And the game is done as of last night. I think this one went well, considering Justin didn't stop playing it for 4 hours after we finished.
It's a space economy simulation game. You the player must build a network of trading routes to move materials to factories and consumers.
Play in your browser!
Just starting the first real day of coding for the 30th Ludum Dare. I started off this jam thinking of making some kind of simulation game - something where you, in a relatively low-pressure environment, could build up a system or a network and watch it do its work, like SimCity.
Justin and I had a short brainstorming session when the theme - Connected Worlds - was announced. They say to never go with your first idea - however, after considering two-screen tower-defense games, games where dinosaurs are attacking the modern world, games with constellations (I really liked that one and I hope some other people do it), and meeting Kevin Bacon, we eventually went with just that. This will be a game where you build up an interstellar shipping empire, moving goods between planets.
I also wanted to try to make use of multiple windows or views, and that goes well with theme. We're pretty sure we know what we are going to do with them. Early screenshot:
The results are in from Ludum Dare #29. Fun being probably the most important category to me, I am quite happy with my rankings. I'm definitely improving over my scores from the last two jams, and I was happier with the game as well. The Dare had a record-breaking 2497 submissions this year.
| Coolness | 82% | |
| #64 | Theme(Jam) | 3.84 |
| #140 | Fun(Jam) | 3.42 |
| #211 | Mood(Jam) | 3.43 |
| #240 | Innovation(Jam) | 3.30 |
| #249 | Overall(Jam) | 3.39 |
| #316 | Audio(Jam) | 3.18 |
| #318 | Humor(Jam) | 2.70 |
| #485 | Graphics(Jam) | 3.07 |
During the judging period, I played 60-something games. You can find lots of "best-of" lists around - here are the best games I happened to play.
A few weeks ago, I participated in the 29th Ludum Dare. It has been a while, but not many posts, since I last participated in the Dare. The theme for this one was "Beneath the Surface".
I worked with Justin Britch on this one. We met just after the theme was announced to brainstorm. I really liked this theme - it evokes mystery and exploration, provides an easy setting (underground or underwater) to start with, and could simultaneously be tied into gameplay elements. While we thought it would have been a lot of fun to make "Ben Eath, the Surf Ace", we ultimately decided that we really wanted to go after the mystery, the thrill of exploration, fear of the unknown, and such themes. We also knew that we wanted to attempt to introduce some sort of narrative into the world.
The design was ambitiously scoped for a jam, and I'm happy I was able to turn out so many features.
The Good: Dedicating time during the development process for polish worked well for the game. When polish gets left as a task for the end of the jam, there's often no time to actually do it. I didn't leave a feature until it was in a state it could stay in.
I also didn't run into too many momentum-killer problems. I've worked on several smaller projects using HTML5 and ThreeJS over the past few months, so I knew some of its quirks and was able to work continuously without getting stuck on strange bugs, even though the codebase for Thunder Fish pushed way past the size of my previous HTML games. Familiarity is key for jams, and it definitely pays off in the ability to continue grinding out features.
Learned: Yet again, I completely failed to allocate time for audio. Fortunately, I was already in the Jam category for this one, so I pulled some free music from NGXmusical in the last hour. Sound effects could have improved the feel even further, though.
You can play The Legend of the Thunder Fish on the web!
Also some of the other Dare games, here: Ludum Dare 29.
Last weekend, I participated in the 27th Ludum Dare. For anyone who doesn't know, the Ludum Dare is a competition held a few times a year in which participants attempt to make a game in 48 hours. Games made for this Ludum Dare had to follow the theme "10 Seconds".
When I first heard the theme, I was a bit put off. I thought it was too shallow, too easy to just tack onto an arcade clone. Fortunately, many brilliant people proved me wrong. However, I opted to take the theme a little more laterally, interpretting "seconds" as a measure of distance based on global lat/lon coordinates. I thought, "what if there were only 10 square seconds of the earth left?" The earth would just be a really small section of the surface (about 300 ft on each edge) and a huge slice of the core dropping off into nothingness.
That sounded like a great setting for a survival-horror game, something I hadn't tried before. The design I ended up attempting to implement was very ambitious. Overall, I think this was a good plan, even though I certainly didn't get to everything I wanted to. I was considering and developing a lot of extra content for the game, rather than just taking the first few things I thought of and ending design because of scope. Of course, over-scoping is still a terrible thing, but by prioritizing things that needed to get done, I was able to still have a playable game after 48 hours even while not reaching all my goals.
I did neglect the gameplay aspect of the game a bit during this jam. Had I been able to implement some form of combat and developed the building mechanics more, the game would have become much more viable from a gameplay perspective. So perhaps the scope did kill me there. I ended up getting to explore ideas for creating ambiances and environments, though, and I think on that front it went fairly well.
You can play my entry here: The 91st Parallel.
