I ended up making a Missile Command clone. I wasn’t expecting that, but the Ludum Dare can take you in some odd directions.  I was really dragging my feet Friday night and Saturday morning. I had a concept almost immediately, just getting around to it felt like a chore. However, once I started, I began coding like a madman. I started at 11 am Saturday and finished by 2pm Sunday, enough time to work on refining the art, playtesting, and adding a boss spacecraft.

This game is set on a small spinning planet with 12 turrets. It’s slow-paced at first, then ramps up after a few rounds. Like Missile Command, you try to create explosions in the path of oncoming missiles.

It was originally going to be a 2-player Missile Command set between two pinwheel-shaped worlds (I called it Pinworlds, the inhabitants would have been called pinheads). I didn’t have time to implement a second player, however, so I just wrote this simple AI that drops missiles at a steadily increasing rate.

I was pretty deleious by the end, making stupid spelling mistakes and embarrassing errors in the code. E.g, not killing the boss spheres would prevent the game from continuing at all. Also, the boss’ rockets would become stuck inside its collider, causing a thousand explosions to generate inside of it in an instance, but without killing it off.

The game is divided into “rounds”, each round has one additional rocket from the previous round. A boss spawns every 5 rounds. The goal is to survive for as long as possible before your planet is inevitably destroyed. Similar to Missile Command, there is no real endgame despite defeat.

So, here is Spinworld! Let me know what you think. You can also follow me on twitter @MichaelPConsoli, and check out my other game Against the Wall (which was my LD 20 project).

I’ve been working on this game non-stop since 11 this morning. It is basically two-player Missile Command set on the rim of  rotating disc worlds. The rim is divided into four sections. Each section has three turrets that hold 16 missiles each. The player can rotate their world so that another section is at the top, in the playable area. This is useful for when the player runs out of ammo or their turrets are destroyed.

At the top of the screen will be another player’s world, firing downward (I may just have everything horizontally aligned, a planet on the left and the other on the right). Rather than have Missile Command’s cities, the world itself will have a health meter. As more and more missiles strike the ground, the atmosphere will become a dark shade of red.

Also, pixels surrounding the crosshair will give you info on the turrets that are out of sight, which ones are destroyed or out of ammo, etc. I may make the world into a regular sphere rather than a disc, but that’s just an art decision. The coming day will really be about implementing the second player, and rudimentary AI.

Unity, Inkscape, GIMP, and Blender have been used so far. I will also employ bFxr for some sounds.