This Ludum Dare weekend thing were a bit chaotic. At first I thought I couldn't make it but plans changed so I had the whole saturday to spend in Ludum Dare.
Saturday morning arrived and as I woke up I checked the theme. It was (as some of you may noticed) Every 10 seconds, not far off from LD27s theme. But a good theme never sucks so I went ahead, took a piece of paper and a pen and wrote down some ideas what Every 10 seconds could mean, mechanically or storywise.
With that in my hands I started working on my game at around 9 am (MESZ).
First idea: Shooter
The initial idea was a top down shooter in which the players gun only shoots once every 10 seconds so the player would need to avoid enemy bullets between the shots. After a short chat with my wife I changed plans and aimed for a game that forces the player to kill enemies every 10 seconds. This should've given the player more agency in the game. The player could shoot anytime but would be advised not to shoot sometimes and treat killable enemies as a resource. Things went great and I implemented even a dash for the player that should've given the game more speed.
But when I threw together a testlevel I noticed that 10 seconds were way too much time for the thrill to kick in. I dashed around, killed anyone and had not much of a challenge. To really make this idea shine I would've needed to create huge worlds for the player to even consider pulling enemies with him to kill while traversing long corridors. I even tried to rescue the project by quickly implementing a snake boss enemy. The player couldn't kill the snake at once so they need to keep the small enemies around to kill while working on the boss.
At around 1 pm I reconsidered my plan as I was pretty sure I couldn't fix the gamedesign withing the remaining hours, this would've taken much more time. So I went ahead and drafted another game.
Second idea: Puzzler
My second idea was a puzzle game where the player gets get teleported every 10 seconds to another segment of a spaceship. At every segment the player would've needed to traverse the segment fast enough and repair multiple devices within 10 seconds, otherwise :boom:. I planned to do a couple of puzzles before reaching the teleportation device as a last device to fix before some feelgood outro. I worked on that idea until 11 pm before realising content creation would be to timeconsuming to be viable. You might guess what comes next.
Final idea: Snakelike
As I wanted to submit something this time after failing last Ludum Dare I went back to my piece of paper. The new idea needed to be simple to make and required no or not much content and fit the theme. I went with snakelike gameplay as a base and added a ten second timer that gets reset whenever the snake eats. The snake boss of the shooter was reused to move the snakes tail.
It took me another 5 hours to get the game done but in the end I'm happy with it. The timer actually adds to the gameplay as the player needs to take the tail more into account when moving so he doesn't block his path to badly.
Let's hope I only develop one game next time. :sweat_smile:
