I Finished A Ludum Dare Game

I'm too proud of myself.

In all fairness, this is my fourth try and it's not easy to learn the skills required to code a simple program, let alone write something approaching a full game.

But anyway, I'm calling it Contact: Lost (links and instructions at the bottom of the page.

It's a long and boring top down shooter, with some resource management time-wasting, but, to me, it serves as a testament to my abilities, which, up until now, have remained un-proved.

To start, minimalism kicked my ass as a "theme" -- if you can even call it that. I don't. It's not a theme as such, rather a design directive: it tells you how you should build your game, instead of what your game should be about/should represent. With that in mind, I ignored it, and pulled out an old favourite of mine: top down action shooter, and went about constructing the game.

Possibly the first thing you'll notice is the last thing I added: the giant text wall hanging over the ocean. I figured that the game needed to have something with it telling players what to do and how to play the game, but I had little time left. Sometime last night I ended up writing a huge tutorial for it (you can find it on the github repo). The game itself remains as inscrutable as ever. My hope was that players would put two and two together based off of the names of things: fabricators use schematics to make new items or machines. My mistake was in assuming that everything would be read and understood. That's a lot to ask of people, and text doesn't map on to pictures very well (a lot of people ask "what are those yellow  things" when talking about the capsules)

Eventually, if you keep playing long enough, you'll get into the machines. I didn't have time to work all of them in as I was going to add a power and liquid system too, which is what the boiler, turbine, solar panel, and nuclear reactor machines were originally for. The pump and aqueduct were there to make it possible to get water from the edges of the map to your miners (which would have required water) in the desert. Transporters and storage cells would have acted in tandem to allow for automated mining systems. Monsters would have attacked your systems, so you needed to place them on concrete (so they couldn't mine out of the ground near your machines) and build walls and turrets around them, killing any that get near. You would have needed the resources from these in order to upgrade yourself well enough to survive the temple and to build the machines needed to take off from the alien planet. For the Ludum Dare game, I had you build a teleporter, and a whole bunch of other machines too, in order to finish.

Ludum Dare page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=8500

Github: https://github.com/WilliamBundy/contact-lost-ld26

My project right now is refactoring and extending the hacked together LD game into a more professional (and better performing--some people only get 10 fps!) possibly marketable game. (I'll need to look into ways to sell open source code. Probably a modified version of the GPL, i.e.: "you have all of these rights BUT only if you bought a licence--and you can't give it to people if they haven't bought a licence", or maybe just writing my own.)