Bad Guy’s Terrarium Postmortem

I got two ideas for the theme: “Beneath the surface”

• The first one was a word play: “Beneath the surf Ace” – A surf game.
• The second idea was making a Dungeon Simulator game

I had seen videos of “What Did I Do to Deserve This, My Lord?“, a game that only exists for the PSP, and had wanted to do something similar for the PC.

I should have gone with the surf idea. California Games, the first videogame about surf, did it great. I could have concocted something similar (with mutant crabs or something).

But I was ambitious, and I bit off more than I could chew.

The original idea was creating an ecosystem – there’s food in the soil. While creating your dungeon, you digg that soil. When soil with nutrients is digged out, a creature is created. The more food there is, the more powerful the creature is. But there’s a food chain: slugs are at the bottom, and are the only ones capable of consuming food directly from soil. Rats eat slugs. And goblins eat rats. If a creature doesn’t eat, it eventually dies. Some creatures release nutrients when they die.

In time, enemies (heroes) attack your dungeon, and your creatures must defend it. But I never got to that point. I never even finished modelling the food chain – my rats don’t eat slugs, and my demons don’t eat rats. They just wander around until they die xD. And heros never come.

So, instead of a dungeon simulator, I built a terrarium – an ant farm.

At least it’s an improvement over my previous try – I have some programmer graphics to show, and the game is, if not properly fun, at least vaguely interesting. My wife thinks the rats are incredibly cute.

What’s missing:

• Rats and Goblins should eat.
• Enemies should enter the dungeon every x time.
• Intro screen.
• Sound.
• Some kind of score system
• Mana and the creatures derived from it

Lessons learned:

• When you get two ideas, pick the one that looks simpler to implement. You can build the cool one later, out of the compo’s clock. It’s only 2 days.
• Art: I am not good at it. Nor fast. That 4-frames walking animation could probably have been 2 frames instead. 3 colors is more than enough for any monster. Don’t try to use a new tool in a compo.
• I can’t write “fast but ugly” code to save my life. Clean code actually saved me more often than not.
• I’m old and I need rest. I watched 3 episodes of Breaking Bad and slept around 14 hours in total.
• Being able to do the game in small increments, and test what worked etc, was crucial.
• I lost too much time on initial infrastructure.

My entry is here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=4031

I don’t expect you to vote up something so clearly unfinished, but a comment saying how cute my rats are would be appreciated.