So, that was a pretty neat christmas (my mother is the best chef everrr). Obviously couldn’t really work much on games during that time, although I did tweak some stuff for Incomitat (intending to get it working better). However, here’s The Plan:
– I’m going to update Masjin with mostly bugfixes soon. There were some weird things in the editor and the likes, and I’d like to get rid of those (possibly also add another item, we’ll see).
– I have a dare with Petri Purho to create a game in 7 days before 2012. Technically the LD game would suffice, but I think I want to prototype an older idea and see where I can go with it. We’ll see what comes out of this, but if everything goes right (wrong?) I may not be able to work on other stuff until the next year.
– Slowly working on Officer Alfred. I think the cutscene is nearly done, but I let my bro play the game and noted quite a few annoyances that I want to get rid of.
– SOPA sucks. A lot. If you live in the USA, go to the barricades or something.
Well then, Ludum Dare 22 went past quickly and silently. The theme was “alone“, which I didn’t like too much. I had a coupla nice ideas, but as often happens in games of mine, the one I chose eventually proved out to be too ambitious.
My concept was to procedurally generate an island, and then put the player onto it and allow him/her to wander freely, trying to explore and find cool stuff. A concept like this quite much *cries* for feature creep, and that’s quite much what happened. I lost my motivation/inspiration towards the end of the compo, but managed to get it back in order to add some more meat to the thing. In the end I was left with something called “Incomitat”.
As it stands, the game is kind of confusing. There’re surprisingly many things to do, and I enjoy playing around by myself, but for anyone else it’s probably a thorough mystery. For example, there’s a hunger meter in the game that the player can fill by eating things. However, due to the time limit I managed to cram only few foodstuffs. The result is that any normal player will probably starve due to not realizing that they have to find a gun from a random abandoned house, then some ammo and then go shoot some bunnies or birds.
The concept is something I’ll absolutely want to return to later on; it fascinates me and I’d really like to make a game where the island was genuinely full of cool stuff to find. However, as it stands, I’d have to tweak a lot of the code and try to make that cool stuff available for all players instead of those who manage to think the exact same way I do.
On other news, Ludum Dare 22 just began, with the theme “Alone”! I’ll see what I can create this time; the theme isn’t really one of my favourites but it’s somewhat inspiring and allows a whole lot of different concepts! Here’s a level you can test with the editor.
