCII parser and then turn that into 3D tiles, but writing an ASCII parser actually takes time. I realized that Tiled, a tile-map tool that I used a few times, supports .json as export format and Unreal Engine 4 ships with a Json-parser that made writing the importer actually quite simple. A few hours later I had the importer done, it is still called TimeMapASCII because that is what I called the thing originally :D

I am really happy with it, since it automatically attaches gameplay stuff to the tiles, it's not just art. I can import tiles and the game rules automatically work and it builds a playable levels with win conditions and all that.

Here some .gifs of the tools:

Tiled Export and Import

Tiled Edit and Reimport

Day 2

With those tools in place, I though I could spend all of day 2 making the game. Little did I know.

Unreal doesn't have any support for grid movement - unconstraint movement just didn't work for it so I pretty much spend the entire second day making the movement and the game rules work. It implemented a grid movement thing with LERP'd animations that came with all sorts of bugs that even bothered me all into late of the third day... I also went ahead and changed the game idea at this time. I realized that the destroy the whole world thing wasn't fun at all.

I had to switch to jam, I pretty much didn't have anything at the end of day 2.

Day3

I already hinted that my custom movement component actually was the biggest issue of my weekend. I had to cut a lot of planned features that included movement of tiles, the player or bombs.

Cut features included:

• Teleporters
• moving platforms that could carry the player or bombs
• pressure plates and switched
• moving obstacles

Sadly, those cut features really hurt the game, I think. I planned with those features for solid game design.

So I spent a few solid hours making the actual game. I implemeted the full core loop around midway through the day, implemented sounds and some effects.

I didn't have time for any art, all the things in the game are basic shapes, I didn't have time for particles or fancy effects.

I even had to cut making levels short. I basically rushed five of the seven levels in the last 30 minutes before packaging the game up.

What went wrong

I basically covered everything that went wrong in the day 1-3 writeup - I made tools! Don't ever make tools unless you know you can finish them in time and they actually increase productivity so much that it is worth the time.

It wasn't for me.

I didn't have enough time to make good levels and polish because of the tools.

What went right

• I finished the game!
• I think the game has potential and is actually kinda fun
• I didn't have time for art but I think it looks decent, considering the fact that I made ZERO art stuff
• the few levels the game has are actually decent and some are fun.
• Switching to 72 hours jam instead of quitting. It allowed me to finish the game and also the sounds I used from freesound.org add a lot to the game.

Thats it! Thanks for reading!

Links

Download - Windows, itch.io

LD38 page

Twitter