Initially I wasn’t too thrilled about the theme, but I think I came up with an idea that I like.

While brainstorming, I kept coming back to the idea of a tiny micro-organism swimming though a vast ocean. There is tons of life around it, but the scale of everything is so tremendous that it could just swim and swim and never find anything else.

I rejected this idea a few times because I thought it would feel too similar to flOw. I think I’ve come up with a unique take on it though.

You’ll play the game as a little amoeba creature, all alone in the enormous ocean. You have to collect food. Once you collect a certain amount of food you have enough energy to spawn a new creature. The type of creature that is created depends on the types of food you eat.

I really want to make this feel open-ended and exploratory, but again I fear that it will end up feeling like a flOw rip-off, so we’ll see how it goes. I might end up adding a time limit or enemies or something else that will end the game.

Progress has been pretty good so far. 4.5 hours in and I’ve prototyped the basic logic and movement. Tomorrow I will try to refine the gameplay ideas and start working on some art and sounds hopefully.

Here’s some ugly placeholder art:

See you in the morning!

This entry was posted on Friday, December 16th, 2011 at 11:25 pm and is filed under LD #22. 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.