Ludum Dare 27: Shelter

Theme: Ten Seconds

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=2393

I knew beforehand that I wanted to make a game that I could port to mobile devices and tablets, but the theme got me off guard a bit. The take became that you have to save cute pink blobs from a bomb with a 10 second fuse.

What went wrong

• First of all: when your finger/mouse is down (scroll mode) the time stops. But this was not communicated visually, so you won’t know if you don’t know it before.
• The game mechanic isn’t very fun. It’s more about scrolling quickly and dragging straight lines.
• And as usual I made the levels in the last couple of hours

What went right

• I used Haxe and my own Entity/Component/System-framework “Seagal”, and had some huge benefints from coding the ECS way. For example: when I had the game working with one charater it automatically worked with two or four characters without any additional code. I remember how happy I was when I realized this!
• Since I used Haxe I have successfully ported and played this game on Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, iPad and Android devices. There was one very critical bug when running Seagal on cpp targets that took some time to figure out, but once that was done the rest was easy.
• I have to say that I like the flood-fill effect when the bomb explodes

How I could have done it…

I’ve thought quite a bit on how I could have done this differently, and I have one take that I am pretty pleased with:

• You have one blob that is the KING! If he dies the game is over.
• You have several pink blob “servants” that can be sacrificed without any penalty at all
• The king is so fat that he moves at half speed
• The goal each level is to let the working people act as a human shield and protect their fat and lazy king
• Between levels a character will be introduced. Like the Queen: lifelong love of the king, or the kings best friend since childhood. In the level that follows they must be sacrificed as well to protect the king.
• Maybe the kings drug dealer will be introduced as a character. He cannot be sacrificed either. Or the guy who provide the king with strippers…

Bottom line: it is a really lousy king (like the Swedish king), but it doesn’t matter. If there is a bomb then we must all protect him with our tiny pink bodies. The king is not allowed to die! Just as in real life…

The result

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