A Sinister Experience

I had failed. It was almost 1 a.m., and there was just one hour to go before the Ludum Dare 30 deadline. I’d been tweeting progressively lower percentages of how likely I thought it was that I would finish, but now I knew. My game didn’t even have a goal yet. It was time to give up.

In the last two and a half days I’d had about as many hours sleep, which made giving up even more tempting. At the same time, giving up would have made it all for nothing. My decision to continue would determine if my entire weekend had been meaningless torture or fantastically enjoyable.

I looked through the assets I had not yet used, and scraped together the most minimal idea for a goal:
if (player.x > goalX) {
    ...
    ...
    profit!()
}


The game very nearly was that short. Luckily I’d already made it possible to add conditions to Levers, and I already had a Key class. I simply needed to check if the player collides with the key, tween it to invisible, set a boolean to true, and add that boolean to the condition on the lever. I admit, this is a really cheap way of extending the play time of the game. Thanks to the key we hid “far out West”, the player now had to walk all the way across the map again. Twice!

Having spent probably more than half my time on art, and another big portion on the music, at least this way there would be some time for players to see it before the game ended. Queue dramatic ending, a deep sigh of relief, and pure disbelief.

Somehow . . . I had actually finished.