Oooh, magic mushroomies!

Link to the entry (downloads for Windows, GNU/Linux and Mac OS X)

Another LD. It was fun, but maybe less (for me) than the previous times. Indeed, the conditions were not really good. I just moved back to school, so I spent quite a lot of time with my friends during the week end (saturday evening, and sunday afternoon). Plus, I’m crashing at a friend place so it’s not like I can throw pizza boxes around the room from my bed. And I didn’t have all my stuff, including a mouse for the laptop.

Despite all this, I managed to make a complete game, and I’m kinda happy about it.

What when wrong

• Strictly no idea for the theme. Plus the fact that I knew I couldn’t give my full attention to the compo. So after a (short) while, I decided to remake Boulder Dash, which I actually didn’t know (I had in mind a clone I used to play on my old Mac). Originality zero.
• Loss of motivation halfway through it. I actually spent quite a few hours on late saturday night toying with LuaGL and doing the examples of the Red Book, to distract me a little.
• Erm, graphics. I suck at them, and I didn’t have a mouse. So I re-drew stuff from the web, which I’ve been told is valid. Note however that the title and win screen use images I didn’t create, and therefore shouldn’t be taken in account when voting. All the rest is “hand drawn with a model”.

What went well

• As the game itself was fairly simple, and since I didn’t need to think of new  ideas, the coding was fast and headache free. Gamplay was complete in maybe 6 hours.
• With all the time I had left, I could take special care about the sound. SFXR gave me all the in game sounds, but I took a while to select them carefully. And I managed to write a 1:19 min music with Milkytracker, which I think is not too bad (could have been a lot better, of course).
• For once, I have a game with an end, and the difficulty progression is quite OK. I managed to play to the last level, so the game should be hard but beatable.
• Once again I praise Lua and LÖVE. They rock. Plus the multi-platform awesomeness.

I don’t know how to compare this entry with my previous ones. On the one hand, it’s not original, super simple and doesn’t look too good, but on the other hand, it’s finished, a bit polished, and the gameplay is supposed to be good (I didn’t invent it. I just hope I didn’t screw it in the implementation).

Now I don’t except high positions in the results, but I don’t consider it a “real” LD for me either. Next time I’ll be more ready and available.

Good voting, and congrats to all entrants!