Well, this takes me back a lot. Hi, I'm Saithir and this is ~~my first blog post! ;)~~ my first try at Ludum Dare.

Currently I'm a Ruby on Rails programmer for my day job, and game developeent has been my hobby for a while now, even working for a while at a company making HTML5 games. You can check out the stuff I've done either on my webpage (for older stuff) or on my Itch page for playable versions of my own ones. They're nothing special really, but they're mine and they're playable - and that IS a big thing.

April was pretty slow for me in the gamedev regard, as I've had a lot of other commitments and stuff happening in my life, so I couldn't really focus on doing anything. LD is a good means to keep up with my One Game a Month plan. :)

I'm going to be trying for the Compo of course, seeing as I don't have a team anyway ;) There will be Unity3d involved, as well as Pyxel Edit, Bfxr and whatever else I need.

As it turns out, my unusually optimistic outlook on doing the Ludum Dare was completely unfounded. That's what I get for trying to be optimistic for once. Lesson learned, though - next time I should only announce my participation after the theme is selected and, what's even more important, after I come up with some decent enough idea for a game involving the theme.

After spending a whole day trying to brainstorm anything, I haven't even opened the Unity editor once. It was pretty obviously pointless, so I am dropping out of this one.

All the ideas I came up with today were of two kinds. First one was pretty crap, too complicated or simply unfun after I've started writing it down. I went through a few of these and scrapped every one of them.

Second type was just to do whatever basic thing comes to my mind anyway - probably some sort of Super Mario Galaxy ripoff with spherical gravity or whatever.

That's okay to do, but I know that I'm not a decent enough artist to produce anything sensible in a small time window like LD requires. Yeah, I know, programmer art is supposed to be enough. It's not enough for me, which is what matters most. Especially when I browse Twitter afterwards and see all these amazing looking games people are making.

So, since now I have only about 24 hours left (which would include sleep and other things, so realistically it's more like 10 hours), it's quite pointless to continue trying to do anything, really.

You folks have fun, and I'll spend the rest of the weekend playing Witcher 3 and Overwatch.

The previous Ludum Dare (which was my first try at it) was a complete letdown for me - I've failed to come up with any decent idea for the theme and I've spent most of the weekend trying too hard to make something - ANYTHING - work, which not surprisingly, didn't work well. Or at all. Well this one hopefully comes out a bit better - at least I have some sort of an idea already and I've started to actually make something working in Unity.

My game is Exodus: Fleet Commander.

I had the basic idea about making a game similar to FTL, but more focused on managing a fleet of ships, rather than one ship and it's few crewmembers. The bigger scale should allow for some interesting decisions for the player - limited resources, attacks from enemies and managing the fleet should all be part of it. Kind of like Battlestar Galactica, but with a bit less politics and religion. Maybe.

What I've just described is NOT this game, though. That game might at some point come out of this one, but for Ludum Dare it needs to be much more focused.

So, "running out of power". This is something that I can pretty easily imagine being included as part of the bigger game.

Your fleet is pretty much stranded in a remote sector of space with your fuel resources running low. You're the commander, how will you proceed? Will you strip the fuel from the other ships, so your flagship can survive and move on? Will you try to scout for fuel in nearby systems, risking attack from the enemies (and scouting uses fuel too, so you can't do it indefinetly)?

How will your fleet survive?

And it's alive!

Since in my timezone the time is switfly approaching midnight and I need to go to work tomorrow morning, I've had to finish the game a bit early. But it works.