EAT, PRAY, LIVE (2017)
My first entry to the Ludum Dare global game jam competition, the theme was "Running out of Power" As a team of four; we cranked out multiple ideas and settled with a survival game that was inspired from the game Agario.
The goal of the game is to gain points by surviving for as long as possible by: consuming objects and creatures to grow into a more powerful giant (there three possible stages in total). However, each time the player consumes something or walks a certain amount of distance, they will lose power. In order to regain power, the player must charge themselves up at churches by repeatedly pressing the F key.
In the year 1,000,420 BC After the discovery of shampoo, the world fell into darkness; giants began roaming the endless planes of the Earth: scavenging and fighting neighbouring giants for survival. The human race (being insignificant as it is) sought refuge alongside friendlier giants to aid them in their struggle, and grant them safety from other angry giant predators. As a result, kingdoms where built within giants to act as mobile homes, ones which would hopefully withstand the passages of time. However, all giants require energy to survive and carry the burden of the useless human race; for that, they turn to the churches where they can acquire “Jesus Fernando Power”.
Platform: PC, browser
Role: Design
Team: Alex (artist), Dylan Abela (programmer), Sean Savona (design) and Logan (Sound)
Development Time: 72 hours
Map creation
The main map is based on a 26 * 26 grid; each tile is assigned as an active or non active state, active states are tiles that will have something of value, for example villagers or horses whilst non active states are just empty tiles. Each tile was assigned one of the two states above and the whole map was plotted with a balanced set of animals/villagers/giants and churches. The player begins their journey towards the centre of the grid (14 * 14), therefore giving them the opportunity to explore in any direction as they please.
Creatures are not randomly generated?
We opted against to randomly generate creatures and churches because that would have required us to develop a more complex system within a very tight schedule; also, this could have potentially lead to game balance issues such as: To many churches towards the left side of the compared to the right etc. requuriing a lot more time to perfect. However, small minute things such as: trees and shrubs are randomly generated since they are just eye candy and do not play any role in terms of mechanics.
Humor
As a team we believed that making humorous art, sounds and game-play references would increase the fun factor; that being said, the art was implemented first which was already quite entertianing however once the sounds were implemented the game finally began to flourish and take a positive direction.