I present to you ladies and gentlemen, my first game on Ludum Dare and the first game I make in my life! BLOCKVOLVE!!

Title screen

It’s funny because the theme of this LD is evolution, and my concept had an evolution. It began with a space pong where the objective is to evolve a star (the ball) by making it hot (by batting it between the paddles), but I thought it wasn’t a good concept. Then I thought another one: a plant who evolves when it catch CO2 and sunlight with its leaves, and water and nutrients with the roots, but you have to avoid the bad gases and pesticides (OldGame class in source code).

The initial ideia

Evolving the plant

When I was programming this concept, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to complete on time if I didn’t simplify it. At this point I remembered on the very first concept, the space pong, and I had an idea: a block who evolves, an idea who evolved into BLOCKVOLVE.

The result

How it works:

It’s very simple, your block has to catch the white balls to evolve and avoid the black balls. Sometimes you will have to catch smaller black balls to catcher bigger white balls, and yet sometimes it will be impossible to not catch the black balls, and you will have to avoid the bigger and the smaller and count on your luck!

Tools:

• Eclipse IDE;
• Java + Slick2D;
• MS Paint;
• sfxr;
• jarsplice.

What went right:

• I aimed low because that was my first game, yet the coding was harder than I expected, but fortunately I was able to code it in time;
• I am very glad with the gameplay, I think I managed to convey the experience that I wanted;
• The sounds blended well with the action, and the pictures showed a atari-like aspect.

What went wrong:

• Unfortunately I could not finish the difficult selection mechanic on main menu (it’s in the source code but incomplete);
• I wanted to create a high score mechanic which recorded the lowest time, but didn’t even started it;
• I tried to bundle the JVM on the executables, but by the time I was exporting the .jar I just had 30 min before the end of the LD, and I didn’t even had created my dropbox account.

It was an amazing experience, I had moments of joy, sorrow and angry, had little sleep but was very excited and determined to complete the game, it really worth it, I am proud of the result.

Now it’s time to look forward to LD25!!

This entry was posted on Monday, August 27th, 2012 at 10:44 am 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.