Best Before 90 Seconds
BB90S is a fast paced incremental game made for Ludum Dare 47 that I made it solo in about 52 hours. In it, the player is trapped in a 90 second time loop and must accumulate enough money to build a rocket and escape the end of the world.
Features/Things I built:
- Full system design
- System implementation
- Database integration with Sqlite Browser
- UI design and implementation
- The whole game really
System Design
The theme of the game jam was 'Stuck in a Loop', so I pretty quickly came up with the idea of an incremental game, as prestige mechanics are a staple of the genre. The twist then was to take agency away from the player's ability to initiate the prestige, keeping them stuck in the phase of a prestige where they quickly try to regain ground to the spot they were before. I decided to keep any art minimal to focus on design and implementation, and designed multiple types of progression that the player would have to focus on in their 90 second intrevals.
The primary progression was buying resources, being livestock and factories to produce higher quality goods. They needed to be manually initiated, but could quickly make money. The second progression system was farmhands, units that could be assigned to a resource to automate it for the player. They needed to be assigned each prestige, so there would always be a period of time required to set up the automation. Lastly there were upgrades, which came in two varieties, ones that reset each loop and provide stacking bonuses to the value of resources, and ones that stay through prestiges and allow a limited amount of resources or money to persist after the reset.
The goal of having multiple kinds of progression, most of which reset on prestige, is to keep the game frantic. Most incremental games start off very active, as the player is learning and beginning to utilize the game's systems; but as the game progresses the player becomes more passive as automation takes over, and player interaction becomes minimal. I wanted to avoid that by forcing the player to stay in that initial active phase, by limiting the amount of time they can be passive. By the time the player finishes buying the initial reesources, sets up farmhand autmation, and buys upgrades, the prestige timer only has little time left, and the player has to do it again. The larger scale progression then becomes using persistant upgrades to begin prestiges with head starts or buy more time.
Database Integration
Like a few games before it, this game utilized SQLite databasing to store data. I wanted adding new things to be as seamless as possible, with the ability to scale up quickly. It only takes adding another entry to the database to add another upgrade or purchasable resource. The database handles what value can upgrade, using an enum, costs, and even the upgrade unlock tree, as more upgrades are opened up when you buy them.
Post Mortem
This was both my first game jam, and my first finished game done solo. As such, it wasn't great. It was very overscoped for the timeframe of the jam (in fact it meant to be submitted to the 48 hour submission of Ludum Dare but I timed out of it and had to submit to the three day submission), and for my skill level. I was still getitng used to Unity, and was unfamiliar with its UI systems, which was hugely important for this game. I actually had to redo the UI two or three times over the course of the project. The scoping also forced me to sacrifice aesthetics, leading it to look somewhat ugly, as I didn't have time to make unique button sprites or implement proper player feedback or even sounds. I also didn't have time to properly test its balancing and pacing, as most of my testing was focused on bugs. I have since gone back and eased up on its pacing and lowering prices of a lot of things. Overall though I think it was a great experience and taught me a lot about scoping and my limitations as a solo developer.
