Ludum Dare 15: Caverns

The theme is a little bland, really. It's like the theme being "fields" or "playground" - it's a place, not a thing, not a theme. With other places, like "mountains" or "valley", there's more than a place - there's a resolution, a complete object. Maybe you need to climb the mountain. Maybe you need to escape the valley, or find the secret at the centre of the valley.

I started in GIMP yesterday and sunk some chilled hours into spriting. I actually love spriting, it's really cool. I get daunted by the big tasks but it's no big deal, really, once you get into it.

It's not coding though, is it? Coding wise, I got to that blank page and hit this wall. My game is a tunnelling game where you need to collect resources and build underground complexes, and fight mad blob things that eat your dudes. The problem is this: how do I populate the entire grid with dirt, the occasional cavern, and stick a starting point on there? I guess I got scared and I was pretty tired and just wanted to make some dinner and spend an hour with my wife before collapsing into bed.

So I did that, and now it's 5am, and I have about a hundred and fifty unread LD48 blog posts. Fuck that. I also had a bunch of tweets, but they're only short, you know?

So I've got some cool ideas bubbling away here, but I think I know what to do: get a playable version as soon as possible. Like ditch the graphics and worrying about getting their hands to match up with the ladders. I can make a dot game. Hmm. I'm just not sure how to make negative shapes and have those be the objects, you know? Rather than defining all that dirt, define the absence of dirt. Yes...