It’s dangerous to “go” – Puzzler Postmortem

Let me tell you about my first ever 48 hour Ludum Dare experience! I made a top-down puzzle game where you, the player, control the movement of both a green Link-like guy and a kitten at the same time. It is dangerous to “go” alone! Take this [kitten]. “Go” as in, yes, “going” to the bathroom. In this puzzle game you have to collect TP for the toilet and litter for the litter box!

Play the game – Click here for my game’s competition entry page.

I’ll go through my experience chronologically as I talk about how my game came together, and then I’ll also tell you about the process of making each of my levels if you don’t mind spoilers.

Part 1 – How 48 Hours Turned Into a Game

Ok, so Friday night the theme was announced. When I saw it, I simultaneously felt like I had to do something Zelda-like, while also not wanting to do anything so literal. The direct reference to such a classic game put me in a bit of a mental bind.

I started brainstorming ideas. For inspiration, I grabbed from the internet both the Zelda screenshot and the famous meme image. I actually had them up on my screen during the whole contest!

Inspiration: The Dangerous Duo

Some Zelda parody ideas popped into my head right away, but because you can’t reuse existing Zelda graphics for Ludum Dare, my ideas basically amounted to “recreate Zelda,” and that seemed a little impractical in 48 hours. There was one particular moment from the first Zelda that I kept thinking about:

Kittens are made of meat…

For more inspiration, I started to read everybody’s blog entries, and I was amazed by all of the clever interpretations of the theme. I started to think about each word in the theme individually, and tried to figure out how I could play off of it. It was then on Friday night that playing on the word “go” hit me with an idea: I’d been wanting to do a simple classic top down puzzler for awhile, so what if I did something with needing to “go” to the bathroom. I figured the player could be a little Link guy like from Zelda, and there could be a kitten companion (like from the meme) at the same time. Visions of pixel toilets and pixel litter boxes flashed in my head.

More after the jump!

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