Before I start, PLAY IT HERE
TOOLS USED:
ENGINE: GAMEMAKER
ART: ASEPRITE/PHOTOSHOP
SOUND: Zoom H3 and a printer
MUSIC: Korg Volca Sample, AUDACITY
I started this Ludum Dare late, with only 30 hours to complete a compo game I had to think quickly. Shape-shifter. Shifting shapes. I came up with the idea of a game where you work an office job coming up with shapes for clients. This seemed like a fun idea and I gauged that the most difficult part would be coming up with this:
The drawing mechanic.
The drawing-shapes mechanic. How wrong I was, I had this done in 4 hours and of course had prematurely patted myself on the back. The tough part was coming up with a way to gamify this mechanic. I wanted the client to be able to specify the number of sides, whether you could cross lines, provide an image for you to copy,
(like one of spider-man, CREDIT)
Unfortunately, my basic knowledge of geometry and trigonometry soon told me that the equations for working out whether 15 lines are crossing each-other were too complicated for my simple mind and computer-vision is particularly difficult to implement in gamemaker in 48-hours. So I settled for two checks, right number of sides for a shape, and distance of the first and last points to check that the shape is joined up. After a brief crisis of realisation, I had to come up with a way to make my mechanic work as a game without having the complicated checking algorithm so I introduced the manager:
He’s a very demanding manager.
He was inspired by JJJ from the spider-man series. I was rather proud of his speaking animation with the moving cigar. He was supposed to give pithy comments on your artwork but once again, I was running out of time with that one so I decided to go a bit left-field after another existential crisis:
Enter the robot:
The manager had a bit of a wild night.
So my game was so buggy it gave out random amounts of cash to you when you handed in a shape (not intentional, just the code was broken), some parts were really sloppily made (like the text and the fa machine sprite) so I decided to run with it. How do you excuse some crappy parts of a game? With a weird story-line involving a social experiment gone wrong, of course! I added in some strange replies from the manager some strange collectibles:
Capitalism? More like crapitalism…
And finally a meeting with a sentient triangle who causes the manager to reveal his true form.
Overall, it was a bit slap-dash. I’d like to think I made a few people chuckle but I ran out of time and copped out a bit in terms of gameplay. Next time I really want to have learned Unity, I tried for this one but exams got the better of me… I’ll try to make time so that I can do the full 48 hours too, that will help.
PLAY IT HERE
Thanks for reading my post-mortem. I had so much fin making this and I am really having a great time playing all your entries. As another personal plug, outside LD I’ve just finished a twine adventure called MINUTEMAN where you explore an abandoned nuclear bunker and discover the troubles of lax password security. It would be great if you gave it a play 
Gracias and see you next time,
@nebulaictoaster
