I have no time!

This week is the ludum-dare, for which i wanted to make a game, but failed. the theme is: “Your life is currency”.

Which game me those ideas:

• Lose life for better weapon (e.g. Binding of isaac)
• You are a demon in hell, and you trade souls with others
• A dating game where you have to open up to find someone, but that risks you getting hurt
• Tower defense game where instead of money, you pay with your main tower health
• Use blood magic (e.g. warlock in Hearthstone)

For the blood magic idea, i thought playing a classic fairy-tales witch. You have a set of decisions to make: do you want to make yourself pretty? do you want to make yourself young? each spell cost her life force. then she go to visit the kingdom. What will she do when the prince refuse to marry her? will she put a spell on him? will she put a spell on the entire kingdom? This was planned to be a decision making game, where the goal is to survive. Many things can kill the witch, some of them are with hunt or magic overdose.

But after a while, I just didn’t feel happy about any of those ideas. And just thinking about a game design, felt a bit too stressful for a weekend.

So, instead I did the weekly 1 hour game jam again. 1 hour sounds more intense, but actually this feels much more relaxed to me. It’s much more easy to let yourself make something shitty in 1 hour, than it is in 2 to 3 days.

In the 1hgj, the chosen theme was “time”, which is appropriate, since there is no time :)

After some thought, I decided to make a game about the rabbit from Alice in wonderland. Since I didn’t want to go to a banal interpretation of time as a time limit. I thought to make a maze game where you have to catch the rabbit, or you will get lost.

I had some technical problems: I just made the switch from Unity 2018 to Unity 2019.2, which didn’t work smoothly. I was about to give up on this project as well, until I decided: don’t take it too seriously, hack the hell out of it to get the result you want. A bit technicalities:

• my sprite collision was wrong, so i decided to check for a sprite existence in a location instead.
• I made my own soundtrack, by recording the first humming that came to mind :P
• I gave the bunny a simple: [try to walk right than up than down than die] algorithm, that gave a good enough feeling of a running away bunny
• nothing happens if you catch the bunny, but he is fast, so catching him is unlikely
• after the third room the levels repeats themselves (this is after on the 5th room i designed, i realized i was saving them on the same existing rooms :/ )
• if you miss the rabbit, you get a random room out of the three, but without a rabbit (the leads to the same places like when the rabbit is there, so just go right and you can follow the rabbit again)
• the sprites looked bad, probably need to improve the pixel perfect settings, just ignored it

that’s it. made a nice little experience, gave it my own art style, and even my own soundtrack for the first time. You can check the source code: here

If you tried it, let me know what did you think of it. I love mazes. Would you like an actual game based on this prototype?