My First Ludum Dare: A Story and Post-Mortem

My

Harmony

Post-Mortem & Story

Hello folks,

I know this might be a bit late but I’ve had a busy week, so here goes anyway. This post is divided into three parts (sandwiched with unashamed self-promotion at either end). The first tells the story of the event and what I went through creating it. It’s quite detailed, so if you’re not interested in that bit please jump ahead to the post-mortem and feedback sections, in which I critique my work and reflect on feedback from you guys so far.

The Game

For Ludum Dare 30: Connected Worlds, I created a game calledHarmony, one of the many space-themed entries that made it into the gallery for the event. The game revolves creating an equilibrium in military (often accidentally spelt with two ‘L’s throughout the game, forgive my sins) and economic powers between the inhabitants of six planets so that they can live together peacefully. This is achieved by the player carefully selecting the geographic properties of the planets each of the six races start on and using various powers throughout the game to influence the rate of growth of the civilisations.

The game essentially takes place over three phases: the setup phase, in which the player creates the planets and settles the races; the pre-space phase, in which the player is given time to balance each of the races strengths pre-emptively; and the final space phase, in which planets start to interact with each other, the results of which can be catastrophic should the player have failed to setup and balance in the earlier points in the game.

You can read the story (with pictures!), post-mortem and feedback after the jump.

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