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

Since we wanted to focus on getting the game done in time with all planned features we stayed away from doing a devlog throughout the weekend 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. If you have any questions please post them in the comments! :smile:

Day 1: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/plutus/plutus-dev-blog-ldjam-recap-day-1

Second Day - Saturday

Woke up, had some coffee and breakfast then got straight down to work on the game mechanics and art. Jason began hand drawing most of the assets with pencil and paper and by the end of the night scanned them and started editing them in Photoshop (I believe all but the planets were started that day). I quickly got our logo intro in as well the Main Menu and pause menu systems in with options for Fullscreen V-Sync and volume controls for both music and SFX so I could hammer out the boring stuff first then get to the fun part - the game itself. I threw in some placeholder circles for the planets and set up the entire scene and determined a good size for the entirety of the map as well as the game objects (also based on some limitations from the engine). Set up the planets rotational movements around the sun - implemented the player controls and began playing with physics controls and settings which I continued to tweak throughout the entirety of the weekend.

By the end of the 2nd night I had fully explorable solar system with very scarce space debris to start but if smaller then you were collectible as well as the speed boost power up. Added some cheat buttons to allow me to continue to grow to make sure scaling the player up and the rest of the scene down would make sense visually - this also took a lot of tweaking for the entirity of the weekend and still could use some adjustments and in the future will require some pretty intense math to calculate properly so went with simple to start. Most of the art assets were completed the following day. Here is what we were at in terms of the features by end of day:

Features Implemented Day 2: - ~~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 - ~~Intro Story and Cutscene~~

A lot of the day was spent trying to come up with good feeling physics controls and proper scaling. But all in all it was a pretty chill day and we didn't worry too much and figured it would be no problem to finish in time. Although I did want to work on original music and sfx so played around with that for a bit but by the time I came up with a good tune and picked out all the instruments (only thing left was a LOT of editing) I decided it was best to get some sleep and work on that last since the game itself was the more important focus. After all we did have some collections of public domain music and sfx stored on on our drives (not just for the jam but for any project). So decided sleep was very important in the remaining days to be able to focus 100% on the task at hand so we went to bed fairly early and got decent sleep and had planned to finish the rest of the major features as well as figuring out a good size ratio and mass values the following day.

Day 3 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