A friend told me he was going to participate in the Ludum Dare 38 compo and since I haven’t participated in one for quite some time, I decided to participate as well. Which means for those who’re unaware, spending a whole weekend to craft a game from scratch on my own. And for the first time I was able to actually finish something in a game jam. How? Well, scope. Sounds dumb and it kinda is but instead of trying to make a game in 48h I decided that the core game has to be done in like 12 hours. I couldn’t meet that time frame either, the core version took me around 18 hours but I still had a lot of time left so this wasn’t a huge problem after all. And the best thing is, I still had enough time to add more enemies, extra features and some polish! Well lets talk about the game:

“Something about rockets that shrink planets!” (naming things is hard!) is my entry for LD38, it’s a top down shoter thingy, where you have to protect your home planet from incoming aliens / rockets. When a rocket hits earth it shrinks, why? It’s the best thing I could come up with that fits the theme :D. Sadly the game didn’t get enough ratings (probably because I didn’t give enough feedback either!) to get a final score, since I’ve never finished anything before I didn’t know this, but well overall I’m very satisfied. This was also the first project I’ve done with the game engine Godot, I was playing around with it and wanted to use it in an actual project but never found the time to do that. Godot is generally a real pleasure to work with and if I wouldn’t write posts on blogs so extremely infrequent I might actual write some articles on it, we’ll see.

Download the game and try it or look at the source code at github.com/atomicptr/ld38, though while working on this project I noticed that my Godot workflow is still very bad so don’t copy that please!

Best regards,

Christopher