Audio: 8th place

Humor: 10th place

Everything else: wayyyyy out there!

This game was definitely not innovative. Innovation was not one of my goals this time around – mostly because of the theme (“Enemies as weapons”). Another excuse I have for not being innovative was my worry that I wouldn’t manage using the Unity platform, so I decided to keep it simple.

Similarly, I did not intend to put much into graphics, and the game looks appropriately. Nothing is animated, the textures are ill-fitting and simpleminded, and basically everything is a barely-modified box or sphere. (The audio, however, came out pretty much as I hoped.)

One of the goals for this competition was to make a fun, humorous game. I went for light-hearted sounds and flavor text, instead of the heavier, mysterious atmosphere from You are me now. The feedback tells me I succeeded in making it lighter and funnier.

However, the big lesson I learned here was that “funny” does not mean “fun”. Most responses to the game were positive when it came to their initial reaction, but the controls were so bad that nobody could actually bear playing it more than one or two rounds.

(See feedback on the entry page.)

And so we arrive at my weakest point of all: control schemes. All three of my attempts at the Ludum Dare competition have resulted in badly-controlled games. This is something I should work on before the next competition.

Thanks to everyone who played my game, I hope to make something better next time.

The theme of this competition was “Enemies as Weapons”.

The physics are quite wonky, but it is “broken in a good/funny way” as one commenter says. I like that, and yes, I feel it was broken properly.

Links to download on the official submission page.

Also notable were Yoni’s first ever LD entry, and Daniel’s second.

For the graphics source and more info, see the original Posterous post on Thing-a-Day.com.

Graphics mostly created by Daniel. I reused some tiles hanging around for backgrounds. Built on Flixel.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Hammond was built on the Flixel framework, using Flashdevelop. Daniel made the mailman image, I made the rest. All graphics created with Inkscape.

Download

Get the competition version here:

• Leaving Satisfactoria – exe and source.zip (10,142 KB – Windows .exe and full source)
  • alternative download
• Leaving Satisfactoria.zip (328 KB – full source, needs pygame [see below])

Background

I wanted to break the normal “exploration” mold, where the goal is to uncover every single square on a map. The following elements were under focus:

• A conscious decision to depart from a comfortable space (leaving home)
• The one-way journey, leading your exploration far from the comfort zone
• Accepting the danger before you

The actual “exploration” probably occurs after the end of the game. You will most likely have to play a few times before reaching all points on the field, this is by design.

Tools

The entire game was built with the Pygame Python-based engine. You can get that here. Graphics were done entirely in MSpaint. Sound effects courtesy of sfxr.