Ludum Dare 49 Post-Mortem — Unstable

Creating a game completely from scratch in 48 hours

Volatile Waters: My submission to Ludum Dare 49. It was created from scratch in 48 hours. Image by author.

This last weekend saw the 49th installment of Ludum Dare, the game development competition where you have 48 hours to create a game for a given theme completely from scratch. This event was my 10th time participating and once again, I wrote a post-mortem about the different steps in the development process and what went well and not so well.

Theme and Idea

The theme for this Ludum Dare was “Unstable”. I started with a quick brainstorming session about associations with the word. The first idea that comes to mind is construction and balancing objects, but there are a lot more things that can be unstable: unstable psyche, unstable ecosystems, unstable economy (i.e. our current economy), radioactivity, and even more that I cannot think of right now. This makes “Unstable” a great theme because there are a lot of different possibilities and there will be a wide variety of submissions.

The idea that sounded the most enticing to me was the unstable ecosystems and slowly narrowed it down to a marine ecosystem. I wanted to create a game about the instability and volatility of many ecosystems.

There is a lot of pollution and plastic trash that is washed into the oceans and slowly accumulates in…