Cover of the 1922 German edition of John Reed’s “10 Days That Shook The World”

This is an old story that you can find throughout the internet. I forget where I first heard it, but it has stuck with me. -SP

A farmer was tending to his crops when his beloved horse escaped and ran away. “Such misfortune,” his neighbors said. “We shall see,” the farmer replied.

The horse returned, bringing with it several wild horses. “What a blessing,” the neighbors said. “We shall see,” the farmer replied.

As the farmer’s son was tending to the wild horses, one kicked back and broke the son’s legs. “What tragedy,” the neighbors said. “We shall see,” the farmer replied.

Soon after the local magistrate came to enlist young men into the war. Upon seeing the farmer’s son was crippled, he moved on. “Such wonderful news,” the neighbors said.

“We shall see,” the farmer replied.

When I last submitted an Ludum Dare game, I gave myself an MS Paint trophy. I submitted another game, one I daresay is a bit better than the last, so here’s my reward.

that’s some CGI right there in case you can’t tell.

This LD was a blast. I spent the weekend hacking with four colleagues from Braintree and we had ourselves a hootenanny.

The game is more or less as I had imagined, albeit with a few missing bells and whistles. The last big gameplay feature where villagers build huts is still in-progress, and it could really use a GUI to tell you what’s going on. Still, remarkably complete, especially when compared to how very far short I fell last time.

What Worked Well

• Knowing Unity - this time around, I knew the tools somewhat before going in. I have yet to finish a game in Unity, but I have banged out a couple of rough prototypes prior to this. In particular, the Catlike Coding tutorials were very helpful.
• Comradery - While I remain a fan of the solo format, leaving home to gather with like-minded hackers was extremely helpful. Just as in my daily work, my colleagues inspire me to be better than I am.
• One Fun Thing - I took Tom Francis’ advice and made a game around one fun mechanic and prototyped that mechanic immediately. I spent a lot of time making sure the fire-breathing looked and felt just so, but I think that was time extremely well spent. It’s still fun to fly around and set things on fire, even if you don’t understand what the game is really about.

What Didn’t Go Well

• 3D Modeling - I realized I needed better tooling to make the ork fortresses, which is where I started to spin my wheels. Google Sketchup is a straightforward enough tool, but I really found it hard to navigate. I have a license to Blender somewhere - I need to dig it up and rediscover that tool.
• Visuals - These aren’t my strong suit. I cheated by going for a very basic look (one commenter compared it to Darwinia), but even then I spent more time on them than I ought to have. I don’t know what the solution is here though.

Other Miscellaneous Thoughts

I really had fun with this. One of my 2014 New Year’s Resolutions is to try and make a game every quarter. I have a few things I’d like to experiment with - in particular, I want to see how hard it is to make an online multiplayer game. I am going to finish up Our Man Dragon first though.

As always, thanks to the organizers for making this happen. LD is a very special event for me.

Making progress, but now my enemy is time

A number of ideas come and go for these competition, but there can ultimately be only one. A few of the nearly-games

• A lone fighter and a lone destroyer have to take out a massive fleet of resistance. The job of the fighter is to go annoy individual parts of that fleet such that they follow it back to the destroyer and are annihilated
• A multiplayer Tropico-like city management game where you’re all managing the same city but with different, hidden agendas. The communists may want more production and mining while the capitalists just want hotels and beachline. You have to undermine your fellow’s efforts without straight-up destroying them (all improvements are probably permanent).
• RTS-style game where you are building a giant death robot piece by piece. How do you arm it, and when do you send it into battle against your rivals?
• You are the only lander for an outpost on a hostile alien civilization. You have to scrounge for resources to keep it alive, and it in return fuels and occasionally upgrades you. (This is more or less what turned into my dragon game)