I had originally planned on collaborating with a friend on the Ludum Dare 26 Jam, however, plans started to fall apart Friday morning when my sister went into labor. Long story short, the baby was born later that evening, and along with other family commitments, took up most of the weekend.
On Sunday I was finally able to sit down and start working on something. My mind kept going back to some sample code I had given a FlashPunk user in Afternet’s #flashpunkers earlier in the week. He was asking for pointers on a drag mechanic and I was able to offer a little help. This sample code was still sitting in my initial basecode project in FlashDevelop and I just started going with the seeds of a simple idea.
I wanted a game where the player had to think fast, but didn’t have multiple types of actions to perform. The Drag mechanic is simple, and everyone who uses computers should be familiar with it. I also didn’t want to have to explain the rules to the player. I wanted them to be able to discover the rules with visual and audible hints. I decided that simply moving objects into a target would be adequate to satisfy those two pieces.
So I worked on Sunday night and before long had the basic functionality down. There were some overlap issues that I had to figure out due to me forgetting that I was centering the origin, but that was probably the only thing that was a pain. After more work on Monday night, it was ready to turn in. I ended up with a progression of levels that started simple and ended up fairly frantic. I knew I was going to be dinged by some voters if I completely avoided instructions, so I put a little blurb on the webpage about discovering it as well as adding a hint to the end game screen if you didn’t make it past the first level or the first level with multiple colored targets. I hoped this would be enough to keep people from being frustrated or downvoting me because they couldn’t understand it.
(I have to say that with the Minimalism theme it is hard to balance the polish. I decided that not only is my gameplay going to stick with one basic action, but the graphics would be minimalism with simple shapes. However, I know someone is going to downgrade the graphics because there are so many more entries that are fantastic graphically. Should they be voted higher because it looks better? Or should the simple graphics games be voted higher because they are following the theme? I don’t know, there are many entries where I can’t for the life of me figure out what is being interpreted as minimal but will probably score high because they are good.)
Here is a video of myself playing the game. Reviewers have apparently done a good job scoring higher.
I think the fact I kept the gameplay simple but had something challenging and fun was great. I was focused on that without having to prepare and test other mechanics. The progression of difficulty was simple and changed things around while still keeping that simple dragging mechanic.
I would have liked a high-score option that reported to my webpage or Twitter, or at the very least kept your own personal high score offline. I didn’t get a chance to do that before the time limit. I also had to skip the sound/music toggle which would have been a nice polite addition.
I had the same thought that showed up in many LD comments: It would be fun on mobile. I would like to explore this. I think I’d have to change the underlying code for handling the dragging to support two at a time, because I know that would be intuitive on a device.
Check it out here.
