Some say failure is the best teacher, and if that’s true I do have a lot that can be learned from this LD 😉

Slime Lord

I was pretty excited about the theme. Pretty much immediately I had the idea for a 2D defense game where you play the role of a subterranean horror, a Slime Lord, who lives under a fragile little hut. The twist is that the Slime Lord wants to protect the lonely hut from the myriad of dangers that continue to befall it.

I thought this dynamic might be a good opportunity to tell a story about a monster living underground, having an emotional attachment to the puny and helpless humans living above ground.

However, by late Sunday I realized it wasn’t working out. Some gameplay aspects depended on ideas that just weren’t coming to me, and time was also running out in general. One thing I liked about Slime Lords is the graphics – and that could be the reason I might return for a second take on the thing. But by Sunday the game was dead as far as Ludum Dare was concerned.

Here, have a time lapse regardless:

Planet Improver

On Monday, I fought against the urge to give up altogether – but I didn’t. What do you do when you have no time and not a lot of energy left? Well, you might make a text mode game. Enter: Planet Improver.

it consists of two parts: the first part is an economy simulation where you play the role of a terraforming machine that’s been dropped on some forsaken planet to mine it for resources. For the second part, I reused some code I had written for the Warmup Weekend, it’s a minimal rogue-like game that I adapted for the Planet Improver setting. In it, the Killbot character (of LD27 fame) made a reappearance, doing the bidding of Planet Improver by ridding the planet’s crust of xeno organisms.

Here’s a quick walkthrough of Planet Improver:

After Completion

The good thing is, Planet Improver got finished on time. I posted it as my entry and went to bed. The next day, I began to have serious doubts about the viability of this minimalistic game. So I left it sitting there for some weeks, which also resulted in a critical bug not getting fixed until yesterday.

Now that I’ve come back to rate some games, I’m actually at peace with Planet Improver.

So what’s left? Well, to do better next time of course!