I still don’t have any real game mechanics implemented, but hey look, pretty planets with graphics that reflect their current environment and biosphere!

To create these, I doodled a quick representation of each “trait” a planet can have (e.g. clouds for oxygen, colored land for different types of vegetation, purple blotches for toxic waste, city lights on the night side for population) as a separate layer in Affinity Designer, then exported each layer to SVG as a separate slice. Then in the game, all the code has to do is stack them all up in the same location and set each one’s opacity based on the planet’s stats. Next up: terraforming gameplay!

Looks like I scoped my project too large – I’m still working on systems and don’t have the interface finished for the main gameplay loop. This is going to have to go in the Jam instead of the Compo but at least I’m pretty sure I can have something playable, if not polished, by tomorrow.

I gotta stop trying to make these complex numerical simulation games for LD

I don’t know why I thought it was a good idea to try to make a number-heavy strategy game with controllable game speed, autosave, and other bells and whistles for the Compo, but anyway, at least I got it done for the Jam.

Here it is: Official Planetologist

I swear, the theme slaughter system needs a “not a theme” button for stuff that isn’t offensive enough to flag, but also doesn’t belong as a suggestion. If a suggestion gets more “not a theme” votes than “yes” and “no” combined, anyone who suggests the same thing again for a future LD should get a message like “last time this was suggested, voters decided it didn’t count as a theme” to maybe help new people understand what a theme is supposed to be (but it should not stop them from submitting it anyway if they really think they have a good idea).

What type of suggestions do I think this vote would be useful for? - Arbitrary technical limitations like “16x16 sprites”, “audio only”, “1 bit”, “3D first person” that would exclude people from making/playing games depending on their abilities - Platform or device restrictions: “VR”, “mobile games”, “video games”, “mouse cursor [does thing]”, anything involving buttons - Genre restrictions: “RPG”, “top down shooter”, “turn based strategy” - things that are already judging criteria: “audio”, “fun” - things that every game has by definition: “controls”, “decision making”, “mechanics”, “you are the player”

Bad theme suggestions are one thing, but when so many people repeatedly suggest things that objectively aren’t themes, it probably means they need more guidance on the suggestion page.

Spent too long messing with lighting in Blender to get that retro “spacey” feel, but I have a spaceship that you can pilot around and dock with a space station.

The plan is to build on the resource/ecosystem management systems from my last LD game Official Planetologist, but with different cargo affecting the resources on board the spaceship (e.g. you’ll want to haul plants to keep oxygen levels up, but other cargo might be radioactive and mutate the plants to do something else…)

I’m using pre-rendered sprites, but in order to get perfectly smooth rotation for the spaceship, I’m rendering all the frames at the same angle with only the lighting rotated, then rotating it and picking the closest lighting frame in engine.

The spinning spaceship:

A sample of the sprite sheet: