This was my third Ludum Dare. As I was trying to figure out what to make for this time, I looked back at my old entries. While the first one had a single mechanic and barely any sound, the second one had more mechanics, more graphics, more sound, music, and overall more polish. And so I felt confident that this trend would continue. With that in mind, I decided to go wild.

Well, what else could've happened?

Long story short, this LD I've learned that with limited resources, more polish is better than more content. Especially if you get food poisoning that spoils your sleep and focus for three days.

The idea behind the game.

I was not very keen on the theme. I couldn't make up anything very neat, so I just decided to go with some kind of space management. I am very fond of all customization in games and I recently learned of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, so I decided upon this Water World style setting ship battle thing. Contrary to the previous entries, this is the kind of game I would play myself. I even made up some thematic backstory which didn't even make it into the game, but hey it's there.

So, in more formalized way: - You equip your ship with guns. - You battle other ships on the sea filled with garbage.

There was an economical aspect of the game I realized I had to drop almost immediately. I decided upon basic endless mode.

Ship design

In order to keep things simple, I just decided pon rectangles with basic grid for guns. The loadout screen is also basic and is more or less what you could expect. I forgot to put any info on the guns in, sorry.

For the enemy ships, I was supposed to add more sizes of ships, but that had to be cut. Procedural generation of any kind was also a no go, I knew that before I managed to get the AI to work at all. And so I could only desing some ships myself. In order to keep things interesting, I designed two behaviour patterns: - The ship comes at you at an angle and tries to sail around you. - The ship comes at you head on, keeping his distance. Reverses if needed to keep his guns on you. I made a basic design for each of those patterns. They kind of do their job, I think.

Balance

There is none.

There are turrets and guns. Guns have the same firepower for half the size. Bigger guns/turrets have less dps, but turrets will automatically target targets at longer ranges, and guns have faster projectiles so that you can hit your targets better. The numbers looked good enough in my head. I should probably at least use some mathematical formula for that next time.

Visual Design

One thing I had to do was to make a few distinct looking gun sprites. No magic here. My only design decision was to make them symmetrical, to keep the game OCD friendly.

I decided I would try to compose a color pallette for my needs. Well, I guess there is a lot I need to learn on that front. In my defence, time was short.

So the big idea is to have a sea filled with garbage. It's thematic and helps you track your speed.

The big problem of traditional quad tiling pattern is that you can clearly see where the tiles start and end most of the time. There is nothing forcing you to use the quad pattern, though. In one of their Friday Facts, Factorio crew described how they used complex pattern to achieve more organic look of their mineral patches. Remembering that, I decided to give it a try. Shifting some pixels on 6x6 grid, I came up with this:

I managed to make 10 different patch sprites, 9 of them during the last hour of the jam, as final piece of polish. I think it was a decent decision. I randomized their occurrence somewhat. There wasn't enough time to use some fancy perlin noise sadly, but it could be worse. You can see some too distinct details, but making out the pattern is nigh impossible at a glance.

Bullets are just yellow. This makes them impossible to see on screenshots. I didn't realise that before now.

Cut features

Boy oh boy, where do I even start. - There is no music. - There are no sounds. - There are no muzzle flashes for the guns. - There are no impact explosions. - There are no death effects for enemy ships. - The player ship doesn't even die. - There is no interface art. - There is no info on the guns in the game. - Guns deselect when you place them in loadout. - Overall loadout controls could use an upgrade. - Gargabe pattern needs work. - There are not enough enemy designs. - There were carrier modules planned. They would be very easy to do too. In the few hours I didn't have. - There are no water trails for ships. - There is no balance. - Ship movement feels too slow. It's not really about speed though. It's the acceleration that is terribly slow. It was meant to make the ship feel weighty and more predictable, it ended up being a bother. - Curently you can see the enemy ships by zooming out. This is not the best solution out there for the problem. - I'm sure I forgot a ton of stuff already.

And so, behold the game in need of a Great Patch!

Enjoy!

Also I made some of those screenshots in 1440p and you can't see shit.