Having been in a bit of a “gamedev slump” for the past 2 months, it was really great to participate in this ludum dare. I think that I did a MUCH better job than my first entry, and it’s great to feel like you’re “getting better” at stuff like this. This is just a quick post-mortem of my 48-hour compo game, Super Time Shoot.
The theme was much better for me this time than the last one (Minimalism). I had a lot of fun brainstorming ideas, especially using other interpretations of the word “seconds”:
-A dueling game where you have 10 “seconds”, as in people who fight for you. I scrapped this because it was pretty much a game with 10 lives, but it was a fun thing to think about.
-A silly game where you went back for 10 “second helpings”. I imagined a frogger-like situation where you had to go from your table to the food a bunch of times.
-A sort of turn-based strategy game with 10 moves, each representing a second in time.
-In general, if you’re talking real-time seconds, mechanics to implement the theme would be either something happens every 10 seconds, you only have 10 seconds to complete something, or the game only lasts 10 seconds.
I wanted to make an arcade game, since it seemed relevant to my platform of choice (Flash/Web), simple to execute, and fun to play. So… I ended up with Super Time Shoot, a mix of 2 of my favorite games, Geometry Wars and Super Crate Box. Every 10 seconds you get a new weapon, and the goal is just to survive as long as possible. It’s a top-down shooter that uses WASD to move and click to fire, very basic stuff. I used FlashDevelop with the Flixel framework, Audacity/Wavepad/bfgx for sound, and I generated all in-game visuals in-game (no image file assets). I think that Web is the best platform for Ludum Dares, since it’s super-easy to get people to play and download, and it’s very quick to put up. Not to mention that developing with Flixel is EXTREMELY easy.
I had a lot more planned, but I didn’t get started until Saturday afternoon. I wish I could have fit more weapons, more powerups, more enemies, more unlockable-type things, music, high scores, and better graphics, but that’s the entire challenge of the 48-hour comp! As it ended up, I had 3 enemy behaviors, 6 weapons, and 4 or 5 level layouts. Maybe I’ll make the game a bit fancier and try to get it up on some web portals.
Check out the game here, and see the screenshots below. How high of a score can you get?
