Finished my LD42 entry

For LD42 the theme of "running out of space" wasn't really something I liked but at least I had an semi decent idea for it that would allow me shoehorn the thing I wanted to do into it but sadly due to having to do everything over a remote desktop connection and not being able to do much during sunday I didn't actually get around to shoehorning the thing I wanted to do.

Deciding to make the map node connections by hand was probably a good decision since I think I'd have spent a lot longer on it if I tried to make it in a less tedious way. Anyway how do people usually make node based maps work? I feel like the way I did it was way too simple.

It might have been nice to add some sort of story and in general make the situation less abstract, as is you don't know what you or the enemy is and only the map looking sort of like a cave is the main thing you know about the situation. One story idea was that you'd a some girl running away from marriage to some cruel noble but teleporting and beating up your hunters seemed too troublesome to explain nicely so didn't do that.

For combat it ended up a lot simpler than I wanted and I'm still not sure if I like the fact that you don't want to just run to an enemy and instead hope that he'll run into you. I think the action ended up being a lot more focused on hanging around the enemy border than I wanted, idea was that you'd attack a bit and then run further away from the border to heal up in peace until you had no safeish places to rest at but there are various things that make that not really how it works.

There's no way to win but I was thinking of adding some sort of dig yourself an escape tunnel that leads to a new map thing, maybe I should have tried to add it in. If it was just spent X amount of turns digging possibly with a hp cost it wouldn't have been that interesting so I thought what if you had to kill an enemy for each turn you dig while having to prevent enemies getting to your digging spot. Not being able to think of a nice way to frame why you'd need to kill enemies to dig was one of the main reasons why I didn't get around to doing it but now I realized that saying you need the enemies weapons as tools to dig could have been nice.

Anyway at first I wasn't very happy with the game but having written all this I'm starting to think it wasn't that bad. Not sure if I'll try to make a post-compo version, adding digging and some intro story wouldn't be that hard but I'd probably try to do a bunch other less easy tasks and then give up on it as too time consuming.