This is my first time doing a ludum dare compo ever – I’m very excited! It’s going to be a complete new way to create a game, and I can’t wait!

 

I feel I’m probably going to fail to meet the deadline in one way or the other. I have multiple ideas already, but I am not sure whether I have enough experience to deliver them fast. I take a lot of time to figure out how to do something decently, and I partially blame this to my perfectionism. It’s also one of the reasons why I spent 2 years making a (completely ambitious and out of scale) game I’d never finish…

But I AM going to try push features rather than to polish them constantly. Maybe its best if I see this compo as a mean for getting better at prototyping. And maybe with this mindset I can get something done despite of my concerns!

Even if I won’t able to submit anything, it’s going to be worth it!

 

 

After 9 hours of work finally doing a break on my entry “Two Must Become One”.

 

I have literally come up with the idea for this while I was half asleep. It’s supposed to be a simulation game where you control the balance between two worlds – nature and civilization. Re-connect human civilization with nature and try not to blow everything up! I hope the connection to the theme is going to show in the final game.

 

Implementing the game so far is/was both interesting and stressful (the type of “positive stress”, you know?). I was intrigued by the fact I found out new ways how to do a game, and how to do it quickly (for my terms).

I found the “grow” function here particularly interesting: plants and animals slowly “reproduce” onto adjacent tiles the more time passes by.  If you let that thing running for a while, it’d create a more or less natural looking pattern. What is also interesting is the fact that some “spawns” of these sprites seemed to have been neglected, while others exploded and surpressed the non-growing ones. This mechanism could be useful for a evolution-themed game!

But let’s not go overboard here just yet. As there’s still a lot of things to add, I’m not sure whether I’m going to be able to finish it at all. If I it’s not done by the end of the 48 hour competition, I’ll submit it to the 72 hour one, and even if I should STILL not make it, I’ll just submit it to one game a month. No matter what happens, I plan to continue working on it  (and perhaps put my other projects on halt) because it seems like it’s going to be a very interesting and easy to pick up game.

 

Play the game here – comments and ratings appreciated!

 

This was a firstie in many ways. It was my first ludum dare, my first game jam, my first finished game, and the first game I ever created without the intention to recreate/immitate an existing game mechanic. About a year ago, I would never have expected to even participate in a game jam like Ludum Dare anytime soon, and here I am with a (more or less) finished entry.

The original idea was to create two worlds, nature and human civilization, coexisting in a subtle balance that could be disturbed by gathering too much natural resources (trees/plants/animals) and other things. I planned to do this visually as well but that turned out to be pretty time consuming, and knowing the mechanics I wanted to implement, I decided to finish these instead. I also wanted to add disasters but I couldn’t add them for the lack of time. The game’s design was inspired by dwarf fortress.

I worked so quickly as I’ve never did before. I cut out a lot of features for the sake of getting some gameplay finished. The menu and credits were extremely rushed and created during the  last hour or two. It turned out to be a very interesting game that can be extended for more in-depth gameplay. Possibly you cannot even win it…

It also has been quite a learning experience. I’ve learned some lessons in AI creation making the commands for the workers. A lot of fun I had making these small sprites (I really loved doing them) and got in touch with a new approach and method to make games. I’ve worked with alot of static variables to design the map and map objects and applied some of my knowledge in memory effective 2D rendering. It was an interesting jam to say the least.

I am looking forward to play all other Ludum Dare entries to check out what others have made during 48 hours. And of course, this will not  be the last time I participate in a game jam too!

Tags: 48h, final post mortem, post-mortem

 

Results are out for my compo game Two Must Become One. This game is my first LD ever, and I have to say, didn’t expect this AT ALL:

#113 Audio 3.58 #130 Overall 3.71 #184 Mood 3.47 #307 Fun 3.35 #394 Innovation 3.37 #409 Graphics 3.32 #724 Theme 3.00 #1626 Coolness 37%

Holy bananas! 130th place on the first try!? Yay! Thanks a lot to everyone who voted and commented! I got a lot of very helpful feedback too, and I’ll try to better myself and future LD entries.

What’s interesting is that people’s impression of my game was apparently good enough to make them rate it +3 stars (in other words, most could have felt bad if they gave me 1-2 stars for it).  Audio got the highest rating, despite the fact I added some music literally in the last minute. The song itself I composed ages ago too, but it fit this game perfectly. I am pretty sure my game has gotten much better ratings than it would otherwise have because of the audio.

What also fascinates me is that most ratings are between 3 and 4 stars, and additionally are pretty close together (3.32 Graphics, 3.35 Fun and so on). I guess it made a solid first impression.

The fact that theme only got a 3 star rating is not surprising at all. I was not able to add all features I wanted to add, which could have made a connection to the theme more obvious. This also means I need to tune down on game scale next time, because this game here as is, is pretty in-depth for being made in only 48 hours. Looking back, I’m wondering how the fridge I got it done in time in the first place. But well, I did it! Weee!

The coolness rating came out pretty bad. I admit I didn’t play too many other games this time because I was happy just to be done with it and to have my first LD entry finished. “Winning” or “getting ratings” wasn’t exactly my aim here. This will change next LD competition, though!

 

Overall, taking part in this competition was a very positive experience, and the only thing I would improve next time was decreasing the scale of the LD entries. And maybe stop recreating things that already exist! I need better ideaass!

 

 

Tags: gamedev, GameJam, LD30, ld48