I’ve spent about 18 hours on the game so far, minus sleep and meals with my wife, and  I’ve got a solid foundation.

The setup is currently:

1. You have a herd of buffalo that you control.
2. There is a field with grass that the buffalo will wander over and eat.
3. There are wolves that attack nearby buffalo, and can be stomped.
4. If the buffalo eat enough grass, a baby buffalo pops out. Whee.

In terms of time sinks, I wasted a few hours playing with a flocking algorithm, and spent a good chunk of time rewriting the original code into state machines, so I can extend functionality easily.

The next step was going to be evolution via special types of plants (Fireweed for speed, Cloudpuffs for buffalo wings, Rustleaf for durability). But I’m not quite sure what the goal of the game should be anymore. It was clear when I started (I’ll go into detail during the post-mortem), but … …. I really wish I had those hours back from the flocking fiasco. =)

Joyous Morale Rating: 5/10

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 25th, 2012 at 7:53 pm and is filed under LD #24. 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.