This was my first Ludum Dare (and actually my first full game I ever finished, although my main in-development game was nearly complete at one point) that I actually participated in, as I usually forget about them or don’t notice until the day or so after, but even this time I missed most of the first day (though I probably would still have been late).
The game is called Petrichor (which is the smell of dirt or dust after rain) and can be found here:
http://www.stencyl.com/game/play/26121When I first heard the theme I had two ideas, the first one was a platformer where you replayed each stage at various levels of the process; from puzzling out the shape of the level out of sensory information, to planning a route, to QWOP-like muscle control for the character, up to more traditional platforming controls. However, the different systems required by this idea would take much more programming than I could possibly do in 2 days, and even the design would need much more time to really do the game any sort of justice.
My other idea was really just an image, some sort of horror game where the player is chased by creatures from beneath the surface of water.
After working on it for a while it started to morph into something a little different, the setting was cool but the game wasn't living up to the concept art and the monsters were getting too cliché, so I tried switching it to more of a forest of dead trees darkly overcast,
and got this image in my head of weird shapes reflected in the water that were just unnatural enough to be potentially really creepy as monsters (especially once I started animating them and they were following you), so I made them walk upside down under the water and try to spear you with these spiky tree-like things.
I also had these flood-like monsters that burst open and let out a swarm of bugs, that came from the fact that it seems that horror things tend to handle spiders/bugs wrong, making giant spider monsters is usually less scary than tiny ones for people who are afraid of them.
I actually did better with the graphics than I normally would in the time frame, as I am right in the middle of the free trial period for Cosmigo Promotion (
http://www.cosmigo.com/promotion/index.php) and had just gotten used to it enough to be efficient but still was able to use it (I highly recommend it, I learned about it through watching the streams of Yacht Club Games making Shovel Knight). But then that was counteracted by the fact that Stencyl was having problems and wasn't opening up right, so I had to use an old version, which was not as fun, then about halfway through I lost about an hour or so worth of work due to thunderstorms.
Unfortunately even without the Stencyl problems I wouldn't have made it, as by the time I got done with everything but the programming and sound, there were only 4 hours left in the comp; and since it took nearly another 10 hours of work (plus 8 hours sleep, plus several hours of not-work) to finish the game, I would not have finished in time even if I had started right away and worked without any distractions. Also, as a side note, the best 'bug' I had, though certainly to the hardest to find or fix, happened when I set an enemy to move at speeds of 284 instead of 4.
I had several ideas that I had to cut in order to finish the game, like a section where suddenly the whole sky would fill up with those black spiky tendrils coming down (or up) toward you, or a section where you get dragged beneath the surface and get stuck down there with the monsters for a while.
These are definitely things that make me want to revisit the game sometime and make a much longer version. I would love to have the dragged-into-the-underworld section use the look from the original concept art, more monster types, have deeper mechanics such as avoiding water to keep from waking the monsters (using better jumping controls as well as things like sticks or logs you can lay across to help you or throwing objects into different pools to distract them), and I definitely want to try and use a variation on this:
http://www.stencyl.com/game/play/11400 "3D" effect in it.
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