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The child of Ludum Dare 16 – Apocalypse Adventure
Posted on 2009-12-14 19:39

Had an amazing weekend! Luckily the theme didn’t end up to be Twilight fandom but instead Exploration, so I could actually get some proper ideas. The development went mostly nicely, so that I had time for other things too, except for Sunday night when I suddenly found out a Huge, Game-Breaking bug which I then spent around 1½ hours fixing. The result of my work was Apocalypse Adventure, a Fallout-esque action adventure that I quite like; the gameplay is quite good and there are not THAT many bugs.

I had seen the trailer of cactus’ Life/Death Island some weeks earlier, and when I saw the theme suggestions “apocalypse” and “exploration” getting high scores, I started to ponder something based on what I had seen. My idea was at first an adventure game with lots of emptiness and some arbitrary puzzles here and there, but it eventually turned out more action-based. Also, when I started working on the game, I decided to keep it fully top-down to make spriting easier (just rotations). By making this decision I also subconsciously changed to the jwaap-drive, which may explain why the game characters ended up looking like something ripped from 4hRPG. At some point I also changed the large empty areas to be on a separate map to avoid it becoming boring and to make navigating easier.

When I had the basic engine running, I started to design the map. This proved out to be kinda hard, because I had little time to really plan things out and had plenty of area ideas for the map. I chose 13 of them and after some pointless scribbling made a simple map with the locations of the areas you can visit. Eventually, however, one of them (a “secret” underground temple area) had to be left out because of the time limits. I could’ve spent more time designing the areas so that there would’ve been some order in which to visit them, or some puzzles that require getting items from several places, but bleh, didn’t want to, and I think I managed to get some of that in anyway.

Hum, perhaps I oughtn’t write a full post-mortem here, I’ll just link the screenshots and put a download link.

Download it through this link. Do visit the Ludum Dare entry http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=rate&uid=491