Saturday 25th of August, 07:30 am GMT+2

“The theme of the LD24 is Evolution. Do I have any idea that could fit with this theme ? Let think about it… Alright, this can do the trick.

Let’s create a one stage game where the player will have to recreate itself using four gates acting as transforming functions on a global shape. The results of these evolutions will turn into bad elements or good elements, they will then start to interact and help/annoy the player.”

This is how start my first LD. Nothing was planned. I started from scratch and my only goal was to achieved a game in 48H, no matters the sacrifices I’ve to do.

The first day, I aimed to obtain a running prototype, with quiet everything operational letting the second day for graphical interface, graphics, and sounds. The movement engine went quiet well even if it’s structure was the messiest and the less optimized ever. But Running for time, I’ve decided that “if it works, it fits“. It was important to have an idea of the nature of the evolution. Then I started to work on the transforming functions.  A clue point was that the same function will not have the same effect it’s used in first or in last.  Since Characters would have complex forms, a pixel perfect collision was required. Everything was running fine since I changed the form of the characters by evolution. All the collisions were broken. My goal to have a playable prototype to the end of day one was clearly compromised. Then I’ve decided that it was better to sleep well and to be ready to fight on the second day.

On day 2, everything remains to done. Not really awaken, I fixed the collision detection. It was just a “silly” problem of localisation. Let’s see if I can give some AI to the NPC. Oh no, I don’t have the time if I want to have a complete game with some kind of a structure. The last part went well, I did some poor graphics (but I can’t do better, so no regrets). However, the impossibility to wrote a small tune and add some SFX was quiet frustrating. But once again I had to decided what was my priority.

The game is playable. It has, I guess, a certain coherence,  and also some nasty bugs due to omissions in the control of speeds. Along these two days, I did well to aim at the project priorities (I wasn’t aware to have this capacity), but most of the problems I came across were due to a lack of organization in the code design.

This first LD was really rewarding.

You can play Ulovetion here 😀