Ludum Dare 11, the 48 hour game making competition, took place last weekend. The theme was “minimalist”, which, admittedly, is going to be most any game created in 48 hours. For my entry, I decided to make a minimalist RPG battle game, taking the standard Japanese RPG battle system and shrinking it down to the basic commands. It’s an idea I’ve had sitting around for a while, but there hadn’t been much progress on it until now. After getting the basic code set up, and running properly, I promptly went to sleep, hoping to get the majority of the game finished by the end of the day Saturday.
I managed to finish most of the basics Saturday, getting text to display, and allowing the player to fight the monsters, but at this point, the game amounted to a collection of text on a blue screen. I stopped early Saturday night to figure out where to take the game next, and eventually sleep.
Sunday, I woke up with about 12 hours left to the competition. Vowing to complete something by the end of it, I worked on making some major changes to how the text output was generated, as the current method, which worked, didn’t allow for a good way to make the “floating” text that I wanted to create. After spending way too much time on getting text to work, I decided to work on some basic graphics, so there’d be something to look at besides just numbers. My plan at that point was to have a collection of monster graphics, and the game would simply pull from a selection of monsters, more powerful ones showing up as you gained levels. However, I am not much of an artist, and after spending about 30 minutes on the two existing monsters and the background, I gave up on the art, and went back to the code. At this point, the game worked, and looked reasonably good, but the battles were too easy, and never got harder. I spent a few hours trying some numbers in OpenOffice Calc, hoping to come up with numbers and formulas that produced a challenging game. I wasn’t entirely successful, since the game starts out hard, and becomes incredibly easy within a few levels, but I decided to finish up and make sure the game worked. I posted the final version early, but I wanted to avoid a rushed post, and I couldn’t chance that I wouldn’t ruin the game within the next two hours.
Overall, even though the game didn’t turn out amazing, it’s coded better than my previous challenge game, and it’s more or less a finished product that doesn’t crash every few seconds. Voting is still going on, and I hope to write up a full postmortem once the game is given ratings. I already know that balance is a major issue, and the lack of any visible progression didn’t help much. In the meantime, I’m gearing up for my next project, and hopefully I can finish it in a reasonable period of time.