Reading some of the comments on Less is More? it seems that some levels can be difficult, so I made I walkthrough video.
My entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=15195
Tags: LD #26, less is more, video, walkthrough
Yeah, I didn’t like my original idea for Ludum Dare so I dropped it, I wish I continued working on it to see if it was going to end well but I didn’t. All of the entries look pretty good and I hope I make a game next time, it was fun working on it while it lasted.
:: Play and rate City-States here ::
City-States in action
Minimalism?
Really?
What is a 48 / 72 hour jam if not minimal already? As themes go I felt this was an incredibly poor one as it offers no particular guidance. I didn’t think there was a theme in the list that would have been worse than Potato until I saw the actual winner. My very first instinct was “I’ll just submit an empty page with a link to a 404. Total work time, less than 5 minutes. Minimal to the core.”
Fitting as that would have been though, it’s not the reason we take part in these jams. So I asked myself what I could do that would be minimal in the context of a video game. Then I realized that it probably shouldn’t be a video game at all.
Doin’ it old school
My original thought was to make a card game based on the Rider-Waite Tarot deck, but as I started to come up with ideas for gameplay I realized that the cards simply had too much personality and too many pre-conceived associations tagging along with them. The game was shaping up to be a narrative guided by random card draws, and I realized that I’d be spending all my time writing up how narrative flows for a ridiculous number of card scenarios.
That wouldn’t be minimal.
So I took it a step backwards and picked up a deck of 52 playing cards at the store. I looked at them and pondered the suits. I realized that there are a number of similarities in playing card suits and Tarot suits:
Diamonds easily translates in meaning to Pentacles
Clubs easily translates in appearance to Staves
Hearts easily translates in meaning to Cups
Spades has linguistic connections to the Spanish “Espada”, which is a Sword.
So I laid all the cards out in front of me and imagined what each of these things could really represent. It occurred to me that they all were elements of a State:
Diamonds / Pentacles : Riches, Treasury, Natural Resources
Clubs / Staves : Knowledge, Power, Skill, “Magic”
Hearts / Cups : Happiness, Bounty, Emotional contentment
Spades / Swords : Insight, Conflict, Tumult
I considered how states use these things to gain advantage over others, and how without one of the four states historically have trouble with continued existence. So the idea then is to get a lot of each of these and to steal them from your opponents. But how? There’s got to be some method to this or else you’d just aim for the one place your opponent has the least of at any given time.
So if the idea is that a state falls if it has no resources left in one of the four categories, perhaps there’s a way to make sure the category is well defended? That’s where the idea behind the advisors came in. The royal cards, rather than ruling the city directly, ensure that no matter what happens a city won’t be defeated by running out of their given resource. So a famous, skilled general (King of Spades) will ensure that no matter how battered your City-State’s military, it will never be an avenue by which the state will fall. In mechanical terms, this means the Advisor offers a +1 bonus, permanently, to their suit.
I wanted the actions to be highly constrained because of the “Minimalism” theme.
I wanted attacking to be completely unrelated to plundering, and to make sure that attacking and plundering both are related only to one suit at a time. Therefore, if you use swords to attack, the defender must use swords to defend. Likewise, if your goal in victory is to gain Treasures/Diamonds, then you can’t just steal Guilds/Clubs and put them in your treasure column. If you want Treasures you have to take Treasures.
Ummm… huh. Wow, it’s only 3 hours in and I’ve finished the game rules. Well, I guess I could submit it now!
But is that really why we’re here at Ludum Dare?
No, I don’t think so.
So in 3 hours I had the card game…
In 3 days I had the video game.
For a strategy game conceived in 3 hours, this actually is not that bad. I’ve played a few rounds with other people and while there are some balance issues with the rules as written there’s a really solid core idea. I think that had I spent more time on the initial card game rules and less on the video game, it would be a stronger concept… but then the video game wouldn’t have been completed. But again, maybe that would have been for the best?
It’s really interesting to build narratives out of the actions people take in this game. How do states use Guilds to steal Farmland? I can think of a few ways, and it’s fun to leave it to the imagination.
As far as the video game goes, my use of finite state machines made coding the game flow a total breeze. There’s a lot of content and a lot of states, but they are pretty well arranged such that it’s easy to keep track of the flow, or insert new states into the flow.
Balance. The 2 player version really isn’t well balanced at all. Would more rules help? I don’t know… more rules would surely break the “Minimalism” requirement…
Explanation. The rules are *really easy* to demonstrate because there are so few things you can actually do. On the other hand they’re *really hard* to explain with words alone. When I show people how to play the game face-to-face I can do it easily. With the video game though, I struggled hard to come up with a good way to explain the actions to someone not already familiar with the game.
Unity was kind of crashy and unstable. I don’t know if it was my project structure or if it was some combination of plugins, but when I tried to export for Android my Unity editor would crash and burn in a firey mess. I sent a bug report to Unity, and they actually wrote back with a workaround and also a note that the bug would be fixed in the next release. On the other hand, once Android did finally publish I found a rendering bug. Ultimately this meant that the Android release was not ready in time to submit… just the web player version. I have since solved the issue, however.
So, I’ve never invented a card game before. You can probably tell! This was a very different experience from my “typical” (as much as you can call them that) video game development. It surely did lead down a totally different path of ideation and implementation. I think overall it was good.
Also, I notice that when the rules of a video game are awful, people just complain about it. When the rules of a card game are broken, people don’t have to hack your source code to fix it… they just house-rule and experiment themselves and tell you what worked for them. That was the really interesting takeaway for me.
So, in between working on a post-jam version of Double Hydra and writing up a post-mortem, we thought you guys would enjoy a little media pack we put together!
Here’s a free OTF font we built using the handmade letters Strega created during the jam. Every letter and number strictly adheres to the constraints of the art style of the game (Please credit us if you use it!):
| Download Font |
And here are four resolutions of wallpaper versions of the title page of the game:
800×600 | 1024×768 | 1280×1024 | 1600×1200
And finally, play the game here!
During the compo, I ran into a bug that made two pushable box (which should collide and stop) run over each other. I’ve been trying to fix that, but now nothing makes sense anymore… The gif bellow can better show it (and also show a new stage! :)).
As you can see, the first time it collides perfectly… but the second time (which should be the exact same situation), they overlap each other… One thing that I was able to notice (after dumping some frame-by-frame information to a .txt file… >_<) is that there may be a relation with their order in the object list (FlxGroup, if you’ve ever used Flixel).
Ok, this gave me a (stupid) idea. I’ll check which is the left most one and pass that as the second object to the collision method (FlxObject.separate). I’ll post soon with results. Obviously, it didn’t work. ¬¬
Why do people release post-compo versions right now?!? Doesn’t this really take apart the idea of the compo?
So I put on this post-compo stuff I worked on for just a little longer because the compo version was, like , rushed and incomplete, and stuff like that, and then
BAM !!! Post-compo it’s soooooooo much better and stuff…
It’s okay because if you rate, you only rate the compo version, ooooooooooooooooooooooooof course, like yeah, suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure……!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Just a thought, and I’m not making a F****KING POST-COMPO (which means AFTER THE COMPO like in WHEN IT’S OVER !!!!!) right now!
Thanks for not listening….
3
This entry was posted on Friday, May 3rd, 2013 at 3:12 pm and is filed under LD #26. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I’ve made post-compo version of my entry “Coder”.
In this game you are a programmer, who need to refactor projects to implement new features, while your boss is waiting you to give him a reason to fire you.
Complete story mode (11 levels) and get “Hardcore coder” badge for your Ludum Dare profile!
Try and rate here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20479
This is our third time entering Ludum Dare! Our previous games were Macro Marines in LD23 and Mighty-chondria in LD24. We didn’t manage to enter LD25, but for LD26 we’ve made another great game!
You may remember us from previous games such as…
Please do play our game and give it a rating!
Here’s a timelapse of us making it:
Unity is brilliant, and easy to use! We’ve used it for a couple of games, and although we could still improve the way we organise our code/prefabs/scenes, it lets us put a game together very quickly! It’s also robust enough that we don’t have to worry about crashes or rendering problems.
Minimalism made the art easier to create! It would be easy to think that a minimalistic theme would allow us to create bad art and pass it off as minimalist. However, we spent some time thinking about minimalism, and came up with an art style that looks great without requiring detailed texture work! Using Blender’s Inset Faces tool with a group of faces selected, an outline could be created in the geometry of the model itself, and then a black material applied to the “outline” polygons to suggest the edges of the object in the white game environment.
Objects are reduced to the minimal graphics needed to represent them, but you can still tell what they are.
Can you tell what it is?
Minimalism made the dialogue easier to write! There is no text in the game – we explored the concept of reducing language down to symbols. It’s part of the puzzle, but we find it interesting that players can figure out what’s going on even though the characters they meet and the dialogue interface only convey a minimal amount of information.
What’s up, brown cube? You heart flower?
We pushed ourselves to make something new! We are all programmers by profession, so it is unusual for us to have a go at making an artistic game. Violence provides a variety of game mechanics that are easy to build a game around, so it was a challenge to create a non-violent game for a change!
Having only one Unity scene meant we couldn’t all work in parallel. Unity scene files are binary, which means they won’t merge properly if there are conflicts in the source control. At the beginning of the weekend we were working on separate scenes to test individual systems, but at the end there was a lot of work to pull everything together, and it could only be done by one person.
We didn’t get the story working completely until the end of the third day. It took us a long time to create all the content, including the AI behaviour. This meant that the story we implemented, although a complete story, wasn’t as elaborate and non-linear as we were hoping.
What’s wrong?
We didn’t make use of all the features we’d programmed into the dialogue system. By having a minimalist dialogue system, we envisioned that the player would be able to say anything they wanted by constructing the sentences from symbols. That is present in the game, but because of limitations in the graphical dialogue interface, we removed the ability for characters to respond to every piece of information you give them. Also the code allows for much more complicated logical rules – to change what the characters think and do – than are present in the final story, but again the GUI is limited in what can be reasonably displayed.
Our external source control system was slow. The Mercurial repository was hosted on bitbucket.org. I had hoped that this would be a good way of enabling us to continue working on the game together after we had all gone home, but it meant that pushing to the repository took up to several minutes. “We’ve wasted, like, hours of the competition, pushing to this repository” said Dunk, who has no concept of the passage of time, and who liked to commit huge MP3 and WAV files.
In the UK, the competition started and finished at 3:00 AM. Technically that would give us more time, because we usually sleep through the theme announcement and start when we wake up on Saturday morning, then stay awake on Monday to work through to the competition deadline – an extra hour this time compared to the usual finish of 2:00 AM. However working that late is a recipe for introducing bugs into the game at the last minute, so we decided to create a stable build, submit it and go to bed even though we could have stayed up longer to add more features.
We’re very pleased with the game we’ve made in Unity! It fits the minimalism theme well, and is playable and fun. We can always think of more that could be included, but it’s a time-constrained competition. Please play and rate our game!
Whew!! After playing and rating 101 games (for those playing at home, that’s 4,3% of Ludum Dare #26!) I finally feel comfortable enough to list some of my favourites so far. After this post I’m taking a weekend break from this whole Ludum Dare thing and return to rating business with fresh eyes and mind in Monday.
[stextbox id=”info” caption=”You Actually Finished It?? award for the most together act”]
…to the game that, against all odds, managed to be a complete experience with nothing to add or take away:
I don’t know if you already know this, but drama is hard. I’d argue it’s even harder than comedy to get right because the tiniest things can break the mood completely, but maybe it’s just me and my high standards for storytelling in visual media.
That being said, Fragments of Him nails the tone perfectly. It’s a tragedy that made me feel things! Think stuff that made me sad! Getting the plot to advance sometimes can be a bit of a pain but that’s honestly the only complaint I have about this entry.
You should play it. Everyone should play it!
[/stextbox]
[stextbox id=”download” caption=”Brain Reconfiguration award for the most clicking game mechanic”]
…to the game I’ll be playing in my dreams for weeks to come:
Everyone has had a case of tetrishead. Play a game where actions are simple and repetitive, yet you have to be aware of the whole picture all the time and plan ahead and anticipate coming actions and you will keep playing the game in your head long after you have quit the physical action itself.
I’m playing Metahotel when writing this and I’ll be playing it after I close this computer and lay down to sleep. See if it clicks similarly for you.
[/stextbox]
[stextbox id=”info” caption=”The Next Portal award for the most promising first person puzzle game”]
…to the game I wouldn’t mind buying from Steam sale for a couple of bucks:
Combination of exploring weird landscapes and a mechanic to alter them is what makes these types of games enjoyable. Cimi Mal does this perfectly, and I truly wish there would be a lot more of it.
There are certain unpolished aspects to it (falling damage will kill you, despite never being mentioned anywhere), but the sheer excitement of seeing blocky environment transforming around you overrides everything else. Go take a look.
[/stextbox]
[stextbox id=”download” caption=”Didn’t See That Coming award for the most interesting mode of transportation”]
…to the game that took blocks and remade them:
As in previous entry, this game features weird landscapes. But instead of restructuring them to progress, you restructure yourself. I don’t want to spoil too much about Deja vu, but I will say that it features the best use of verticality in level design since Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight.
[/stextbox]
[stextbox id=”info” caption=”The Plucky Plumber award for platforming excellency”]
dot dot dot redundant additional description colon
This title has a lot going for it, least of it being the visual motif of using words describing things rather than the thing themselves (culminating in ending that is meta as this simile), but it also was one of the few entries I came across that got platforming just right. You can even stomp the enemies!
Also features perfect controller support.
[/stextbox]
[stextbox id=”download” caption=”I LOL’d award for making me actually LOL”]
…to the game where humor came from mechanics, rather than only writing:
Fight alien ships with pointy stick! Use your goldfish to find secret treasures from mysterious forest! Random Legend Adventure is exactly what it says on the tin, and delivers it’s promises. Check it out!
[/stextbox]
[stextbox id=”info” caption=”Lasting Appeal award for the intriguingest game”]
…to the game I’ll actually be playing after this month:
If you ask me, best games feature an element of mysticality. Seed has you in charge of creating life for the plantkind, and it’s mesmerizing to watch! There seems to be endless opportunities to grow your field…
[/stextbox]
If you liked this post, you can also try out my game and drop a comment!
Tags: compilation, recommendation, reviews
Managed to get my time-lapse uploaded. I think I might have cranked up the speed a bit too much haha. May cause eye strain.. Also cheesy funk music 😀
Game Page:
www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=rate&uid=22035
I been trying my best to play and rate as many games as I can, but these are some of the ones that stood out to me
I’d recommend all of these games, Good bye!
3This entry was posted on Friday, May 3rd, 2013 at 5:09 pm and is filed under LD #26. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I’ve uploaded a post-compo tweaked version of Invertigo!, taking in to account some of the feedback left by you, the commenting public. Hopefully this makes the game less angry-challenging, and more hooray-challenging!
I wasn’t going to do a post-compo version until the judging period was over, but the feedback is overwhelming and I want people to enjoy playing what the game could’ve been (playtesting y’all, 48 hour time limit is no excuse for skimping on it), so I whipped up a lil’ edited version that addresses the biggest flaw of the game, which is being able to stand in the middle forever and just shoot at the doors.
Huoheian Post-Compfaux edition
(it’s probably too hard now but challenging gameplay beats the pants off of boring gameplay. A real post-compo version will come later)
Enjoy!
The Summary
I totally had fun this LD! Even the painful aftermath helped a lot with figuring stuff out. I was at long last able to upgrade to glsl 1.5, fix my shader setup, get more familiar with matrices again (even if i’ll forget it all by next week) and was able to deliver a solid entry, that’s actually gamy, unless most of my previous entries.
Like every other LD i need a good half day to get over the theme. I keep complaining on IRC, to my housemates, to basically everyone that dares trying to talk to me within the first couple hours of saturday. I don’t try to intenionally violate it, but i usually end up doing something that only remotely could be considered themed. This time around it was technically quite challenging to set up, but the gameplay atleast mechanics are simple:
Get Gems, don’t run into things, get to goal.
After a bunch of coffee and ranting i fired up the IDE and started working on TunnelVision, not actually being determined on pulling it through. I made the ring model, imported it and have it arranged along a spline. I realized that this solution is not at all sufficient because rotating the rings along the spline direction is a task i didn’t want to bother with. I remembered that you can construct a rotation matrix out of forward, right and up vectors, so i use an array of those to make up a track, where each node has a definite position and orientation i can further work with.
Applying a constant rotation along the forward axis, and a translation along its up and right vectors allowed for some interesting level design components to create segments that don’t look dynamic and not too uniform, like a rotation of 12 degrees every ring in distance 2; although it is nice to have that kind of control. Basic ship and camera mechanics were added aswell, but in even cruder forms than it is in the entry. Also i started implementing phong shading only realizing later that there will a be whole lot more problems arising.
#gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */
Textured rings along a spline
Random orientation and scale changes. The path looks nicely dynamic but the rings arent aligned towards eachother
Chaotic Cubes
Curvy
Paths
After implementing most of the basic mechanics in day 1 i could focus on building actual tracks and a add little more variety to them, get some polish done and get a smooth release. Glad that i decided as i did because i was just on time, so i thought. I realized a bug in the intersection code just after the submission hour started, i tried my best to get rid of it, but i wasn’t able to figure out exactly what the problem was and i wanted to wrap it up, so i left it in.
Another thing that is still bugging me are the ship controls and camera logic. I wasn’t able to get the physics done in a way they behave like i intended them to, so i didn’t bother with it for the time being. The camera logic is another beast. Just attaching the camera do the back of the ship looks very boring and undynamic, i wanted to have it follow the ship with a slight delay but that turned out more diffucult than i imaged. So for now it keeps following the path left behind by the ship in a certain distance. The result is not quite like what i had in mind, but it’s close.
Otherwise it was a smooth process; I planned to have enough time for everything so i didn’t need to resolve to botching. Only thing i regret is that i weren’t able to squeez in a second tune.
Spiral Power! ORE WO DARE DA TO OMOTTEYAGARU
Only the day after submitting is when the actual work started. “Error”, “Not working” and “Crash on startup” are only a few of the messages you can read in my comment thread. Again. AGAIN. ATI oh why you just do not care when compiling shaders. At first shaders weren’t able to compile on nvidia systems at all because i called functions that aren’t available in the shader-version i specified (Thanks for realizing ATI). Then, after upgrading to #version 150 nvidia complained about attribute/varying keywords being obsolete (Thanks for mentioning ATI).
After fixing that the game started to run, but the normals were totally wrecked. At this point i already got a lot of help by you guys, providing me with info in your reports and helping me to fix this, so let me say thank you: THANKS YOU! A remote debug session with NeiloGD in a Hangout enabled us to figure out the culprit. I am at fault myself for not realizing this one: I assigned the correct shader only after buffering the modeldata and assigning the attributes. Since the wrong shader was loaded at that point, the Normal-attribute was not active due to optimizations by the compiler. I can see how that is my fault, but damn, ATI, why you allow for such lax programming!
All in all i’m very happy with TunnelVision. It turned out mostly like i planned, and you guys seem to like it too 
But yeah, i’m sorry i forgot to add the option for inverting vertical controls. It will come soon =]
Speaking of which: A post compo version is planned, and partly in production. If you want to be kept up-to-date on that you can follow me or visit my burrow [RSS].
And if you haven’t played it yet DO SO NOW!
[PLAY]
While Zeik is fiddling with his own timelapse for the code he made for our game “Stargazers”, I was able to throw together mine fairly quickly and have it ready to go! (He’s much more of a perfectionist when it comes to his video. 
)
Check out our game here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=10976
“Stargazers” required a lot less intensive art than usual, I think. The constellations were pretty easy to throw together since there were only 10 of them in varying detail, plus even the most detailed ones were extremely geometric and just required small amounts of shape wrangling.
Shamefully, typography took a large chunk of this video. u.u Moreso than I’d like to honestly reveal, since I probably edited that down to a much more inaccurate representation of how much time I spent.
Maybe next time I’ll sacrifice overly customized typography for more detailed worlds. Hope you all enjoy my timelapse~ <3
Also, we apologize for being much slower at rating games than usual this time around! Cake and Zeik are drowning in a sea of school projects and end of semester/quarter assignments. We’re hoping to make a “Best Of” post after going on a rating spree though! (Which should hopefully be after this weekend!)
Tags: timelapse
Something about the theme of minimalism has really brought out the creativity in people. The quality this Ludum Dare is through the roof. Here’s a few of my favourites so far.
Persist
A very fun nes-style platform game where the main character loses abilities as the game progresses. Excellent use of the theme, a fantastic art style and wonderful music. There was a bug in the original game but it’s since been fixed in the post-compo version.
…
Very nicely polished game with lots of attention to detail. There are some great little nods later in the game to classic arcade games.
Join
Join takes a very simple idea (snake) and builds nicely upon it to create a unique action-puzzle game. Quite difficult but still lots of fun.
#
Another game with a very simple concept but really nice execution. Very pretty visuals and nice sound design.
Guru
I have no idea how such beautiful animations were created in such short time but somehow Joe and Rob did it. Well worth a look.
Follow the Line
This ones been talked about a lot and for good reason. Very fun and very challenging.
Here it is, a mosaic of Ludum Dare 26 made using all the main screenshot of Ludum Dare’s 26 games. (click on the image for the high resolution)
Tags: composition, mosaic, screenshots, wallpaper
My game is a minimalistic puzzle game where we tell a history of a little boy called Ted, trying to make a better world around him with the imagination.
We receive in our page great reviews, and the most good thing is the surprise of the game be so polished. It’s because we fix in the idea that the game have to be something minimalistic at all, not only in the graphics, but also in the gameplay, and even in the story.
We discuss about the first version of the game and we decide to make a puzzle. Then we decide to make a storytelling game, and finally the mix it all.
We develop the game in pure as3, making the project as mobile in Flash Develop. Game graphics are totally made in code. The music has chosen by Sharbel (he plays piano) and the sounds are made from he in the piano as well. The sound is not very nice, but it’s better than the first try we did.
We’re thinking in put the game in iOS and Android. We have put the game in Kongregate as well.
The most difficult thing in the game to do is the level design. We design the levels, and the we realize the levels was hard as hell. So, we design again, wih the same base of the first, just to make the things easier to play. And put the hard levels in their appropriate place. When my girlfriend finish the game in normal mode, we notice: the game was finished.
As the final challenge, the people don’t get it what they’re doind in the game, so the Help button turns an guide for the first player. The first idea is only to show what the pieces do, but after a few plays, we put the answers in the help, and this make the game so much better.
For now we’re going to fix and adjust some details, fix the sound (maybe even change the music) and release it for web and mobile.
Thanks, and follows us:
@stigmawall
@sharbelfs
Fire Hurricane
Tags: as3, final, flash, game, LD#26, LD72, post-mortem, postmortem
I thought I’d have a go recording some of these.
Apologies for the quiet voice. If you want your game done, tell me and it shall (maybe) be done.
I had originally planned on collaborating with a friend on the Ludum Dare 26 Jam, however, plans started to fall apart Friday morning when my sister went into labor. Long story short, the baby was born later that evening, and along with other family commitments, took up most of the weekend.
On Sunday I was finally able to sit down and start working on something. My mind kept going back to some sample code I had given a FlashPunk user in Afternet’s #flashpunkers earlier in the week. He was asking for pointers on a drag mechanic and I was able to offer a little help. This sample code was still sitting in my initial basecode project in FlashDevelop and I just started going with the seeds of a simple idea.
I wanted a game where the player had to think fast, but didn’t have multiple types of actions to perform. The Drag mechanic is simple, and everyone who uses computers should be familiar with it. I also didn’t want to have to explain the rules to the player. I wanted them to be able to discover the rules with visual and audible hints. I decided that simply moving objects into a target would be adequate to satisfy those two pieces.
So I worked on Sunday night and before long had the basic functionality down. There were some overlap issues that I had to figure out due to me forgetting that I was centering the origin, but that was probably the only thing that was a pain. After more work on Monday night, it was ready to turn in. I ended up with a progression of levels that started simple and ended up fairly frantic. I knew I was going to be dinged by some voters if I completely avoided instructions, so I put a little blurb on the webpage about discovering it as well as adding a hint to the end game screen if you didn’t make it past the first level or the first level with multiple colored targets. I hoped this would be enough to keep people from being frustrated or downvoting me because they couldn’t understand it.
(I have to say that with the Minimalism theme it is hard to balance the polish. I decided that not only is my gameplay going to stick with one basic action, but the graphics would be minimalism with simple shapes. However, I know someone is going to downgrade the graphics because there are so many more entries that are fantastic graphically. Should they be voted higher because it looks better? Or should the simple graphics games be voted higher because they are following the theme? I don’t know, there are many entries where I can’t for the life of me figure out what is being interpreted as minimal but will probably score high because they are good.)
Here is a video of myself playing the game. Reviewers have apparently done a good job scoring higher.
I think the fact I kept the gameplay simple but had something challenging and fun was great. I was focused on that without having to prepare and test other mechanics. The progression of difficulty was simple and changed things around while still keeping that simple dragging mechanic.
I would have liked a high-score option that reported to my webpage or Twitter, or at the very least kept your own personal high score offline. I didn’t get a chance to do that before the time limit. I also had to skip the sound/music toggle which would have been a nice polite addition.
I had the same thought that showed up in many LD comments: It would be fun on mobile. I would like to explore this. I think I’d have to change the underlying code for handling the dragging to support two at a time, because I know that would be intuitive on a device.
If you would like to give it a try, please go it’s LD page.
