'The Idea' is the end result of my attempt at an entry for the Ludum Dare compo 29. As you've probably gathered if you've made it though the minute or two of content in there, it didn't go entirely as I imagined. After getting the theme, I rapidly got carried away with a very vague concept involving a person (or maybe people) escaping from something along the side of river, from which beasts or something would rise and attack the player, and there would be Exciting Narrative and generally fun things happened in a somewhat hand wavy way.
I then found myself getting carried away implementing lots of fun features like pixel block based flowing water stuff (or at least, it was intended to look like water), and randomised character generation code, and lots of other fun things, none of which actually contained interesting gameplay. After doing this for the whole day, I planned to just take care of the whole gameplay issue on the second day. What could go wrong?
In order to deal with this issue, I spend the Sunday morning working on such important things as 2D rotated rectangle collisions, and other drawn out tweaks. Shockingly, these didn't solve the glaring lack of gameplay, but did at least make things more complicated, which is almost the same thing.
Coming towards the end of Sunday afternoon (submission is due at 2AM on Monday here, so no mad rush), I was sorely tempted to throw in the towel, with no real game to speak of, just some slightly broken screens the player could wander through. After convincing myself I really had to submit something, I finally decided that making it a brief and pithy development tale would broadly pass the theme, and was hopefully slightly better than a brief broken not-very-much-any-thing-at-all.
The main lesson I've hopefully learnt from it is that I should really come up with either a solid gameplay, or a reasonably complete narrative before starting implementing random features. Oh, and also that leaving ChronoLapse running taking screenshots as .jpgs won't end well. There's my attempt at a timelapse here.
I hope you were able to extract something from the experience either way.
David Miles, 21:52 27/04/14