Best of luck to everyone! First time L. Daring here.

Let’s see how Scirra’s Construct 2 can compete with all the other engines people will be using. I may also use some comunity plugins/behaviours, hope that’s ok :D.

Have fun everyone!

Finally, a proper idea that doesn’t involve “Do X in 10 sec”.

How it went so far: Just woke up (Europe here… the compo started at 4-5 AM, I don’t even know), and spent about 30 minutes on “how to make 10 seconds solid?”, “Can I make a 10 second energy bar?”, “Checkpoints every 10 sec?” until I figured out that all of these ideas were just fancy energy/mana bars you would consume in 10 seconds.

Idea 2: I want to control something for 10 seconds, and I want it to be meaningful and complex, I want the player to care for something for 10 seconds. So how about a lemmings style game where new “lemmings” are spawned and they only live for 10 seconds and you have to take them to safety in that time?

Refining: You get a 5×10 grid with blocks (a road) that have orders and special effects (go down from here, go left from here, you are slowed here, teleports etc). They change randomly and you get a set of actions to move/destroy/replace any of them. How many 10 second lemmings can you get to the other side.

Should be interesting since this map you keep changing (and changes randomly) is persistent. Complex paths could emerge and what you do at the 2nd unit could have huge impact for the 5th :D.

Let’s do this thing!

(Any feedback?)

Alright, first day’s over, here’s how it went:

Didn’t create anything for the first 15 hours of the competition (was not at home ). Blasted amazingly through the next 5 hours and made an almost fully working prototype, yey! Gameplay seems to be solid so far but plenty of bugs are still hanging around.

Here’s a little development teaser (hope the image looks reasonable, Windows on a high DPI screen is horrible, but my only option right now):

Everything here though, is prototype graphics, nothing is final and all was done inside Construct 2 (yeah, final images will be made in something more pro, probably GIMP, no time to install Photoshop right now). Also, I haven’t touched a bit of sound… hope SFXR and Garageband will be enough. Sound is not my strong point.

All’s going good, about 2-3 hours left on coding gameplay (almost everything went smooth so far, not a lot left to implement), 1 hr for instructions and main menus, maybe 1 hr for some highscores, and everything else – sleep and content creation.

Tomorrow morning I hope to post a prototype for you guys to play with while I create content, maybe some balancing would be nice to do.

Yey! Everything is working.

Nooo, the game is not nearly as fun as I expected. I can either make it way too easy, or way too hard. I really gotta do some balancing… maybe the random generator, timing (when it’s not forced at 10 seconds). It’s gonna be a pain to get to a sweet spot where the difficulty curve is right.

I’ll leave that for later, now to go actually make graphics so I have something that looks nice, not just something that works.

The contest is over, but porting is still cool and ongoing. For anyone who enjoyed playing 10 Second Paths you now have download links for Windows, OSX and Linux ports of the Web game!

Next up, porting for iOS and Android.

One more thing I learned as part of LD, even after a project is over you still need to upload it everywhere, manage your website, write blog posts, handle some PR. The contest still rocks after it finished!