Well I’m been putting this off for a while but I might as well do it now.

This past LD was quite the challenge for me, especially the theme, I found myself unmotivated by the fact that the theme more or less dictated most of the gameplay, thus more or less disallowing me to go about my usual “wing-it” strategy. I had this idea for a game pop into my head the night before the compo as I was about to fall asleep, and I was really hoping for “Hidden depths” or whatever to win so that I could use it. My mistake was probably getting so excited about that one idea, and as a result, when I got the actual theme I was too disappointed to bother looking further into the theme. I went for a walk and got an idea as to how I would make my game concept work with the theme, and got really excited. The idea was that your character would get parts from enemies and would then craft weapons out of said parts. The idea quickly died as I realized I’d be spending my whole 48/72 hours fighting the inventory system. Once again moping about, I noticed Hamumu had posted some of his ideas for anyone to use, and, desperate as I was I read away.

One of his ideas, which I don’t remember at this time, sparked an idea in my mind: Have turrets shoot circuit boards that power electric gate things! It wasn’t much, but I figured I could cram it into my game concept from the night before. And then I started work on D3SCENT.

It was interesting to make a game that focused on storyline first, game mechanics second, as I almost always do the opposite, “Oh, here’s the engine, time to staple on a couple lines of humorous dialogue”. I quickly realized that for D3SCENT to be a success I’d need to focus on story first, which ended up being true, once I had the story in place I was able to create the ambiance and world it called for, and meant I didn’t have to go back and tweak the whole world to make it fit with the storyline.

I’m very happy with my end result, heck, it got featured on Byetjacker, but I’m tired of fighting with and for gamemaker. I should be getting flash CS5 sometime soon, so I’ll try working with that a bit. Though I’ll probably have to stick with GM for the next LD or two until I’m comfortable with flash.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 30th, 2010 at 2:07 pm and is filed under LD #18 - Enemies as Weapons - 2010. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.