It appears I’ve made a grass growing simulator disguised as a game.

I’m okay with that.

Day 0:

This LD was announced at 6PM my time, which gave me just enough time to stew about how I wanted things to look and feel in game.  I’ve spent a lot of time working on tiny planetoid games.  I didn’t really want to do that again.

I had some friends over for DnD.  I didn’t have enough of an idea of what I wanted to do to go at it full time and was bushed from work anyhow; I doubt it hurt my schedule much.  I did my first art test with player animations and got some basic movement code working this night and that was all.  My concept work looked very game-like, but I hoped a more solid game idea would come to me after sleeping on it.

Day 1:

I spent a ton of time working on details this time around, which is a pretty weird thing to do in a 48 hour competition.  My first day of work was mostly art.

I animated flying cars zooming around skyscrapers and ant people handling deliveries in my cities.  Cities ended up doing little more than being bullet sponges in game.  Everything wobbles and rattles and it looks a bit silly.  I’m very happy with that part of things.

I gluttoned out on some deliciously catered barbecue at a picnic my wife organized for her math department colleagues.  I got food from an ice cream truck for the first time in years.  Bubblegum eyes are still troubling.

By the end of this day I only had my plants coded, but I’d arrived at a design I liked a lot: farm/protect plants, using the energy to heal and upgrade your cities, which in turn gave you classic shooter-style powerups.

Day 2:

I modeled and coded my enemies this morning and it quickly became obvious that I’d need to cut a lot.  I spent what time I could polishing the basics (movement, flying, respawning with a god ray that annihilates your enemies) since I figured that was about all I’d have by the end of the compo.  With three hours left I gave up on doing anything fancy with cities and turned things into a shooter where you got bombs by farming plants.  The bombs kind of suck and the plants end up giving you a ton of them.  In this case two wrongs kinda make a right.

I wish I had more time to tune things, but without the more complicated powerups I’d planned on from the outset I’d have a hard time balancing this in any meaningful fashion.

Thanks for the inspiration, everyone!  LD was a blast, as usual.  Happy 10th birthday, Ludum Dare .

You can check out Genesis’s Ludum Dare contest page here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 22nd, 2012 at 9:50 pm and is filed under LD #23. 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.