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 36: Alien Artifact

Competition: Ludum Dare 36
Theme: Ancient Technology

My entry for LD36 was titled Alien Artifact. The object of the game is to gain 100 Energy production to "activate" the Alien Artifact. This is the second Ludum Dare where it fell on an extremely busy weekend for me even with a couple months to plan. So all in all I had about 10 hours to actually work on this game. I was bit disappointed in my entry this time around but others seem to be enjoying it. LD36 had no rating system as others have had but I understand that LD37 will have them back, so I can only judge what others think about this game based on their comments which so far have been positive. This ended up being a Jam Entry (easy mode) rather than a Compo as I have done in the past. This was due only to missing the Compo deadline.

The game is a single player card game of sorts. You start with 5 Player Points (PP) which you use to play cards. Each card has a PP cost in the upper right corner. A number in the left corner indicates that the card expires after a certain number of turns. To play a card, click it and then click a socket to place it in. There are 4 random bonus sockets as well, 2 for Energy production and 2 for PP production. The box on the bottom of the card indicates what that card does. A + indicate that you'll receive the number of Energy/PP every turn. A - indicate you'll lose that amount every turn. A # indicates that you'll receive a flat amount of Energy/PP that turn only. If you run out of PP you lose the game. You can run negative on Energy but you'll eventually run out of cards and lose that way too.

The video below goes over the game in more detail but I suggest you play it to get a good idea of how it works. I do like this concept and I've wanted to do a card game for a while so this was good practice I may try to finish this game out a bit more but sort of doubt it unless I do it just as a prototype for something else. There were a couple things I dropped due to time, one of which was the connecting lines were meant to be an adjacency bonus of sorts. Something like "if there are at least 2 PP cards connected to at least 1 Energy card do " something. Another was that when you hover over a socket, it was planned that you'd be able to see the card detail. All in all though, the biggest thing missing that is really needed is card balance and more cards. It is extremely easy to win this game on you really can only lose if you get a two bad draws on the first two hands. The deck is shuffled completely randomly so it is possible you'd see 3 cards each turn that cost too much to play and you'll lose. If there was more balance this scenario would become exceptionally rare.