pasta run is a silly game i made with a friend for Ludum Dare 49 (unstable). that was my first game jam and quite possibly the worst way to go at organizing a jam:
- i had no experience in the engine (Godot),
- participating was decided like, the day before
- we both had busy weekends.
in hindsight i have no idea how we even got a single game prototype working.
how did we even get going
brainstorming also happened at completely separate points from both ends, so it was fun working with completely disconnected ideas all way overblown in scope.
what could it even mean for something to be “unstable”? how would we put that in the game?
here’s a few of the ideas that we got:
- unstable platforms
- unstable program (crashes)
- unstable controls (?)
- unstable object properties
- unstable tetris (???)
- unstable connection
we ultimately settled on the idea of “unstable weather”.
unstable weather?
turns out weather in the real world is quite unstable. on the saturday of the jam weekend, i looked outside and it turned out to be raining! that’s where the weather idea came from.
so maybe, we could have different weather patterns, and it would affect the game differently? like, for example:
- rain would mean likely to slip and fall
- snow? slowed down, could trip as well
- fog, can’t see anything
- etc etc
paired with the idea of an infinite runner, that sounded nice! different level patterns, easier or harder. could need you to go as far as you can, collecting items on the way to stay on the run for longer.
final idea on the list however was “la course aux pâtes” - quite literally pasta run.
why pasta run? why pasta? i can’t remember. the game’s 4 years old by now
“pasta” run
you might have noticed that the pasta in this game does not look like pasta. you might also have noticed that the design overall is very (extremely) simple, and that there’s only two levels, and that they’re absolutely not infinite.
yeah, that ties to the fact that i/we organized this extremely poorly. basically my friend and i only really gave half a day each to the game - i gave saturday morning, he gave sunday afternoon and patched things together on monday. good luck making anything coherent with that little dev time.
…and somehow we did?
sure, there’s only two levels, and the physics/everything feels janky as hell. but despite all that, it was pretty fun to make!
i didn’t know anything about Godot when when we tackled this project. it was meant to be a learning experience so that i could get started using Godot for maybe future projects. i had a lot of fun messing around and learning, and we ended up using Godot for a VR project for uni around the same time
the game might be bad and/or messy, but i love it all the same since you gotta start somewhere if you want to make games.
you can play pasta run on itch.io right from your browser. there’s also a windows build available, but that’s not really necessary unless your browser is ancient somehow
if you want to do something, just do it. if it doesn’t hurt anyone, why not do it? if you need direction to make games, find a game jam and do that!