LD41
Step-by-Step Deathmatch - My project for Ludum Dare 41!
Theme
Combine Two Incompatible Genres
License
MIT (see LICENSE)
Description
Step-by-Step Deathmatch is a turn-based battle royale shooter game. The world is represented by a grid, and you can only move from tile to tile, as can your enemies. You will be dropped randomly into a randomly generated world populated with many enemies who want only to kill you (and each other, but mostly you).
You will need to eliminate all enemy players, and to do that, you will have to take your turns. Each round, you will receive a number of "turns" which will allow you to perform exactly one action, be it to move one tile, shoot one shot, or pick up an item. Each round, one player or AI moves at a time, and in a random order.
There is no real "score" because you are just trying to be the last man standing. This "remaining players" stat is available however, and that's how you can track your performance.
There will be certain blocks that might slow you down, others that might block you (and bullets) entirely.
The only way to win is to be the last one left. By any means necessary.
Development
Day 0 (Friday - April 20, 2018)
I spent the first 15 or so minutes being salty about the theme choice, and hoping that somebody would create an unofficial alternative theme like they did last time. After that, I spent a few hours working on a very large and complex matrix of theme combinations, which can be found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1enpKy0W-tg2E0qfAFEgJiEbspktFyc9wtLarmGe-WpQ/edit?usp=sharing
After that, I started working on porting over some changes from my TimberWolf game engine to ArcticWolf so I'd have some useful framework/engine features ready once I came up with my theme combo.
Day 1 (Saturday - April 21, 2018)
I got up fairly early in the morning to get a good long day in. Probably not an early morning in the minds of you "morning people" though. I spent countless hours adding features to ArcticWolf in preparation for this game jam, and I largely ignored the theme and didn't try to think about any game idea.
Hours and hours later, there are still some missing features in the engine, but major progress had been made and although I was feeling completely exhausted, I felt like I was going to be able to finish on time still, albeit slightly further behind schedule than I would have liked.
After deciding to turn in for the night, I started thinking about some ideas that might be fun and I came up with one that I think is pretty good. Initially I considered "turn-based" and "roguelike," and I was going to make a game similar to a simplified Binding of Isaac, but I realized that the complexity of it was still probably beyond what I was prepared for, so I dialed it back to a single room, and changed it to "turn-based" and "shooter." I then realized that I could make a fairly large room with lots of AI enemies, and that, despite not being multiplayer, is essentially a "battle-royale."
So officially I decided it would be "turn-based battle royale" and the game would be called "Turn-by-Turn Deathmatch."
Day 2 (Sunday - April 22, 2018)
IN PROGRESS
I woke up a little bit later, getting started right around noon. I worked on a few more minor changes to the ArcticWolf engine, but mainly I wanted today to be focused on getting a workable item, as tomorrow I will need to have something to play.
My initial plan was to port the changes I had made over to my Ludum Dare 40 game just to make sure they worked. I also decided to fix a longstanding bug with my Ludum Dare 40 game, which was that it would randomly segfault sometimes. All it needed was a little attention from GDB to find that the culprit was graphics code being called from the update loop because of a GameStateManager::push() call.
With that out of the way, I started copying some code from that project over to the new repository and creating some basic assets. There is a visible game now, and that's pretty exciting, even if it doesn't do anything just yet.
Stay tuned.