What I learned with this LD is that 12 hours is not enough to develop a game, at least for me. For first day the competition my only progress was that I had the idea for a game in the theme of “Advancing Wall of Doom”.

My toughts during innovation followed path quite similar to this:

• What is the best known wall of the world? - The wall of china!
• How it may cause DOOM? - Of course it would have caused DOOM for all mankind if the chinese people hadn’t stopped building it! Sooner or later it would have covered entire face of the earth!
• The construction material for the “uber wall of china” would come from other human made constructs (cities and protective walls in my game) . The player tries to protect his cities by building his own walls (inferior to “uber wall of china” of course). Too bad that the hard working chinese workers can also use steal protective walls for building material, thus making the construction of their WALL OF DOOM even faster.
• The gameplay would have been an hybrid between Amiga game Masterblaster (the advancing “spiraly” wall) and the game classic Rampart (building your own walls using wall blocks not entirely different from tetris). The gameplay should be rather hectic and emphasizing on intuition rather than logic.

So what did I manage to complete in 12 hours. A lot, if you look back:

• I managed to set up dev enviroment on my secondary Ubuntu Jaunty box, consisting of MonoDevelop, SDL.NET, GIMP, Audacity, ffmpeg and others.
• I got a world with advancing china wall, (for now) invisible chinese workers, dwindling cities and basic wall placement rules.

I’m missing:

• Protective walls for players and mouse controlled way of placing them in Rampart style.
• Animated chinese workers who carry bricks from cities and player walls to their own wall.
• Score counting. Every tick with cities gives you points, when all the bricks from the city have been stolen to the chinese wall, points are no longer gained.
• Menu, hi-score and some sort of winnablility.

Perhaps I will complete game project later this week. Well see.

Video of the “toy” version of the still incomplete game (not playable or winnable):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn-EVAtI2xw

Timelapse of my 12h:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80kwKIIYsCk

After a long struggle to get it working, I finally have py2exe version of my game. This release also includes a bugfix to my library, which lets the game run on ATI hardware (the texture loader wasn’t enforcing power of two texture sizes).

Sorry it took so long, but I didn’t have much time to devote to LudumDare in the 2 days after the deadline and I had a really hard time getting PyOpenGL to work with py2exe (for details on how to make it work see my journal).

Here are links to the new release files:

GlobCombat 0.1.1 for Windows (6MB)

GlobCombat 0.1.1 for Linux (1.5MB)

Here’s my final entry for LudumDare 10:

GlobCombat-0.1.0 for Linux

This was my first LudumDare and I’m disappointed that I did not finish, but on the other hand I guess I’m also kinda surprised I got as far as I did. Most of the game logic and art is finished, but I didn’t have enough time left to add gameplay and polish stuff like a menu and highscore list. It is possible to run the game to see the artwork and play with the logic a bit (see doc/README for details).

My biggest mistake was spending 9 hours on trying to get A* graph search working (especially with about 2 years gone since the last time I touched that kind of stuff). Should have given up on that path and re-designed after 3 hours instead of 9 - then I might have had a playable entry.

I did learn a lot (and I am going to learn a lot in the coming weeks as I work to finish this game and to improve my library to make things easier for next time). It was fun in spite of the setback.

Here’s a screenshot from just before I started packaging it up for release: