Ludum Dare

What is Ludum Dare? Ludum Dare is an accelerated game development competition where you are given 48 hours to build a game from scratch using only graphics, sounds, and code you have created yourself. You cannot work in Teams and you must work around a theme as voted on by the community, there are no prizes.

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Ludum Dare 50: Numerus Maximus

Competition: Ludum Dare 50
Theme: Delay The Inevitable

My entry for LD50, titled "Numerus Maximus", was built on a very tight time budget. Like my last competition, I decided the best way to proceed was to use JavaScript and make a pure browser based game since that is where my mindset is in coding these days. This time around I decide to leave behind the Canvas and keep it simple. The entire project is in basic HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Though it did give me the opportunity to use my new spDialog class for some of the popups. As this class is freely available to anyone who wants to use it and open source, it falls within the guidelines for the Compo.

With a theme like Delay The Inevitable, my mindset immediately when to a game that would need to be quick to play and nearly ensure the player would lose. I played around with making a game akin to Minesweeper but eventually abandoned that specific type of game play because the player had too much of an advantage. I landed on something more random where the player blindly picks tiles trying to find the #24 tile last. Finding #24 ends the game but technically the player still wins. The more tiles they can pick before finding #24, the higher their score.

The game takes advantage of the localStorage API to save player scores between sessions. This avoids having to store any player detail on the server and keeps everything local. There is a Score Sharing feature the player can use to copy/paste their results to social media.

The rules are pretty simple and there is very little skill to this game at this time, it is mostly dumb luck. There is a total possible score of 300.

  • Click on tiles while trying to avoid the highest value target (24). Finding 24 ends the game and your score is totaled and averaged with your previous games.
  • Avoid finding the 0 tile, finding 0 will open two random tiles that are not 24 and their scores will not be counted.
  • Finding 0 is bad but it can provide some valuable information to you depending on what tiles get exposed.
  • No adjacent tiles will be consecutively numbered. So if you open a 5, the tile below, above, and to the right and left will not be a 4 or 6. Diagonally they could be. So finding 23 potentially gives you up to 4 safe to open tiles.
  • If you select a tile and the adjacent tile is within 2 value points of the one you selected, it will be opened and scored. So if you open a tile with a value of 5 and the tile adjacent to it is 3 or 7, they will open up.

There is a Powerup/bonus icon (lightning bolt) that will highlight 3 random tiles. These tiles will contain 2 tiles that are safe to open and one that is the 0 tile. There is a bit of information you can gleam from this data to help you play longer.

All things considered, I'm pretty happy with this entry. I was able to dedicate about 13 hours to it but alas I haven't any more time. I didn't have time for anyone else to test it so if you find any issues before the end of the compo, let me know and I'll try to fix it. I do see two small bugs on my Galaxy Note 9, the clipboard api doesn't appear to function and some of the fonts are a bit off. But game is completely playable still and it works fine on desktop.

I have some ideas for the future, for instance I'd like to provide some additional cues to the user to make it a bit less guess work. Possibly adding some additional rules to the algorithm that randomly generates where tiles are located so you can eliminate possibilities a bit easier.

I didn't get around to adding sound unfortunately but I did add some animations to make it a bit more enjoyable.

 

  • This game was developed using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS
  • Should work on all modern browsers including mobile.