My name is Nathan Hicks (Programmer) with Apostate Games - Jason Varnell (Artist)and I did the game Plutus as our #ldjam38 submission. Please check out the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/plutus Since we wanted to focus on getting the game done in time with all planned features we stayed away from doing a devlog throughout the weekend so over the next few days we will be posting day by day recaps from start to finish of all the progress, decisions made, and even problems we ran into or things we had to cut from the final entry. If you have any questions please post them in the comments! :smile: Also, apologies that this one was a day late. Got busy.

Day 1: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/plutus/plutus-dev-blog-ldjam-recap-day-1

Day 2: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/plutus/plutus-dev-blog-ldjam-recap-day-2

Day 3 - Sunday

Jason was quickly finishing all the space debris, player planet, and backgrounds and were implemented fairly early in the day. I spent most of the day doing math...lots and lots of math to make sure the scaling made sense and you actually collect things smaller then you when you reach X size. This still is a slight problem starting out with smaller objects but is something we may fix later if we take it to full production

I quickly got to work on the gravitational pulls of the planets and got those in fairly quick. Then went on to do the notifications of when you were bigger then the other planets. And after that the death by hitting larger objects and cracking apart as well as randomly spawned objects off screen to populate the map with debris. By early evening most of this was all implemented and a lot of testing began. There was still no GAME OVER or victory events just yet. The rest of the night was tweaking and adjusting values, sizes, speeds, gravity etc. Half way through the evening though we decided it was too hard to find the planets since they move (which we liked and wanted to keep) so we came up with the idea for a planet distance tracker and a quest arrow since I have never done a mini map and don't know where to start making one (something I will be doing very soon now).

With ALL of the features in place a majority of the art assets also being finished it was time for Jason to move onto the planets and sun.

I had already started working on a musical composition in LMMS, a free music software I was not used to, to use in the game but of course we ran into lots of bugs that took priority. The bugs included: Scaling not working consistently as well as debris shrinking down to being invisible. Hit boxes not working properly. Gravity causing too much lag while remaining inactive when not on screen and dragging LOADS of space debris. The rest were mostly graphical issues like positions of thruster and shield overlays. The Arrow was also not pointing to the nearest planet or one you could destroy. Also making the objects pause and resume was even an issue.

With all that in mind I decided to not sleep at all till the bugs were fixed and canned the idea of making my own original music and SFX (at least for the jam). So with that said Day 3 merged with Day 4 (for me at least - Jason made sure to get some sleep). Lack of sleep also later became a bit of an issue in terms of remembering important fixes and taking all other code into consideration so more bugs kept arising so it was a good thing I canned the original audio idea. The lack of sleep also made for a few last minute mistakes that weren't tested properly but we will review that on Day 4

Day 4 Recap will be posted tomorrow :smile:

In the meantime while waiting for voting please check out our other game we currently have on steam greenlight and tell us what you think!

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=872678368

Also follow us on social media and our website for future games and updates: - http://www.apostategames.com/ - https://www.facebook.com/apostategames/ - https://twitter.com/apostate_games