SPOILERS ALERT! If you’ve not played Breakdown yet go do so before reading these posts as they contain, amongst other things, a full walkthrough!

“The theme of this month’s contest is a classic sci-fi setting – you must have your main character(s) on a ship afloat in space that is, for whatever reason, unable to move (other systems may be malfunctioning at the creator’s discretion). Are the characters scavenging the ship? Or is their own ship out of commission? The cause of the malfunction is up to the creator.”

It’d been a while since I’d entered a MAGS competition and, as is often the case when you already have a project on the go, I was feeling inspired to do something different. When SpacePirateCaine’s very open ruleset came along I decided to think up some possible games I could make to it.

My first plan was to do some kind of horror game, big on atmosphere. I’d love to do something serious that really grips the player, but ultimately decided I couldn’t pull it off in the time. Next idea was to return to my game-making roots and do something in an RPG Maker style – top down tiled graphics with a focus on exploring and environmental rather than inventory puzzles. Again another idea I’d love to return to in the furture, but some quick attempts at drawing tiles went badly and it would have been cheating to have used someone else’s free tileset.

I have a general rule of 5 days planning for MAGS. If I’m going to make a game in such a short amount of time I’ll need to know (more or less) what I have to draw, script, test and so on. So on the 5th of April (a Sunday) I had a last ditch attempt at coming up with a game idea and opened up Graphics Gale and started pixeling characters…

To be continued…