This was my 2nd LD I've submitted a game for and 4th I've attempted. I chose to use Nim again and the same basecode I used for LD37.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/smalltrek

https://impbox.itch.io/smalltrek

You can see a history of development gifs on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=%23LDJAM%20from%3Aimpbox&src=typd&lang=en

I was thinking about the boardgame "Small World" and the idea of many races fighting over a small piece of land and resources and thinking small little planets, then thought of Star Trek and how each episode is very similar where they discover a planet and meet the locals and they're fighting over something and they have to sort things out for them, so I made a game about that! I also wanted to make a non-violent game about spreading peace. I had also planned that you would visit a planet and then after solving the level you would gain an ambassador of one of the races on the planet to add to your ship (which would also be a puzzle on how to fit everyone in, and be its own little small world) I ended up not using this idea as I couldn't figure out how to make it into a fun game.

After writing up some notes, I began mocking up the artwork in Aseprite. I decided not to use the Pico-8 palette this time and tried out some other 16 colour palettes, and settled on the Arne16 preset from Aseprite which had some nice greens and blues and warm tones for contrasting alien skins against brown planets.

A bunch of different types of aliens on a grid that you can slide around like a puzzle game, I reused this mechanic from my previous LD game "Moving-in" a game about moving furniture around a 1 room apartment which I thought worked quite well. But I was worried about it being too similar, so I needed to make the aliens more interesting than furniture.

The first alien types were very basic, simply requiring to be adjacent to a fixed resource. I then added the blue aliens which connect in a chain to their resource. I had planned that some races would not like other races, but it seemed very racist and didn't fit the kind of game I wanted to make, so I scrapped that and tried to think of something else to make the puzzles more interesting, which led me to the alien type that craves diversity.

Then I was trying to think of some other star trek references and I remembered the Tribbles! Once that occurred to me everything fell into place. The story, and the main mechanic, I was excited! I added the cute little fluff balls that multiplied like crazy and filled up any empty space they could get to, then made it so the blue aliens hated them which made things a lot more interesting.

I added a few more aliens to fill up the roster, one for each main colour in the palette and 8 to fit nicely along the spritesheet size.

Once I had things mostly working I wanted to do something I didn't do last time, which was ADD SOME JUICE! Lots of tweening, dust particles, heart particles. It made such a big difference to how the game felt to play.

Added a scanner mode to look at objects/aliens to see info about them. I felt this was one of the things I did poorly.

I had decided for some reason to make 32 levels, I started making a bunch and they were flowing nicely, made the ship fly in and out between levels.

END OF DAY 1. My plan was to have a quick nap and then make some music.

Longer than planned nap happened, but I was feeling ok about my progress as I had all the mechanics and art done, just needed to do Music and Level Design.

I kept putting off level design. Tried making music on LSDJ but it wasn't happening for me, figured I'd come back to it later.

I decided to make an intro screen with a logo and starfield. ... Then I added a little ship you could fly around. Fly between quadrants. Then added planets which would be each level. Went way over the top with the level select. I still hadn't figured out the later levels. I felt I needed one more mechanic.

Then I added the last alien type which had something I didn't want to add to the game. I hated to do it, but I think it worked as a mechanic, it totally changed the gameplay though. So there's a big shift in the later levels.

I wish I had had time to make a great finale level though. But generally pretty happy with the outcome.

I think some levels should be reordered.