Just now starting a game for LD38...

Better late than never. What do gardens, watercolors, and parallel universes have in common?

Play and Rate

You can download the compiled version for Windows as well as the project with source code and assets at itch.io, and vote / leave feedback on the LD 38 project page.

Ludum Dare 38

For one reason or another I’ve never managed to participate in a Ludum Dare before this past weekend (LD 38). Planetary Garden was made under the compo rules (worked alone, created all new assets, finished within 48 hours of starting). However, I got a late start (3 PM Sat) and did not submit in time for the official deadline, so it’s technically a jam entry.

The theme was “a small world”, and I started riffing on various ideas for many connected small worlds: perhaps a platformer on a circular planet or mini golf where you switch worlds. These ideas didn’t quite jell or seemed out of scope considering compo rules, and incremental games have been on my mind as well, so I ended up going in that direction (tho Planetary Golf seems like it has legs, might revisit it in the future).

Art Style

Entering the compo means that you have to make all of your own art and audio (with some very limited exceptions for fonts and brushes/samples, etc… that are suitably transformed). I’m not a particularly good artist, so I went with a watercolor artistic style that let me leverage materials for most of the impact, and created the actual art as simple RGB masks (outer border, inner border/outline, and fill color). I wasn’t going for realism but just something evocative of watercolors, with variations in opacity and splotichiness generated by a couple of noise samples operating in screen space so it looks coherent across objects.

Final Thoughts

I'm pretty happy with the outcome, especially after a few 'ascensions' of playing. If I had more time it would have been nice to perhaps slowly zoom out or adjust the scale as plants are placed (so when there are few each is larger), as right now the art is tiny and the patterns aren't super evident until a lot are planted, but the current impl. still works well with it being a small world. I still need some more practice to tackle the compo again next time, especially RE: learning to do simple music tracks.

I've uploaded a HTML5 build of Planetary Garden, go check it out.

No changes from the end-of-jam build, just upgraded from UE 4.15 to UE 4.16p3 and exported to HTML5.