Ludum dare and Gorillaz

Ludum dare happened this last weekend, and I failed it. Sort of. I ended up with a few prototypes, one of which I find incredibly interesting. For plenty of reasons, but before I get into that I'll talk about my first two prototypes.

The first was supposed to be this collection of generated worlds with generated people inside them. This idea came after a lot of deliberation of which I deliberately avoided any tile based ideas because I do those all the time (which didn't work out in the end). I struggled and fought and eventually decided it was about time I tried to do proc gen. I quickly found out I should probably learn how to proc gen before I try to do it within a time limit so I scrapped this.

The second idea was much more interesting, and if I didn't have the following idea I probably would have followed through with this one and actually made something for ludum dare. When I have no clue what to do I just say fuck it and throw shit together until something clicks. This was what this was. I made a giant plane, put some fps shit in there, a little bit of light and was said to myself "okay not bad, but it might be cooler with a setting sun." So I did that.

It ended up as you see above. However, 3D isn't my bag and a lot of the things I wanted to add to it just kinda led nowhere in my head. P.S don't do that. Nothing work in gameplay as it does in your head. Bad form me.

After that, I finally tried an idea I've thrown around in my head a lot and this seemed like a perfect time to try an attempt at it. I've been fascinated with Go and the idea that it was considered a martial art once in ancient china. I totally understand that sentiment. I've been playing go since middle school and it has this quality of life and death, seriousness and playfulness, attack and defense, all intertwined in the mind. It is a language all on its own. I love it, and I've wanted to capture that feeling. Somehow.

I've also been a huge fan of battle media such as Avatar the last airbender, Fullmetal alchemist, Berserk, HunterXHunter, One Piece, Bruce Lee,  Jet Li, etc. Anything that has the idea that raw strength is meaningless, it's how creatively strength is used is what decides the winner. That's something I've also struggled to formulate a mechanic around, because the problem is that the system I make has to allow for creativity to win over strength. This is something Go does very well, but it misses the idea of asymmetric sides. I wanted to do that. Somehow.

I may have found something that might do just that. I don't know. I need to work on it more, but it's promising. The idea is more or less a turn based game where abilities have the ability to change the flow of, not only combat, but movement as well. Players can only move tiles that have their sigil, forcing abilities to not only be used for damage, but to affect movement around the board as well. There's a lot more going on in the game, meditate, corruption, mana (I want a different word for that), health management, and more! But this blog post is getting long so I'm going to wrap it up for now and talk about those things as I keep working on this game.

All I wanted to let you, the reader, know is that I'm very excited right now. I haven't been this excited for a project in a long time.

Oh, also I made a new game this week : http://gamejolt.com/games/andromeda/252764

It's a small little arcade game that takes asteroids and applies tile constraints to it. Holy shit. I should really just give into the tiles. They just flow through me at this point.

I probably won't talk too much about this one because the process behind it wasn't that interesting. I made a feature, played it a lot while asking myself what would make the game better. Repeat until finish. No big revelations here.