My entry for the 7-day RTS was a little two-player bomberman-like game called Spawner Pawners. Here’s the development process and some other stuff in a nutshell.

My initial mockup!

Initially, I wanted to make a more traditional RTS, but I realised I would be busy for three days just learning and implementing pathfinding, and I didn’t really have a great idea to build on. So, I challenged myself to make an RTS with these limitations:

– No pathfinding
– No AI

As I read the description of a game: “…2 player bomberman style weird territory annihilation game!“, a thought popped into my head.  Spawner Pawners is the result of that thought!

Maybe you’ll say “HEY RUBNA! This ain’t no goddamn RTS there ain’t even units u control what u be pullin’ some sorta trick on me? Huh? What? Huh?”

To which I would reply that it actually could be seen as an RTS; the bombs and pushable walls are your units, the spawners your resources and barracks in one tiny, handy package, and you need to destroy eachother’s base to win. It’s actually the most innovative RTS of all time!

(But secretly, I just made bomberman with a couple of twists and an artsy-fartsy graphical style, and slapped the label “RTS” on there for good measure.)

Some things I wanted to make but couldn’t/didn’t:

–up to 4-player multiplayer! But I realised I could be happy if enough pairs tuned in for the 7-day RTS to rate my game, far less quartets. But maybe I’ll make this for the OUYA-port 😉 (I’m not making an OUYA port)

–ONLINE multiplayer! But I had no idea on how to pull this off and the chance that two people would play at the same time would be very small.

Things that could’ve gone better:

–Incredible loss of focus all the way through

Like, seriously. It took me like four times longer to make this than had been necessary. I need to work on my workflow…

–Two player Ludum Dare Game

…it just isn’t a good idea…

All in all, I’m pretty happy with how the game turned out. Eventhough I haven’t been able to playtest this against anyone, people who did play it seemed to have had a good time, and I certainly had a good time making it!

Until the next Ludum Dare!