Hi
Oh man, so pleased with out entry! It looks and feels so juicy!
The game takes place on a spaceship that looks like it was built in RPGMaker. On board the ship there are rooms where crew members can stand, or do work, or surf the web. Throughout a game, the crew wander about, do their work, get bored, and surf the web for porn. You play as the caretaker AI, a little like HAL from 2001, only hopefully less… um… crazy.
I spent the first day and a half working out a system for having the crew find their way around the map. Basically I used dijkstra’s algorithm for shortest path, but instead of running it every time a crew member changed their destination, I ran it once at the beginning of the game… and the populated each tile with “sign-posts” pointing at all the important locations. The sign posts are invisible, of course, they are just data! They contain a single instruction, like “left to the bridge” and the crew just walks from tile to tile checking along the way. I really like this technique, and I’d like to use it someday to create actual procedural sign-posts on roads or something ^o^//
It was a pretty stressful jam, because along the way I rarely felt like we had a finished product. In a recent jam, #indiesvspewdiepie, I made a game using a more iterative, less destination oriented approach. What it meant was that I didn’t have a grand vision, but at each step of the way I felt like I had something that I could submit and call a game. This project didn’t look or feel like a game until, um, maybe half-way through today. That’s demotivating for sure, especially when, after the first day, all you’ve got is some dots navigating a grid and a half-finished tile-map. Fortunately I was working on a team as @zncatlaw, and everyone pulled their weight really well. When it started to come together, it felt great!
What we submitted is not as nuanced as what we set out to build, but it is still quite fun to click around in, and to see how long you can survive before your incompetent crew decides to overwrite you with more porn videos. The restriction “all on one screen” turned out to be really good for us! If it hadn’t been for that, we might not have been able to control scope as well as we did.
Go check out our game: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=42407
Thanks!
z.