I finished up a little early due to some real life scheduling and I wasn't sure I'd have more time tonight or not. I went ahead and made my submission. Also, before I left I started the render on the timelapse, which is now done as well.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/hopperbot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cRNJdBPkF8

After a couple failed renders, I got my timelapse properly compiled! Check it out here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qptMfRsBuRM

In the days leading up to the jam I started considering the theme finalists, I was leaning toward trying out some kind of tower defense game, since I haven't made one yet. My plan was to combine the themes from Ludum Dare and GM48 using one for the setting and one for the mechanics. I got the card manipulating the tetris piece working pretty rapidly, but ran into a couple collision issues with the "L" and "J" and "N" and "Z" block types, which my fix still left a bug that made it into the jam version where they can still sometimes get stuck. And then I hit the next issue of actually detecting a tetris has occurred and being able to delete the line and drop the remaining blocks down. And then the being able to detect if rotation was possible to allow the cards to show red or green in real time for the possible moves. Anyway I got what could done on Saturday, and Sunday was mostly finishing up the music, title screen, and tutorial screens.

What Worked:

Keeping the "active" piece's ID in a global variable made it easy for the cards to know which object they should be controlling. When a piece "locks in" by touching the bottom or another piece, the shape is deleted and replaced by individual blocks that can be destroyed independently of the shape they came down as.

What Didn't Work:

Rotation is still a mess, I need to go back through and come up with a different plan for handling collisions. The freeze time mechanic did not get represented or implemented well as a mechanic.

What to change:

Add an hourglass animation to the UI that shows how much longer time is frozen. Remove the cooldown from drawing cards, and make it so the card discarded to freeze time does not have a timer, but is just grayed out during the freeze. So the mechanic would be to discard a card, and be able to still play other cards during the freeze, but then have a recovery cooldown after time is unfrozen, freeze again, and be without 1 more card again.

Link to timelapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJH7S2NGapc

This weekend was the 42nd Ludum Dare and the theme was “Running out of Space”. It reminded me of a few jams ago, the theme was “Running out of Power” and I think both themes were finalists that time so I had thought about potential games to make back then too. My first thought was to do a play on a racing type game, where the space would literally be running out, and the mechanics would be about braking or stopping before the space ran out. Maybe even in space, going lightyears per second and performing some kind of puzzle mechanic to slow the hyperdrive down before actually running out of space, as in the end of the universe.

What I started with was planning as like a “fulfillment center simulator” with the idea that things would get delivered to you in one way, and then you’d need to send them out in a specific configuration. I had originally started planning for multiple colors and shapes, but scaled it back to just colors as I started having some issues getting the drag and drop working well. I wanted to be able to pick up individual objects and be able to sort them, and then also move them around in bulk. I’m pretty happy with the end result for how the boxes and pallets drag and drop relationship works now, but I think I’ll need to play around a bit more with the size of objects in relation to each other to fine tune how smooth it should be fore moving things around. I’ll probably make the pallets a big bigger and reduce the space between them in the middle, so that clicking on the outer edge would be for moving a whole pallet, and clicking in the middle would be for grabbing individual boxes.

I ran into another bit of trouble figuring out how to check that the pallet the player has configured matches the randomly generated ones to create the gameplay points system. What I settled on doing is creating a global array called pallet[x,y] where x is the pallet id, and y is the spot on the pallet 1-9, and the value stored is the type of box in that spot, so pallet[2,3] = 1 would mean on pallet number 2, the top right spot is a red square. That way is scale able in that I could have as many types as I wanted and still have a quick way to check if it matched.

To continue work on this game, I’d definitely like to incorporate some better themed art for a industrial type environment with the conveyors and walls. I’d like to make the boxes different styles, some could just be the square, or with crossed beams, or a triangle or really anything. So the amount of potential objects could get more and more complicated to sort and be able to quickly put together the things needed to finish the outgoing pallet configuration. I’d also like to work in different size pieces like a 1×2, 2×1 or 2×2 that would make both the sorting and shipping a little more complicated to create a difficulty curve, or maybe different gameplay modes. I could even see myself designing stages with a particular order of pieces that I would make out to specific difficulty that would match the stages through a campaign like experience.

Check it out on the LD site here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/put-what-where

Or on the itch.io site here: https://doublesquare.itch.io/put-what-where