Just finished my first-ever proper entry to a Ludum Dare compo – Seedscape!  You have one seed to rebuild the world.  Where will you plant it?

A few things fell on the cutting-room floor in the scramble to get her out the door (no editor mode… sigh.)  But all in all, it’s remarkably complete.  Many thanks to the LÖVE team for their awesome free 2D engine.

Give it a spin and let me know what you think.

Tags: compo, game, puzzle

Apparently not.

The game I’m working on is called ‘One Cold Night’.  Dig avalanche survivors out of the snow; try not to freeze to death or wake up any bears.

…well, there aren’t any survivors yet.  Or bears.  But I have a whole nine hours to implement them!

In the immortal words of Strong Bad, ‘it’s over!’

Depending on how you count things, this was either my second or third Ludum Dare attempt (I made a game for LD24 but never submitted it). I took a relatively laid-back approach this time, opting to go the jam route rather than the compo and utilize some existing voxel code  that I had on hand.  Overall, I’m happy with how things turned out!  That’s not to say that everything went 100% smoothly, though…

Some things that worked well for me:

• Writing a game brief (check it out).  Before starting, I wrote up a one-page brief.  The intro (which I wrote to figure out the tone of the game) wound up getting pasted pretty much verbatim into the actual game.  I enumerated a couple of gameplay concepts that I worked into the final game, as well as some that didn’t ultimately make the cut (but might be good for future updates).  Referring back to the brief kept me mostly on track over the weekend.
• Using a familiar engine / framework (Love2D, in my case).  I didn’t spend much time fighting the engine or digging through documentation.
• Making configurable parameters for *everything*.  Good programming practice generally, but this helped me test and tweak different variations quickly.  It was also something of a downside, though (see below).
• Using freesound.org for sound effects.  These ultimately precluded me from including the game in the 48-hour competition, but I would have gone over the time limit trying to make the right sound effects in-house (and probably come up with worse results – I am no sound engineer, my apartment is no studio.)

Some things that didn’t go so well:

•  Increasing the difficulty right before launch.  While testing, I mostly played with a 1000×2000 voxel space (for sake of time).  I bumped that up to 1500×3000 for the initial release.  Though I only boosted the dimensions by 50%, that increased the area of the game by a whopping 225% – a huge difficulty spike given that mechanically the game is all about searching a big space efficiently.  In the subsequent Mac release, I reduced the play area to 1200×2400 – still a challenge, but somewhat more in line with what I intended it to be.
• Unclear mechanics.  Some of the feedback I’m seeing suggests that I didn’t provide immediate enough examples of how to use sniffing and barking in practice.
• Focusing on cosmetics rather than gameplay.  You can see in this screenshot from Sunday morning that I hadn’t even implemented survivors to rescue yet, leaving me with a lot less time to test and refine the gameplay before release:

Though I’m calling this a post-mortem, I think I’ll continue development on this game.  I don’t think I’ll really be satisfied until the hibernating bears are in, and I’d really like to give the character of the ‘master’ a proper game presence.  I also feel like it could work well on other platforms… going to take a stab at at Android port with the love-android-sdl2 project.

I’ll leave you with a quick video of the game, for those who haven’t played it yet – this should give a feel for how it looks and sounds, if not plays:

One Cold Night – Digging demo

Having participated in the game jam  for the last two Ludum  Dares, I decided this time that I’d go all-out on the compo.  I even made my own font from my handwriting for the text!  (…my handwriting’s terrible.   sorry!)

It’s been a fun 48 hours.  You can find my entry – Drift – here.  Let me know what you think!  I’ll be back in just a bit to start rating games

Tags: compo, ld48, love2d