I am a student at a small liberal arts college and am enrolled in a game development course. Our final for this class included a submission to Ludum Dare, and what fun it was! Making a game, which was something that neither I nor my peers had attempted yet, in a weekend was exhilarating, to say the least.

Initial Design Brainstorm

When the topic went live at 8 p.m., my partner and I were baffled. “An unconventional weapon? What does that even mean?” A Google search or so later, we decided to NOT make a game about nukes. Wanting to make something that wasn’t overtly about combat, we decided on a platformer. But what would be the players weapon? “The world,” my partner said. And thus, our game was born.

The player had the unique power of being able to create platforms in the world around him in order to assist him in reaching his goal. But! Enemies would spawn, and the player might need to use the energy that he would otherwise use to help him move to survive. Thus, the player faces an interesting energy economy problem while playing.

What Worked?

We were able to get all of our features added into the game by some miracle, minus some physics bugs (sorry). The game felt good to us, we certainly enjoyed playing it. We ran into the problems that we expected players to in general: running out of energy killing an enemy and then not being able to make that last platform to reach the goal, the frustration of being backed into a corner and surrounded when we erected defenses.

Overall, we were happy with the feel of our game.

What didn’t?

Alright, so the player, aside from having to understand how to win the level, has to manage a few abilities. Creating and destroying platforms, along with enemies coming at you constantly out of nowhere, all whilst scrambling to reach the goal can be overwhelming. The game isn’t paced well right now. There are only three levels, and the player is forced to learn so much at once that Koichi Hayashida would cringe. You kind of just get dropped into it head first and told to sink or swim, which I’m sure makes you seasoned game devs cringe.

At times, the controls feel bad. There were some control abuses earlier on in development that allowed the player to move in a manner that made the platform-making aspects of the game useless. However, we managed to get most of them out, but some still made it into our last cut (shout-out to infinitely jumping using the ‘w’ key). Our work-around for one abuse in particular that allowed the player to move a ludicrous distance laterally is a lateral movement cap while you’re in the air, but this doesn’t feel natural. It kind of feels like you’re hitting your face on a wall that doesn’t exist.

Future Work

My diction might make it sound like we’re through with this game, but our work is actually far from over. Aside from things that I mentioned previously, we need to:

• add sound effects
• add animations (creating, destroying, aiming)
• work on a unity of aesthetic
• add more levels (in part to add content, and also to pace the game better)
• a few more features (rotating platforms, if we can find a way to do it that’s ‘light’ for the player)

Final Remarks

Altogether, I’d mark this Ludum Dare as a success. It was fun participating, and I’m proud of our game, flaws and all. Looking forward to participating again in the future!