This LD (like LD20) I decided to make an adventure sort of game. Not an arcade game like I usually make, but something that involves a big space to move around in.

Needless to say, I failed both times. The first time because I tried to write an efficient tile map renderer from scratch, and the second because I got caught up in making my chunked, randomly-generated map work while avoiding floating-point inaccuracies.

A randomly-generated house. I spent way too long on this.

So, after a particularly nasty bug involving the doors and still not having collision, I decided to scrap that project about 6 hours before the deadline and make a different one.

This new project, Asteroids: Alone Edition is what happens when you take the theme too literally and apply it to an old game. Simply put, it’s asteroids minus the asteroids. Well, except the main menu, where the AI plays.

I finished it up in about four or five hours, and submitted early.
…Success?

(Most of that time was spent tweaking the AI. Make sure not to ignore it when you play my game!)

Play my entry, Asteroids: Alone Edition.

Or play the original, unfinished project, Return to Solitude (Controls: WASD, hold shift to run.)

today i found an abandoned apartment complex. thick doors, locks to hard to pick. not problem, likely no food in rooms anyway

lobby had stuff, though:

• 7x water bottle
• 2x polaroid camera (wtf?)
• 5x fritos chili cheese [-1, breakfast]
• 4x potato chips
• 2x snickers
• more ruined in vending machine
• wrench
• !!!screwdriver set!!!

no enemy presence found. maybe in the rooms, but I listened at all the doors and didn’t hear anything. not worth the noise to bash them in either, since i can’t pick the lock

getting cold, got to find a place with windows left. don’t want to have to return to house G. don’t want those memories

ate this for breakfast. note to self: get a better camera

i feel so alone

I was curious which theme would win based on the total votes they got in the previous rounds. So I put them in a google doc, sorted them, and guess which came out on top…

KITTENS!

Wait a sec… the numbers… oh. I had it sorted in ascending order.

Unfortunately, it appears that random generation wins based on previous votes, but I hope this prediction turns out to be false.

I like making games that use random generation, but that’s exactly the point. My games already always have random generation, so this theme does nothing for me. If this theme wins, it’ll be a boring contest for me. Secondly, I bet that artists wouldn’t like it much, because random generation is something that you have to code/logicize/whatever. Although I’m sure a few things could be done with art style for random generation, it doesn’t really seem fair in that regard. There is a third reason that essentially disqualifies it, but I won’t mention that, because it’s kind of too late.

I got a message about this from a friend, in fact… maybe it will convince you.

“There are consequences for this evolution of theme voting… alone will randomly generated be the antihero of decay, for only in a parallel universe, in some forgotten place, will the mechanism of my dreams shape-shift into the territory where, upon reflection, the self-replicating fall towards a theme travels in time with me, to the tunnel of the conscious world. Then… then the teleporting moon-kittens strike, their underground movement taking force.”

He has a thing for bolding words. He’s weird.