I was really looking forward to Ludum Dare 50 but when the theme was revealed I felt nothing. The three loose ideas I had been thinking about for the last week didn’t fit into “delay the inevitable” theme.

After some soul searching, I came up with a new idea and a story. The game is an endless shoot ‘em up that you will eventually fail. It’s a sad story about a spy that have been busted and need to flee. Unfortunately, the fate is sealed as soon as the spaceship lift off the planet Lluna. Endless homing missiles will shoot the craft down sooner or later.

So far Saturday morning started of decent. Started a new project and set up some scaffolding. Added source control and opened Corel PaintShop Pro and hit my first wall. I’m not a painter. After more than an hour I had a spaceship done in “programmer art” style. Back into Unity and writers block hit hard. Last Ludum Dare I spent way too much time fiddling with the new Input System. Didn’t want to make that same mistake. Got some basic movement going felt that this wasn’t going well.

Took a break to clear my mind. Had to make some more… “art” for the Lluna surface. Created some green mess and figured out how to make a repeating tile of it in Corel PaintShop Pro. Wasn’t that hard once you found the menu option. Back in unity I made it a scrolling background and added some clouds via a particle system. That looked convincing enough.

Spent the evening trying out a few different enemy ideas. Settled on one and continued with health and effects. Got tired of clicking to fire so I added auto fire. Not happy with the game but decent progress.

Sunday means finishing the game and it was missing some systems. First, I tackled the game states. With a way to lose the game immediately got more fun. Fixed everything related with menus and buttons to restart.

A lesson from my last game jam was to add audio early. Oh well, better late than never. Fired up Rytmik Studio and had a blast making a cheesy song. Fixed some sound effects with the awesome SFXR tool. Implemented an audiomanager and main menu. Since there was time to spare I made sure the game was fully playable with a controller too.

Time to build the game for Windows and WebGL. As usual the WebGL build fails and you must solve a new issue every time. 😂 Took screenshots, made a logo and created both Ludum Dare and Itch pages.

Finished the compo with lots of time to spare but I’m just relieved that I’m done. A lesson for next time is that if it’s not fun then maybe do something else than the theme.