Until yesterday, I forgot that Ludum Dare was approaching… and this morning I milled around for a bit trying to decide if I had time – let alone an idea – to even begin working on it.  Well, I decided about 8 hours ago that I was going to give this a shot, and thus 5 hours ago I started messin’ around with an idea that one of my friends brought up.

There’s no way I’m going to finish this, but perhaps I’ll come up with something.  I’ve got the beginnings of a game thanks to Unity:

My friends’ suggestion was to make a game where you’re a fish eating other fish, but those fish provide you some kind of mutating powers.

I figured I’d start off even smaller, with some static objects that you could eat and a little pointer (the aqua line in the picture above) to show you where the nearest of those objects are located.  For each of these pellets that you eat, you become just a little bit faster.

That part’s working… now to make it do something interesting.  In a couple of hours.  Hmm.  I feel like it may have been a mistake to start this late.  Ha!

Well, it’s getting somewhere.  Woke up this morning at about 9, and started attempting to make some more interesting enemies.  I now have enemies that will die if you touch their body, but will kill you if you touch their head.

We’re having a stare-down contest right now:

I’ve got a couple of hours to:

1) Get them moving around in even some cheesy way

2) Add the “power up” features (I’m going to make a separate pointer that you control with WASD, and as you eat creatures you gain ammo for some kind of fish projectile that you aim with that pointer… clownfish will give you more of these “fishy missiles” [what an evolutionary trait!], and goldfish will give you the ability to lock onto your nearest target.  I don’t think this mechanic will be fun in practice now that I’ve had some time to sleep on it, but oh well!)

3) Get the fish resizing randomly

4) Add the logic such that you cannot eat fish that are larger than you, and vice versa

5) Add the “boss” creature (a giant killer whale!)

Phew!  So that was a bit of a whirlwind for starting up late last night!

The game isn’t at all what I really wanted it to be… but at least until you die it’s playable (not very fun, but playable!)

It was an interesting experience: that was my first time using Unity.  I like the engine – I think that I just need to learn more about the details of how it works.

If you want to play it, feel free!  I included a windows .exe in the repo, but other platforms will need to build from source:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=11228