First hours of the Ludum Dare 24. Working on coming up with a game design involving evolution. Getting tired. Maybe I’ll just dream one up for tomorrow morning…

Cool competition. I love the community surrounding this event. This is the first Ludum Dare that I have participated in.

My game is The Origin, a game about young Darwin scientifically learning about the secrets of evolution. My goal was to create a non-violent game that showcase the scientific process of exploration and documentation. I wanted to use Darwin’s log book as a way to tell the story as you progressed through the game.

Things that went well:

• Core mechanics of exploration and documentation.
• Young darwin character; I believe the animations were appealing and expressive.
• Sound; I composed a short theme song, also used as3sfxr to create a few sound effects.
• Story; Darwin’s journal. I thought it worked well both as a segway to the next level and added some story telling elements.

Things that could have gone better:

• Background tileset was very basic and boring. I ran out of time to create interesting graphics.
• Level design; again time was a factor here… I was able to design 3 short gameplay levels.
• Enemy AI; This was basically non existant. My goal was to have the enemies patrolling back and forth to push the player off ledges.
• Overall game time; In the end, I only delivered about 5 minutes of gameplay. I would have liked to have at least doubled this.

Thanks for checking out my game, and I’ll probably come back for another competition in the future!

Tags: post-mortem

Tonight I composed a tune in GarageBand. I was hoping it would help bring me some inspiration… I guess I will sleep on it…

Villain01.mp3

I have lost track of what I’m trying to accomplish here… Maybe I will have better luck finishing up tomorrow. At least I have some sweet parallax going on, PRESS Start!

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4026412/Troll.swf