Ludum Dare took place this weekend, for the 35th time. This was my third Ludum Dare, and I'm quite pleased with how it turned out.

Scroll down to play the game!

The theme this time was Shapeshift. I didn't take part in the voting, but thought it was a good theme.

Saturday morning, the very first idea I had was for a grid based puzzle game. Before I started writing any code, I drew some sketches on a piece of paper to see if I could come up with a game mechanic that would work. I quickly scrapped that, and went on to writing code.

Since I wanted to make a puzzle game, and I use Vue.js for a university project these days, I wanted to try using it in my game. I kept the grid from my earlier sketches, and made a grid of numbers.

Still not sure what to do, I changed 0s to square, 1s to triangle, and 2s circles. Since the theme was shapeshifting, I made it so that the shapes would turn into other shapes on random when a shape was clicked. Not very exciting.

Then I thought maybe it'd be fun if you got to select many shapes, forming the shape of the previously selected shape. So if you had just clicked a circle, you would get a "circle shaped selector" that would span a given radius from the next clicked shape. I found that really the only selector that worked, was the circle selector, so I just stuck with that.

Next, I decided to make the shape switching deterministic, so that they wouldn't switch at random, but if you clicked on a circle, all the circles in the selector would become squares. The other two shape types would act similarly.

I found it was quite a challenge to get a lot of the same shapes within the selector, so that became the basis for the scoring system. If there was one of the same shape, you'd get one point, two shapes would give 2 points, then 4, 7, 11, 16, 22, ...

After deciding on that system, I also made the piece you click each turn, deactivate itself. So if you click many of the pieces near the center of the board, you'll have a hard time getting many points, as those won't count anymore.

The game was pretty much feature complete by Saturday night, and the Sunday was spent polishing, adding music, and making it work on mobile.

In the end, I feel that I ended up with a good game. It's challenging, and with some more features and polish, I think it could become quite addictive. If the game gets high votes by my fellow LudumDarers, I may actually keep working on it. I think it has potential.

Here's the final result:

Any thoughts or feedback? Please reach out to me on Twitter!

View it on the LudumDare website, or play it in fullscreen here.