My first serious LD48 attempt. I decided to use XNA at the last moment, but I don’t have any base code at all so I’m starting completely from scratch. I will try to restrain myself from implementing robust, complex systems and instead just hack stuff together.

I’ve settled on a design. For now I’ll just say, your weapon is a virus. You use it to defeat the immune system of your victims. Sampling enemies’ DNA will allow you to adapt the virus and increase its potency. Due to time constraints it will probably end up being a twin stick shooter -_-

No screenshots yet. Getting there.

Done for the night, I think. Right now I have a title screen, a player with movement and shooting. I spent a lot of time getting friction/drag to work correctly and also wondering why moving in one direction was slowing me down in others. Another thing that preparing would have fixed. Lessons learned

As it stands now I feel very behind, but I’m excited to keep going.

The compo will be over in 1.5 hours. I’ve only spent about 2 hours working on my entry since Friday night. Nonetheless, I’m going to continue working on it. If I get something fun by the jam’s deadline, I’ll submit it there. Otherwise I will continue to update and release it when it’s done.

Since the last update I added a camera and I modified player projectiles to have some of the player’s velocity added to them. Next up is adding walls and enemies.

Several ways to go with this theme (You Are The Villain) popped into my head immediately.

• Reverse the role of a normal game. You build up your dungeon, hire henchmen, or something like that.
• The player finds out in some kind of twist that the main character is evil, either through obscurity or unwittingly.
• It’s all about perspective. One person’s hero is another’s villain.

I liked the idea that the main character isn’t necessarily evil. Maybe he’s only a villain due to perspective. So for now, the premise is that the character is on a long, solo space flight. He’s bored on his space ship, tinkering with designs/inventions on his computer. He tests them on inhabited planets he passes by. So I guess through some kind of puzzly/management mechanics you’ll design a virus, bomb, nanomachine or some other sort of trinket, where success is determined by how effective it is at destroying life on a planet. Maybe there will be a timer until you pass the next planet, and you have to finish your design by then.

I want the player to be able to walk around their ship to collect inspiration from various items they find. And I want them to be able to combine and alter their design in ways that are interesting, and not simply an optimization problem. That’ll be tricky.

I’m using javascript. And I guess sfxr and photoshop if I have time to do assets. I’ve never made a game in javascript before, and I don’t know the language very well. So I’m learning from these snippets from the book Foundation HTML5 Animation with JavaScript. I’ve never read the book, but they seem pretty great.

All of this is way too ambitious to do in a weekend considering my skill level. I’ll have to cut back a lot.

Tags: design, javascript