Hello fellow devs and jammers! :smile:

My name is Nathan Hicks (Programmer) with Apostate Games - Jason Varnell (Artist) and I did the game Plutus as our #ldjam38 submission. Please check out the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/plutus

Seeing as this was our first jam as a team (I've been in 1 previous ldjam and 2 other jams) we wanted to focus on getting the game done in time with all planned features so we stayed away from doing a devlog throughout the weekend (as well worrying about screenshots/video) so over the next few days we will be posting day by day recaps from start to finish of all the progress, decisions made, and even problems we ran into or things we had to cut from the final entry. We simply want to document the process for future reference and help us figure out what we did right and wrong through the whole thing and seek other peoples feedback on their methods as well - with that said we will probably also do a post-jam-mortem blog post once voting is over. So hopefully these dev blogs will help other jammers from making our mistakes or allow them to utilize our successful tactics and allow us to improve in the process too. If you have any questions please post them in the comments! :smile:

Week Before LDJam38

Before I get started let's also recap the week prior the jam. We (Jason and I) made sure to get involved heavily in the voting process. Once we got down to the final 2 rounds of voting we started coming up with quick base game ideas for EACH category and tried to come up with some that would fit multiple themes. Unfortunately, the final theme that got picked was the one we prepped for the least as we didn't think it would win so First Lesson Learned: Never underestimate a theme in the voting process. First thing we decided we wanted to implement was custom control key-mapping which I started getting to work on ahead of time as a template to provide as a tutorial but it ended up breaking every time we tried it the first night so had to can that idea and is an idea we will still revisit later. But we were at least able to include X-box controller support still. Also would like to note before we went into this we decided on using the Clickteam Fusion 2.5 engine as it is one I know very well already and could easily pump out what we needed - we decided this long before the jam started)

First Day - Friday Night

Theme announced: A Small World - As I said this was what we were least prepared for so we spent the majority of the first night brainstorming. Came up with our idea for "Plutus" 2 hours into the jam which had planned to be kind of like a space Katamari. Then spent the rest of the night creating 2 asset and features lists. One we knew we could achieve in time - the other if we had extra time. We also wanted to make sure to include a short fun story so we started typing a few paragraphs we edited a few times over the course of the weekend.

Starting Asset List - Player Planet (w/ thruster animations) - 8 Planets - The Sun - 8-10 space debris objects of varying size - Shield power up - Power up Icons - Explosion - Hud/UI (size bar, power up icons and pause screen - originally we did not plan on the planet tracker and arrow guide) - Stars Background - Stars Middle Ground (for parallax movement) - Title Screen - Icon - Original Various SFX and Music

Starting Features List - ~~Customize-able Controls~~ (quickly canned this idea) - Player grows larger while all else in the solar system gets smaller respectively to create illusion of growth - Collecting debris smaller than you until bigger than other planets - Death by Sun - Death by hitting too many larger objects (explode and break apart) - Power ups (Shield and Warp Drive - Also originally planned alien threats and missile power-ups) - Notifications of when bigger than certain planets and when items acquired - Rotation of planets around the sun - Gravitational pull of the planets

...With all that done and prepped for we had some other ideas if we had time to make them like black holes, various easter egg nerd references (like star trek, doctor who, etc). If we go on to make this a nactual product we will be including most of those as well.

After the night of brainstorming got some sleep fairly early and got down to work the next day!

Day 2 Recap will be posted tomorrow :smile:

In the meantime while waiting for voting please check out our other game we currently have on steam greenlight and tell us what you think!

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=872678368

Also follow us on social media and our website for future games and updates: - http://www.apostategames.com/ - https://www.facebook.com/apostategames/ - https://twitter.com/apostate_games