Hiya!
First of all thank you for another Ludum Dare. This was my 5th and its been a blast like every other in the past. My entry for LD34 is Drone Racer.
I think we can all agree to some extent that the theme for LD34 was a little bit weird. On top of that having two themes makes it even more confusing. Sometime I brainstorm about theme one and other times theme two. I even tried to mix the two themes together hoping that I will come up with an idea that somehow involve both themes. I can assure you now it was a very bad idea. But for some mysterious reason my brain just wants to combine the two themes together. I lost couple of hours in the beginning arguing with myself which theme should I focus on. In the end, as you may have probably noticed in my compo entry none of the two themes were clearly reflected. Oh well…
In every Ludum Dare I participate, I try to experiment with new mechanics and gameplay ideas. My first idea was to fly a drone in a high security facility and steal vital intel without getting detected. The drone is equipped with smart technology that can hack into any remote device. For the sake of theme/simplicity, one button allows you to hack open the doors and the other button allows you to hack into the security cameras and pause them off for limited amount of time. Every time you perform one of those two hacking actions the global threat level grows, guards become more and more vigilant and it takes slightly more time to hack into successive devices. There you go both themes are covered, my brain wins. Yayy. Now its time to write code.
Before calling off my first night, I was able to fly a drone in an empty space. It was a decent progress. I prepared a big list of all the tasks I had to do the next day before saying good night to my computer. I kept pondering in my sleep if the game is still doable or not, both asset and code wise. In any case I have to re-evaluate it again the next morning. As I was going through the list of tasks I have to accomplish in the next 36 hours, I felt that the scope of this idea is way bigger than I originally expected. Producing all the assets that could deliver the right mood and compelling gameplay will be a challenge. Since I suck at art anyway, it’ll be harder and more time consuming for me to create all the assets within such a short period of time. I steered away from it for a while and thought what else I could do that involve minimum art. Lately I have developed an obsession about owning a drone and hoping to take part in some sort of drone racing (just for fun) in the near future. Thats when Drone Racer came to life. Although I was tempted to make a two player split screen drone racing game but my previous game jam experiences reminded me that if you want people to play and enjoy your jam game it has to be single player. Racing with bots is not much fun so I turned myself towards making it a challenge based game. And voila, here is Drone Racer equipped with six unique challenges, each grows in difficulty than the previous one. Every challenge focusses on various aspects on drone maneuvering capabilities.
This looked more achievable compared to my original idea and equally fun. I sat down to work and the next thing I know “its time to submit”. The compo was over and I didnt even realize where all that 36 hours went. I was feeling proud and accomplished. Once again I did not failed. Things turned out great and I had a game. One more fun filled weekend came to an end. Now its time to get away from my computer and see if the world around me still exist :D.
If you haven’t played and rated Drone Racer yet, please do it before the rating period is over :D. Thanks for playing!!!
Till Next Time!
Anshul