While trying to think of a decent game to make for the Weird/Unexpected/Surprise theme (a theme I had voted for, but never expected to win, so I never thought about any real game ideas before start), I sat down at wrote Banana Ship.

It’s not meant to be a real entry, but yet follows the theme quite well. If anything, it lacks in that it’s not much of a game, you just have to figure out what to do, and it’s not much of that either. It’s more like a short story, really, but you might enjoy it for a minute or so before it ends.

You materialize out of nowhere, and have no idea who you
are, or what you are expected to do.    

You are wearing a pink sheet cut into a really ugly robe.  

All around you are filled with nothingness, except for a
small, yellow banana, floating in the air right in front
of you.  

>

Right. Didn’t get any game done this time, but I give you a fabulous non-entry called Evening Journey.

Download Evening Journey. It’s for Windows and comes with source.

How to ‘play’
Get ship (red beacon) to the jump gate (strip of green/yellow dots). You can add a thrust with right mouse button. There’s a time line at the bottom where you can select what state to do an action in (only action is the thrust). There’s infinite random levels.

What would have existed
A challenge.
Pickups.
More kinds of actions.
Actions limited by pickups.
Increasing difficulty on levels.
Levels connected so you can go back to previous level and get different pickups.

Stay tuned for post mortem tomorrow.

Really, my LD9 entry was my crowning acheivment. I originally had some grand schemes to dominate the competition with a distributed networked web based magic thing. Those schemes amounted this:

All things considered, I placed fairly well.

The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands is a game made within 14h for the LD8 Swarms compo. However, it was never really entered into the compo, because I felt it wasn’t quite enough, but also couldn’t figure out how to make something more of it. In the end, I abandoned it, and instead used it as a base for Ultra Fleet, which I did enter. This might not have been the best of decisions, but no matter.

You navigated your hat swarm around islands to destroy dancers that tried to defend the islands, while at the same time trying to avoid the deadly dances that was danced at you.

The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands prime features was an intro, an island generator (that I later used as a base for rather prettier islands), the famous Hoids algorithm that simulates hats in groups flocking behaviour (later adopted for the fleets in Ultra Fleet), stick figures, and a lot of dancing. Strangely, it was also my very first LD game (together with Ultra Fleet) that didn’t use tiles.

There’s no dedicated distribution for The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands, but you can get it as the bonus in the Ultra Fleet compo version. It’s for Windows, but if you’re a bit clever, you can probably compile it for Linux. It requires OpenGL with 512×512 sized textures support.