This is my team’s first full-size Ludum Dare competition. This is also the busiest weekend we’ve had in months. Funny how that coincides; life hates us.
Artist – Stuck on a fishing trip Friday/Saturday, home late Monday.
Musician – Unable to make team meeting due to family issues and lack of ride.
Lead Designer – Friend’s birthday party to attend, college assignments, and campus job to attend to.
Programmer – Stuck at home waiting on assets. ;__;
First tip: Make plans in advance, don’t be surprised when those plans collapse a week before the LD.
The theme was announced, “Evolution.” I squirmed in my chair a bit out of dislike for the theme. Rush home, get on Skype, no one’s on. *facepalm* When I got everybody in one chat, we got to planning. Odd as it is, the first idea that was shared ended up being our final choice. Plenty of ideas were vented in our chat, but the problem was that I can almost guarantee that all of them were thought of by someone else, as evolution doesn’t make for as much originality as you would think.
Examples: (I’ll link to games that were made using ideas that had been thrown out in our chat)
“I’ve an idea where we take some kind of basic game, and have the art and music evolve as the player progresses. The only caveat is that a similar game has been done before, by the name of Upgrade Complete”
“We could make a funny game showing how some evolved animals would fail miserably laughably bad”
“An AI could evolve”
“Maybe, a man of some sort creates a cyborg. Half human half robot or half animal half robot, which ever one. And as the game goes on it evolves and turns on the player.”
“Maybe the player could evolve in some way, not the character they’re playing, but the player themselves”
“like lets say the music evolves ranging from who knows when to today different guitars or sounds from your guitar, up to modern music. Make like a music game based on that or something, idk.”
All of that has been done. I just know it.
Second tip: Go for the most original idea.
We went back to the idea of a breeze becoming a depression and later a category 5 hurricane. This was unique and also had a grassroots feel to it. Our team being based in Louisiana, no one was more qualified to make a hurricane game. Also it was the only game that made its own pun.
“going from a wind to a hurricane, and we could call it The Winding of Isaac (for those not in the know, Isaac is the hurricane that’s supposed to hit us in the next few days)”
The original plan was to make the game follow from an original breeze caused by something or other in the Atlantic all the way to a Category 5 Hurricane hitting the Gulf of Mexico area and use the “music evolving” idea to let the music help show how powerful you’re becoming. Yeah, that didn’t happen.
Third tip: If you can’t do everything, take what you can and make it nice.
From the start, we knew the idea of going from a light breeze just wasn’t going to happen with our artist out of town, not to mention the difficulty of planning. So we skipped forward to the final stage of the game where you’re a hurricane going from Category 1 to Category 5. Once it was planned, work began. The hurricane ended up in game pretty quick, and it rotated (backwards, *facepalm*), and I added a random background, just so I could see the movement of the hurricane relative to the map.
The hurricane was intended to (and does, if you’re super good at our super bad game) grow with the amount of water you gained, and that would be represented by the background scaling up or down rather than the hurricane growing on the screen, considering how much real estate it needed to look proper. We used the scaling of the hurricane itself as an attempt to reference how high/low you are in the sky.
Fourth tip: Developer graphics.
If for whatever reason, like in our case, your artist is unavailable and is the holdup in the development process, don’t sit there and do nothing. Make some garbage art that no one will see but you. You’re not doing it for the final game, you’re doing it so that you can move forward. Instead of jumping over the hurdle, you just gotta plow through it and stand it back up later. This is the fatal flaw of our game. I relied too heavily on the hope that our artist would be able to do a decent amount of work in a decent amount of time.
This led to two crucial features to the play of the game being broken/missing. The first, fronts, would have added challenge and variety to the game, through the use of strong winds blowing your hurricane left/right, making it go faster/slower, making it spin faster/slower, and changing hurricane height all based on what front hit where and what direction it was facing.
The second, and most important to the “gameness” of our game, was the endgame. With no end game showing the destruction your hurricane wrought, you just fly right on through the top of the map, never to be seen again. With no end game, there was no scoring system beyond the water count and speed that you’ve managed to achieve. The whole thing just ended up being a lot of concept and not a lot of play.
A word from our artist: “I would like to say working on the artwork for a couple hours before the deadline was very pressuring but I enjoyed being part of the team and will be making a port for this game.” Expect his GameMaker/HTML5 port to be a post-competition build.
PS: This post contains just under 500 characters less than all the code used for the game. Props to Corona SDK for making game development that easy.