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Lundum Dar #14 Games

Lundum Dare #14 came and went and while I didn’t actually compete due to not coding my own game, I was very pleased with what I did do: design a very basic game using the theme LD voters came up with. That was my goal for the weekend, and I accomplished just that. I am, to be perfectly honest, quite proud of myself as I’ve been trying to inspire myself to actually use these kinds of contests not to program games, but to use my nogin to come up with designs, no matter how simple.

This was the perfect exercise for me. “Simple” and “basic” were the two most important words in my vocabulary this weekend. My tendency is to sit down and think a lot about a game design and then explode the idea. The idea then tends to float around in my head all bloated, and I never actually get around to writing it all down because I never know where to begin. By forcing myself to keep to a simple design I was able to easily craft a game that would have, had I been a coder, been something I could whip up relatively quickly and most likely well within the timeframe of this contest. Now I don’t know if my game would pass the playability feature, but that’s the beauty of keeping it simple: I would have been much more able to tweak with a simpler design than I would have if I thought it out to death.

That’s not to say that I didn’t start coming up with all sorts of complications to my basic beat-the-walls-back theme. Several times I wanted to take pen to paper, map out changes, write down ideas, but I was able to stop myself for once. The challenge for me was to keep it simple, shithead, and I’m really glad that for once I did.

I noticed that a lot of the participants ran into this problem fairly early in the competition. They most likely did not map out their concept, or if they did they weren’t thorough enough. Or, and this is another most likely, simply said to themselves, “hey, what if I add this, or let me tweak this and see…” and then get wrapped up in their work all the while leaving the basic design that should have gotten them through the first phase of coding behind.

Another thing that I noticed is that some focused on the wrong thing first, such as graphics and splash screen before they actual had a playable something (by “playable” I mean at least their basic game play functionality coded). When you have only 48 hours in which to design and code a game, don’t get caught up in pretifying the whole thing, especially if you have to playtest (another thing some competitors did not have time to do) your game.

I liked how various participates interpreted “advancing wall of doom.” Some interpreted it literally as I did, creating a moving wall or walls, some with spikes, some entirely made of flames or lava, moving towards a player. Some turned the AWOD into a maze, others, numerous spherical objects. Two (that I saw) turned the wall into a static object that the players had to climb. One created an interactive fiction game, which amused me because I had said to myself, “wouldn’t that be an interesting challenge.” Imagine my surprise when I saw someone take up that mantle!

You can check out all 121 entrants by pointing your browser here.