I’ve been anxiously awaiting the October Challenge this year. I wanted to join in on the fun last year, but I was way too busy back then. But I’m hoping nothing is getting in the way this year. Also, as of today I’m a full-time indie developer.

Before I get into what my game is all about, here is some back-story: I’ve grown up with strategy and simulation games like Sim City, Caesar or The Settlers and they have been and still are my favorite game genre. What I want to create is a peaceful strategy game which is not too complex for newbies, but not too simple for veterans. I had several prototypes in mind with different gameplay mechanics and what I settled on was a scenario in where the player has to build a settlement on sky islands.

Interestingly enough, I came up with the original sky island idea for LD #20 and after playing around with the idea for a bit, I decided to create a small prototype while I was at BIGJAM in Berlin. While I was not as productive as I hoped to be, I got the basics done and decided to stick with the prototype. All in all, I worked about three weeks on this game so far. If you want to know what happened so far development-wise, click here to be redirected to the development blog.

If you liked the screenshot, I uploaded a very short gameplay video to Youtube last month if are interested in how the game looks like in motion. I also want to mention that I’m not working alone on this: Christian Storcks is doing the music (a short preview of that is in the video I linked in the last sentence) and Jesse, a friend of mine, is helping me with some coding, in particular scripting and some backend stuff.

The game is going to be released for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. I am planning on starting pre-orders by October 21st and I hope someone will buy the game.

Hello folks, I will be participating in this MiniLD! But since making dialogue in Game Maker is kind of tough, I’ll probably just have a story in my game, The Struggle for Humanity. In this game that I’m working on with qwezc, you are of an ancient alien race that has to introduce new technology and ideas to the early humans. I’ve never really done something like this before, so I’m excited to see how this turns out!

Here’s an early screenshot:

oh god. I 100% want to make a rebirth of Republic … a political simulation. It will take place in vienna and i already extracted a smaller set of rules and am ready to go.

Not sure how to strap islands onto that pig, though. We’ll see…

Probably my least-finished LD entry (not counting ones I didn’t even start), Termites is the adventuresome tale of a small band of termites on a very small screen. All you can do is wander around and chew up grass, making termite babies with which to devour the couple of buildings onscreen.

It’s kind of entertaining to enjoy the simulation a bit. This ‘game’ cannot currently be downloaded anywhere in particular.

The People was written for the Growth theme, and in many ways it resembles my first two LD games—there’s the tiled world, and you can build things on it. Only in this case it looks more fancy due to some clever tile rendering. Like my two first LD games, it’s a puzzle game.

There’s seven levels of varying difficulty, with goals such as ‘reach a population of X’ or ‘get Y huts’, a sandbox mode, and a tutorial mode. While you build stuff, a simulation is going on where new people appear and so on. A good description of what you actually do is, as someone put it, playing a planetary engineer.

My ‘post mortem’ for the game was pretty much the following:

So how did the game turn out? Good, and bad. My first idea was a kind of God game where you created land and such and people appeared. And there was supposed to be a kind of currency, that I called belief. So I coded the tile system and the simulation first, then I started to try to get it into a game. Well, it didn’t work, or at least it didn’t work without very much job, so I dropped it (the game idea, not the simulation and that). So I figured out another game: You have a limited supply of different kinds of land, and you have objectives to complete. Then there’s supposed to be interesting levels that are fun and challenging. I fixed up a tutorial mode, and a sandbox mode. These are pretty cool. Then there was the levels. I managed to come up with a few OK ones, but then it went downhill. So I ended with 7 levels, of which some are OK. Most are pretty easy, you just have to wait a while. I’m not very happy about them. But on the whole, the game’s pretty OK.

If you’re to believe the unofficial results from my own vote counter, The People did indeed turn out OK, and placed first in ‘fun’ and second in ‘innovation’ and ‘production’.

You can get the Windows compo version, or the Linux port version. They require OpenGL with multitexture support.