Hi guys, pretty pleased with my first LD entry and really enjoyed both reading comments on what I’ve done, and cruising everyone elses entries, here’s my thoughts on the birth/life/and hopefully growth of my game

Concept

The initial idea was an RTS with buildings that spawn their respective units every ten seconds, as well as enemies that spawn every ten seconds. Mental playtesting, (saves a lot of time), made me realise that controlling this huge flow of units as your base expands would be both very time consuming to program, and very difficult with the ten second spawn rate, so I decided to have the drones behave in an automated fashion, following a circular path around the edge of your base and moving outwards as the base expands, I’m happy with the way the mechanic worked out but the game feels more TD than RTS. Not a problem I <3 a good TD.

Constructing The Game

Having a solid grasp of how I wanted things to work, meant I could crack on very quickly and get something working, I’d also like to mention that stencyl is one of the finest tools for transforming a concept to a prototype I have ever met. While some things were a bit of a pain, (nobody likes trig), hammering out my own brand of bad art was fairly quick and painless, as for sound… um.. well… don’t really know what I’m doing there at all

The End Result

Drone ring, a game that quickly escalates to impossible, or if you’re winning becomes a lag fest as hundreds of good and bad guys run terribly inefficient distance calculation at each other. But it had cool explosions and that made me happy. Sometimes I walked away from my computer without looking back as stuff was exploding. The game is unwinnable, that’s entirely deliberate, the bad guys keep growing stronger and keep multiplying in number until you lose.

Play Drone Ring

Here http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=26686

What went right (planned or otherwise)

• Getting things done went right, the game was finished in the allotted time (high five self!)
• The way drones circle and move outward, looks awesome in motion and I think conveyed the feeling of a massive and continually growing force really really well.
• The sound, because I managed to make some.

What went less right (or wrong if you’re a negative nancy)

• The art is a little weak and too repetetive, the enemies have a cool randomised evolution system that really should have had some graphical representation even a colour change, but I didn’t think about that till after the comp. As it is the only way the evolution is represented to the player is when they do particularly well or badly and aren’t sure why.
• Bad maths, the checks for distance between drone and bad guy are calculated too often and inefficiently, leading to slow down as gameplay progresses and the two opposing forces grow.
• Lack of information, it’s not immediately obvious that the loss condition is bad guys reaching the centre of your base, and the resource system needs a rethink, as while it works okay it’s very counter intuitive.
• Sound, because it was last minute and I don’t know what I’m doing, I wrote a song about it which you can listen to on the upgrade screen, it’s terrible, I kicked the entire family out of the house while I sang badly into my awful built in laptop mic.

Where from here?

While conceptually fairly strong (I think), an entire reboot is underway, which is already so different to drone ring it’s barely recognisable as the same game. Lots of (if only I had the time) extra gameplay mechanics are conspiring to turn drone ring into a fairly complex and fun mission based RTS/TD. I can’t wait to finish it and show everyone, but it will probably be a few weeks.

Cheers for reading guys!

MyChairHasALooIn.