I'm calling it a bit earlier tonight, so here's my nightly update! It's... not great. I really struggled today, and I'm not nearly as far as I wanted to be. I've been having a tough time motivating myself to work hard since I'm not passionate about my concept this time, and the implementation has also been slow going.

Most of today was spent trying to get Sisyphus working. My original concept was that he would push the boulder up, then you'd click and drag him back down to stop him from reaching the top. I was able to get him moving on the path pretty easily, but dragging backwards wasn't going nearly as well. I specifically wanted clicking and dragging, but just holding it down made it move and I couldn't figure out how to check for mouse movement in the correct direction. I tried using a LineRenderer, a Slider, linear algebra, Vector3.Project - nothing was actually working, even after many many hours.

Originally, I was planning on using the drag mechanic multiple times, but after spending so long without success, I reevaluated. The other minigames using a slow drag weren't particularly hard to come up with a separate idea, so I just replaced Sisyphus with clicking to slide him back down a bit. It was... extremely easy to implement. I really should've done it sooner! After that, it was trivial to add Tantalus with a vanilla slider, since that was always supposed to be a quick drag.

So here I am, getting ready for bed with 2/8 minigames done and placeholder graphics. Not where I wanted to be, but I think the rest of it should go a lot more smoothly. Knock on wood, but I think the other minigames should be a lot easier? Here's hoping!

I managed to pull together two more minigames, for a total of 4/8! After two entire days. And there's still no timer, no scoring, no overall lose condition, and no difficulty increase over time. I think the most notable thing I've done today is develop a burning hatred of Euler angles. Trying to do clamp a rotation with the minimum as a positive and the maximum as a negative is bad.

My plan was to finish the mechanics today and use all of tomorrow for art, audio, and general polish, but that might not be totally feasible. If I'm lucky the other minigames will go smoothly, but after the extreme difficulty of "click and drag to rotate the snake around its origin" I'm not betting on it.

My original goal was to finish all the mechanics before Day 3 so I could spend all of Monday polishing. And... I think I've accomplished that? All eight minigames are fully functional, losing all of them moves the player to the game over screen, the timer counts up, the difficulty increases as time goes on... It's ugly and has no instructions or audio, but it's playable? The bones were sure lying when they said everything would go perfectly, but maybe they were telling the truth that things would eventually turn out acceptably!

This might've only been my third LD, but it was by far the closest! I was finishing the art up until 8:55, and didn't have any time to even look for music. But I did manage to submit something! Thank goodness for the submission hour.

Tartarus Panic is a fast-paced game about managing eight of the prisoners of Tartarus and delaying their escape as much as you can. Each torture has a simple mouse-based interaction, but it's your job to figure out how to keep each one going and maintain it for as long as possible.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/$280782

Overall, I think it turned out fairly decently! Given that I didn't really mesh with the prompt and didn't get any code started until Saturday morning, I think I did a pretty good job.

Initial sketch

Functionally complete

Final art

Once again, I forgot about ratings until the last possible moment. You know the drill: rate our game, and we'll rate yours!

Delivery: Kat Kafe is a fast-paced game about controlling two cats at once to fulfill orders for your waiting cat customers. Earn as many points as you can within 3 minutes!