I recently took part in Ludum Dare – A 48 hour game competition.  The theme for this round was “You are the villain”.  Originally I spent my time working on a ‘Scooby Doo’ themed game, where you dress up as ghosts and scare people away from real estate and castles and the like.  Eventually I decided to move away from that idea.  I was going to give LD a miss at this point, it wasn’t until a few hours later that my brain threw ‘The Twist’ into view.

I ended up coding a game about twirling moustaches (because what good villain doesn’t twirl his moustache deviously?) called “The Twist”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4IAWbp30xE

The finished LD version can be played here (Android version here) and the slightly modified post-competition version here, however I have decided to move forward and go for a commercial release.  It will be a good trial run for later projects.  My initial plan is to release for Android ($1 ish), and maybe a feature-lite version for Kongregate.  I hope to have the game released before the end of voting (which I believe is January 9th?).

I’ve got a lot to do before then.  I want to implement a scoring + ‘achievement’ (notoriety is what I’m calling it) system, fix a variety of bugs, add some extra features, and I’ve also got a second game mode lined up (though that will probably be a second release, later down the track).

Currently, I am working on the scoring system – utilizing CouchDB.  I’ve been working on security, and it should be close to secure for the time being.  The system will be designed in such a way that if it turns out not to be acceptable, then I can switch in another solution.