I thought I would make a post just to see how this whole thing works. This will hopefully be my first Ludum Dare. Barring any emergencies.

I’m planning to do an HTML/JS based web game. Very possibly with a ukulele soundtrack. The pictures will be grotesque. I might use Phaser, but I’m thinking of going with copying various enginey bits from my previous games like Ping-Pong Spider Mother and keeping the framework count low.

Should be fun. I think I would be happy with the Snowman theme.

So I woke up early this morning to get started (given the theme was announced at 2am last night in the UK I thought it was smarter to get a good nights sleep and begin in the morning. I spent breakast scrawling 8 pages of notes and ideas. I’ve settled on a game which is currently called “Matriline”. The tag line is “Eat, Shit and Give Birth”.

It is a sort of mix between an arena platformer and tower defence. You play a single mother on a desert island (I suppose). You have to grow food to eat, defend the trees from animals, go to the toilet sometimes (which fertilizes the trees) and every year you get the opportunity to have a baby with one of the island’s native men. Once the baby is born, you control the child and the mother slips into dotage. Children take after their parents, so picking a mate who is stronger or can jump higher will give your offspring an advantage.

If this sounds crass and awful, then I hope it will live up to your expectations.

So far I have a tilemap being loaded and the character moves about. Lots left to do clearly, and I’m most worried about all the animations, but hopefully something will come together by tomorrow night.

So a bit more progress while I stop for tea and biscuits.

There are trees in the level now, and you can eat fruit from them to replenish your hunger meter. At the top of the screen is your characters health, and below it a meter to show how hungry they are. In this screenshot i would be dead because my hunger went all the way.

Progress is going ok, although I think it’s a little slow since I was hoping to get all the mechanics in today. I still need to do mating, pregnancy and all the animals who eat your food. Lets see how it goes.

I’m calling it a day after about 17 hours work. Didn’t get quite as much done as I would have liked, but I think the progress I have is good and I should be able to get something fun out of this tomorrow.

Good night internet friends!

My current bug list.

I’m also thinking of changing the name from Matriline to Single Mother Desert Island Simulator, or something like that.

It’s going fairly well now I think. The main thing I still need to add is the animals, giraffes and hyenas. I think I’ll leave birds and monkeys out. Giraffes eat apples from the trees and can be shooed away. Fences will keep them out too, but they will damage and eventually break down the fence. Hyenas are attracted by corpses and will attack you and the old women. Clearly they are very dangerous. You need to bury your dead to stop the hyenas and generally keep away from them while they are around since you can’t fight them. Monkeys and birds were only ever intended to be fruit eaters, but harder to keep out, so I don’t think it’s that bad not to have them.

Big things left to do are music and sound effects and a better introduction / tutorial system. These will sadly be last on the list, but hopefully will get done too.

We’re on the home stretch people!

My game is sort of fun to play now. There are giraffes who eat your fruit, and you can shoo them away, which is quite fun. Keeping everything in mind is challenging, and absorbing. I’m pretty happy with how it’s turned out so far.

I still want add in the hyenas, to add an element of danger. This will spice up the late game and also the sections when you are a child too. But if I have to choose between hyenas and a tutorial system I think I will go with the later. Right now there are way to many actions and combinations to expect anyone to be anything but confused when they start the game. I need to have some hints floating around so people can actually enjoy it.

I also want to do music, but that is last hour type of stuff. Currently thinking I’ll throw in some SFXR noises for the actions and try to bust out a few minutes of ukulele as a bedding track.

This has been really tiring, but quite rewarding too. See you on the other side.

We’re using a wave function collapse library for unity to generate random levels based on a hand drawn pattern and 5 different tiles. Link: https://github.com/selfsame/unity-wave-function-collapse