Good morning. A little update. Yesterday I added The Dark Tower (player starting base) and tree zappers (drain trees for power and for simply draining trees).

After that, I wasted a lot of time on how the wall of decay etc should progress, only to ending up with something that wouldn’t work. So I’m still thinking about that. I could spend some time describing what didn’t work, but I’m not going to. Instead here’s a screenshot showing how the decay thing for the ground would look (the tree decay in this shot is just for testing purposes).

Now I have some thinking and showering to do. And breakfasting.

This was my first attempt at a Ludum Dare, and in some ways my best entry. I still think I aimed too low for the game, I think this may be why I havn’t done so well in others, I’ve aimed too high overcompensating for this one.

The competition version of the game required two players on the one keyboard to play, limiting the number of people who could use it. It turned out that, after the compo, it only took an hour or two to make a workable AI player. I should have pushed for it in the 48 hours. Instead I had a go at network play, I did get a sort of game running networked but it ran like crap. I played a game against a friend in australia during the compo 48 hours but I was still on dial-up so it was never going to be a good look. I ended up stripping it all out again.

The game itself was quite simple. There is a dark player in a light universe and a light player in a dark universe. You can shoot at the walls of your univers to make it larger (while reducing the enemy universe). The object of the game is to get your ‘gribblies’ home. The gribblies have an incredibly basic movement behaviour that everone complimented as being far more clever than they actually were. You help the gribblies home by cutting paths for them to travel.

A post compo version of the game with AI and a few more features is available here

All up this game was qute fun to play, I still play it from time to time. My daughter, fiance, and nephew all like it so I’m happy.