This was my 3rd participation to the Ludum Dare, and until the end I wasn’t sure to submit something. Here are the key points of this weekend.

Background: On Friday I published a game called Laitida, and I don’t know how it is for you, but finishing a project always put me down. So I wasn’t really motivated before the compo started.

Theme: Waow! Minimalism, this was a tough one. I know nothing about minimalism in graphical art, surely a bit more in music, but I didn’t feel like I was able to make a good music game in one week end. I wanted to use minimalism on an artistic point of view but also regarding the gameplay.
Lacking ideas, I finally googled “minimalism art”, and the first result was a Piet Mondrian’s frame. I guess Mondrian inspired a lot of participants this week end, which is funny when Mondrian seems to not even be a minimalist. Anyway, this separation of colors made me think of a battlefield with units, warzones, fortifications. The idea seemed a good one.

Can you see the battlefield ?

From scratch: Maybe one day, I will learn to be a good developer and stop wanting to write every single line of code. Writing everything gives you a complete freedom, but what a lack of time when you have to code GUI. Another advantage is that you think differently, you don’t ask yourself “what can I do with those tools?”, but “how can I shape my tools to do what I want?”. The problem is that you’re quickly trapped in unstable solution if you didn’t anticipate problems.
That’s what happened to me. I lost two hours trying to write an algorithm which should give me the resulting rectangles of the intersection of two rectangles (btw if someone has a solution, please tell me, I’m still looking for). I had to change a bit the gameplay since I wasn’t able to find an efficient solution.

A.I.: At the end of the first day, my prototype was ready and working, but only for two human players. I know that people usually don’t have the opportunity to play a game for two players, I definitively had to write an AI, even stupid, but something the lonely player could interact with. On Sunday, I started working on it, and I spent 6 hours. It was way too much. I should have stopped before, but a lot of small errors I made, resulted in a non working AI. Still in the compo version, the AI is buggy but at least, it acts like an opponent.

Tutorial: Even if the game is pretty simple, the rules are not straight forward, and without any explanations people doesn’t catch it. Hence the tutorial was an obligation. Therefore I decided to use the remaining time to work on this important point and sacrifice all other ideas.

M.I.A.: Since I lost a lot of time on the AI and I decided to choose the tutorial over the rest, some points are missing. I wanted to enhance the graphics, use some small animations to facilitate the understanding of the action, allow the player to save a picture of the final battlefield as a resulting minimalist frame, and finally add some ambient minimalist soundtrack.

Play Drimonna, a minimalist strategy game.

tl;dr: I wasn’t really in the mood for this LD. I got inspired by Mondrian and decide to make a minimalist strategy game. I lost ~10 hours over 23, on algorithm issues. I finally decided to prioritize the tutorial over polishing, sounds and extra features. As usual LD was a great experience which taught me a lot.

Click here to play Drimonna !

Tags: post-mortem