As soon as I saw the Small World topic I thought I always have wanted to make a game with the character moving around a planet as had seen in previous ludum dares... so this time we decided very fast on Saturday morning to try something as a remake of the old spectrum game Jetpack (from ultimate) but with a round planet mechanic. Let's say a tribute as this was one of authors' first owned computer game :-) (yeah we are getting old)

Timeline

So I spend most of the Saturday doing the round world physics and mechanic on unity and my brother had mostly all the art done by Saturday night. I was able to resist and not integrate graphics till the basic gameplay was working. We felt this was the LD edition that we arrived to Saturday night with more work done.

On Sunday we spared some time with family and got distracted and at the end not have too much time for the game but at least managed to put all graphics and animation... and even put some fast sounds. We were running for the jam anyway...

On Monday the plan was to tune gameplay and that but as usual got a bit distracted with some not-so-esential things like making the ship fly at the end and introduction scenes and playing with unity UI classes... so again finished letting the gameplay and enemies generators with no so much work...

But we enjoyed very much this LD. And an important indicator this time I ended with less chaotic code because of last-minute changes until is fixed than previous editions... so maybe this time we won't discard the game and try to make a mobile version with levels

What went good

• I am beginning to get accustomed to unity... and like it
• Iñigo draws really nice sprites very fast and in large quantities
• We counted with a remote musician who send just in time loops
• We decided fast on a topic and started implementing mechanics early
• I kept the game with programmers art for a full day and concentrated on gameplay
• I think this is the first LD that I got web, mac, linux and win builds

What went not so good

• If your little nephews came to visit, your programming performance degrades and you don't mind too much :-)
• Towards the end of LD I always give preference to having a game with start and end screens. And not too much to the game being fun to play...
• We always do very short play games... that can be finished in 1min or less.
• At the end the sounds that were added fast just to have something were never changed, the sound of the ship going up is an explosion repeating and is a bit tiring

Overall

Anyway we enjoyed very much this LD but after it had not too much time to review or promote our game... so let's work a bit and write this post-mortem...

So... if you read all that, you may have a look at the game here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/a-world-too-small-and-no-jetpack

Thank you and enjoy