Two weekends ago, I took a short break from Dehoarder 2 development so that I could join Ludum Dare as I do each April. The theme this time around was “Combine two incompatible genres.”
It was a fairly challenging theme. In fact, I see it as less of a theme and more of a challenge in itself. The trick is, not only to combine two genres that would classically be defined as incompatible, but also to do so in a way the game does not turn out to be the unplayable mess that such classical thinking would suggest.
The game idea that I eventually settled on was a marble-rolling game combined with an action RPG. For the first iteration, you could roll around on a terrain, talk to an NPC, and pick up a sword Katamari-style. I named it “The Roll Playing Game“.
For the next iteration, I added the enemies: Identimon. For a while now, I’ve been interested in procedurally generated identicons, especially the 5×5 or 7×7 pixel ones that often end up looking like some kind of space invader. So I made a simplified identicon generator, and used it to create a taxonomy of 4.2 billion possible enemies.
Next I added the combat. Damage would be primarily done by rolling into enemies, with higher velocities causing more damage. This is where I started to run into difficulty – for the longest time, combat just did not feel right. About midway into Saturday afternoon, I finally got to the bottom of what caused combat to suck so much. There was no physics feedback to it. You’d roll into an enemy, and sure, there was a sound and a particle effect, but the marble would just stop dead, and I would have to back up a few meters and roll forward again for another hit. Turning the enemies into dynamic physics bodies rather than static ones, and adding some decent knockback force on a hit solved so many problems here! The knockback automatically took care of the backing up, meaning much less tedium in repeatedly smashing into enemies.
From there, I implemented the first couple special abilities, which were crucial to identimon being able to fight back, and the capture mechanic to allow the player to steal abilities. I fleshed out the type mechanics, defining strengths and weaknesses between attack and defense types. At first, I had planned to be able to have the player actually see collected identimon in a list and choose which one to use. However, the reality was that there was no time to build a system that could handle as many entries as would be possible for this, plus UI allowing them to be sorted and filtered all kinds of ways in order to be useful.
This segued into defining the goal and progression for the game – collect them all! Realizing that actually battling and catching over 4 billion unique monsters was not a feat accomplishable in a mortal amount of time, I added an idle game mechanic, where the player could collect gold bars to fund research to gain more identimon. I deliberately worked out the math here so that getting up to around 35 gold bars ensures victory occurs in a matter of hours.
With Sunday afternoon left at that point and the game pretty much complete gameplay-wise, I spent the last few hours of the compo polishing, adding more special abilities, and populating more of the game world. I was able to set up a simple progression up to about level 25 before needing to wrap things up and submit the game.
Overall, I was very pleased with how the game turned out with only 48 hours to work on it. Naturally, I would have loved to polish it more, but, with Ludum Dare, you go with the game you can make in 48 hours, even if it is rough around the edges. I will be adding it on the site here as I get time, but for now, you can check out the game over on my entry page on the Ludum Dare site.
Judging ends in 10 days, so after that I will know how I have fared. Unfortunately, I have not been able to judge as many entries as in prior years. On the first day after the compo, I set out to judge a bunch of games, but one of the entries was infected with malware which at first slipped past my antivirus. So after a time-consuming and thorough cleansing of my workstation, for a long time I just did not have the motivation to judge any new entries because of what had happened. Usually I judge 100 entries or more. So far I’ve only judged 20 for this Ludum Dare. I’ll be getting that number up a bit more for sure, but I highly doubt that I’m going to make it to 100 this time. I probably won’t even make it to 50 entries.
Dehoarder 2
No blog entry would be complete without an update on my current project, Dehoarder 2. With the non-Ludum Dare weekends in April, I continued to focus on making more progress completing the list of objects. Most of what I have left to create in this regard are object variants, such as DVDs, books, board games, and household products. These are some of the more challenging items to create, because these media-based items parody real life items. So for each object, I need some kind of inspiration for the parody. Each individual item requires substantial creativity, with the main constraint often being my artistic talent to pull something off. Thank goodness for openclipart, because I can’t draw worth a dang but I can composite all day long.
Often I come up with what I think is great inspiration for a parody object, only to find that it’s already been done before. Those can be frustrating moments. But then, I come up with an idea, pop it into Google, and lo and behold, get no relevant hits.
As for testing my ideas out, I’ll just run them across people whenever I get the chance. My wife, of course, is my first line of feedback. Then sometimes the opportunity presents itself to show a batch of parody logos and products to close friends. Then, there is always the Central Ohio Gamedev Group. Cody from Multivarious Games is one of my go-to focus testers there. Besides being a great friend, if I show something to him, and it causes him to spontaneously swear, then I know it’s REALLY funny.
Hopefully next month I will have this push for finishing media parodies close to complete. Looking at my current velocity and what remains in the plan, I don’t think it will be quite complete by then, but I should only have a small number left at that point.