Designing the game

Here is my entry for Ludum Dare 50.

The theme was "Delaying the inevitable". After exciting thoughts of Thanos, and with input from my eldest son, I decided on a tower-defence game, with the objective being to last as long as possible against an unending enemy.

I was determined to do this properly this time, fleshing out a proper design and using tools like Trello (https://trello.com/b/A681FngS/ld50-delaying-the-inevitable) to keep me on track.

I wanted to use the player's score as a life-meter as well as a currency pool to "pay" for defences. Having the player's score reach 0 would be a game-over condition.

The genre would be sci-fi-ish, and I'd reuse a villain I'd created for LD48, the vile General Critter (I really should flesh him out some more). 

The play area would be largely static, with camera movement restricted to left/right scrolling. The player's "base" would be at the left end of the play area, while enemies would enter from the right in a series of waves. The waves would get progressively larger, and contain increasingly tougher enemies.

The player has a variety of defences available to them, with different strengths, weaknesses, and costs. Barricades that don't attack but have a large pool of hit points. Turrets have fewer hit points but can can hit oncoming enemies from range. Mines wait for an enemy to blunder into them, before exploding for a large amount of damage. And sniper towers have a longer range and do more damage than turrets, but have a slower rate of fire.

The game jam started at 2pm Saturday New Zealand Time, and by the time I had the design fleshed out, the Trello board created and a Unity project set up, it was heading on for dinner time. I made the decision to get a good night's sleep after dinner, and start actually coding first thing Sunday, hopefully fully refreshed and ready to go.

So naturally, I wake up on Sunday with a migraine...