Ludum Dare 33 - You Are the Monster

It's Ludum Dare time again, and as with the last competition I wasn't at my most productive. But nonetheless I managed to pull something together on the second day, and I'm pleasantly surprised with the result. The theme was You are the Monster and I made a turn-based game called Tasty Humans where you have to sweep levels and hunt down as many humans as possible, playing as either a Demon, Wraith, or Necroghoul. Try it from the Games page, or read on to hear more about the process of making it.

Unlike last year I was quite happy with the theme. My lack of initial efficiency was more down to laziness and a hand injury making coding slightly uncomfortable, so I spent most of day one watching TV comedy shows instead. However, I did at least decide on my general concept: the turn-based, square grid based human hunting game. I decided that you as the monster would not be in any danger, and the challenge would be based on limited time and approaching the levels in such a way that you wouldn't panic all the humans too quickly and scatter them. The basics of monster movement and human chomping were done, but not much more.

The Wraith moving into a crowd of humans with invisibility.

On day two I felt a bit guilty about my poor progress, especially since I failed to make anything worth releasing last year. With my hand feeling better I got stuck in, and by focusing on simple features for different human types and monster abilities, things were coming together quickly, which further boosted my interest and productivity. Deciding to make the humans helpless against you was very important here - I did consider adding a human type who would attempt to trap and delay you (with a big shield or nets or something), but realized that coding smart behaviour for that would be too hard. Instead, humans just have to run away from you, shout wildly, and slam any doors they pass. It's not smart, but works in the context of the game. Does it mean that people something get stuck in corners, or close doors and lock themselves out of buildings, or in with the monster? Yes, but you can put that down to panic, and it doesn't hurt the player experience since it just makes them easier to eat.

The Necroghoul prepares to use their teleportation ability.

Once I had those basics in, all that was left was adding a main menu, some explanation of what to do (this was done poorly to be honest, being a block text with some images, but I didn't have time to make a more interactive tutorial) and building a few more levels. This is probably the main takeaway for future Ludum Dares - get something fun to play going ASAP, and build on it. This is what I did with my LD31 game 12 Hours, where it was entertaining as soon as I had basic guard tracking and searching behaviour. It's what failed in LD32, where I was trying to build UI intensive games with systems that wouldn't be fun until there were a lot of components built and working. There was no challenge in the early builds of Tasty Humans without any time limit, but there was a basic satisfaction from deciding how to approach the humans and then chasing down and eating them.

So there we are. It seemed to move very quickly from being a basic proof of concept to fleshed out idea with multiple levels and monsters to use, but that's how it goes when you're enthusiastically working on a game.