Defuse in under 5
5 seconds, a bomb, and a timeloop… what can I say?
Following the failure of “Hope”, my Ludum Dare 46 entry where I tried to make as big and glamorous a game as I could ( which ended up buggy and bloated ), I decided to try an experiment for Ludum Dare 47. Conversely to a large and fancy game, how well could a small, but extremely polished and carefully thought out game fair?
As it turns out, pretty well. garnering 111th out of 3206 participants; a 400 spot improvement.
Level Design
In order to maximize replayability while keeping the workload and complexity down, it was decided that the map would be randomly generated when the game starts. Random map generation was handled similar to Spelunky 2, where a several base templates were designed before hand for the levels and further variation was added by substituting parts of the base template with a 2nd set of individual level parts.
Graphics
The objective here was less with more. Therefore 2 decisions were made early on for the art style: that the game would use low resolution pixel art; and that it would also use a small 8 bit palette. The 8 bit colour palette was first sourced from Lospec, segregated into 3 categories of colours in order to better define the game’s elements and make them stand out.
As for the sprites, 32 by 32 pixels was selected. This was still enough resolution to have a reasonable amount of detail, while still keeping in line with the game’s intended design. Objects were also animated to indicate what could be interacted with.
