controls:
WASD or arrow keys
esc closes the game
post mortem:
You could say, that there are two ways to go about these game jams. You can either see it as a challenge to use every last little bit of time to make the biggest game you possibly can or you can try to come up with a neat little game idea which is very manageble to make in the limited time. This time around I really wanted to go for the latter.
So when the theme was anounced I spent some time thinking about a good concept. I decided on a sidescrolling shooter, where you fly through the same area over and over again leaving behind debree to the point where the area becomes difficult to traverse.
As you can see in the timelapse, I spent some hours programming, before I decided, that that game wasn't going anywhere, so I scrapped it, and went for may second idea:
some ever expanding cellular automation based square goo
It turned out that that was really fun to code. I got a grid going and added some rules by which the cells on the grid expand. I messed around with a lot of different rulesets and eventually went with a "stone, paper, scissors" approach where "cell A eats cell B eats cell C eats cell A". It's a wonderfully chaotic system.
I then defined the rules for a player cell - no player object required - which expands based on keyboard inputs and leaves behind a trail.
On the second day I mostly focused on making my little toy/simulation an actual game.
I added a sprite based level loader and some levels. Added a bunch of new different behaving cells. Added some win and fail states and some congratulatory messages.
I spend the last hour or so adding some neat sound effects and wrapping everything up, and that was it.
This was the 3rd gm(48) I participated in and this feels like the most finished game of the three. I actually tried to satisfy all voting categories (ok maybe not immersion) and got everything pretty polished.
I would liked to have got a few more levels and more interesting cells in, but that's ok. Also music, but that's always a hard one if you are working alone.
Also hanging out in the chat during the last few hours with you guys was real fun :D. Also a big thank you goes to tehwave for running the show and being very helpful in the chat.
I hope I can be there the next time around, and now I gotta play some of your games.