Ludum Dare 27 – Postmortem

[This was cross-posted from Ludum Dare.]

This was my first Ludum Dare adventure and also my first game jam. I usually avoided game jams because I was under the impression that you must suffer sleep loss. Funny, I found a lot of Ludum Dare advice saying to get a good night’s rest, but that’s besides the point.

My best impression with Ludum Dare was the wonderful community here. There was a lot of positive energy, which I don’t usually see on the interwebs. I would like to thank everyone for making such a wonderful community of game developers and for making this game jam. And thanks to everyone who played my game. I was surprised by the amount of people who liked my game!

The game can be played here. Video here.

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The idea behind Caelium

Caelium was a wondrous idea for interactive software that came about by love for astronomy and love for games where you build things. The most famous example of such a game is SimCity, where you build a city. However, I imagined Caelium having  a different scope in terms of complexity.

In Caelium you build a planetary system of your wildest dreams. You start with a star in the center and from there you make planets, moons, rings, and so on. I imagined that there would be a lot of customization in terms of types of planets, size of the star, number comets, and the list goes on and on. The problem is that giving too many options will make this space building experience very complicated, maybe even more than SimCity.

My intention with Caelium is to allow users to create planetary systems in a simple and easy to use interface. There are apps on iOS that helped inspire my idea of the “user-friendliness” I intend with Caelium. Check out Planetary and Starscape to know what I’m talking about. Those 2 apps are the main inspiration for this idea.

I’m still currently in the process of planning out what this ‘game’ will be like. I’m also experimenting with a prototype in Unity to see how to program planetary movement.