Nothing To The Moon

Nothing To The Moon is a game made by badoomtch (Jay Parry) in 48 hours for the Ludum Dare Game competition.

This was my first submission to the Ludum Dare competition, but not the first time I have tried to take part. It’s tough to come up with a game within the scope of 48 hours and the theme.
For the jam, you don’t know the theme until the very second the jam starts. You can see a list of all the potential themes during the voting process. I found that typing out some basic ideas for each theme before the jam starts is a good way to give yourself a base to start creating as soon as possible.
Here’s some of the ideas I had for this theme before the game jam started.
“Start with nothing
Homeless???
God creation-like game
Nothing as literal text
Puzzle type game made from nothing
You chose to keep your nothing, or look for something more
You get attached to the word nothing
No upgrades from beginning
Start with nothing in the game and slowly add “game-like” elements”
I liked the idea of creating a god simulator, where you start from nothing and create life and a world. I had never worked on anything like this, so I decided against it.

The jam started at 11pm UK time which was nice because before the Ludum Dare 45, the previous jams started at 1am UK time. I worked until around 3am and then slept on the idea ready to wake up early and take on the game the next day.
I wasn’t sure what I was creating for a long time. I didn’t really have a plan until it just fell into a little story I created. I didn’t want it to just be a “walking-simulator”, so there are a few gameplay elements which I thought were enjoyable.
One of the most important things I tried to remember is people won’t play something that is intimidating or convoluted, so I started simple. The game can be completed in around 5 minutes, which turned out to be a good amount of time because a number of people completed the game.

After the first 24 hours I was almost sure I wouldn’t upload anything, I watched a few people livestream their progress on the game jam and felt a bit disheartened when I felt their games were a lot better than mine. I continued to create my game despite this because I just wanted to finish something, and I actually started to enjoy myself after writing a todo list of the story and elements that I wanted to add.

On the last day, I had around 13 hours left from the time I woke up. This day was spend finishing the last 2 scenes, polishing some of the gameplay elements and adding sound. I am no musician, and I have never created any music ever. I decided I would do most of the sounds with my mouth and things around my room. I walked around with my microphone closing doors, tapping objects and making weird sounds with my mouth. Most of these sounds went unedited and directly into the game. The rest of the music was created using Music Lab from the Chrome Experiments project. The last thing I had to do was give it a name. It didn’t take long for me to think of “Nothing To The Moon” because I didn’t have a lot of time. I couldn’t think of a “clever” name, but this one was original enough that I stuck with it.
I am very glad I did this. A lot of the feedback I recieved for the game mentioned they liked the sounds and got a laugh out of it. I uploaded the game 3 minutes before the deadline and went to bed. I didn’t want read any feedback before I slept just in case it wasn’t good. I woke up to 10 comments on the game, with none being negative and filled with people who laughed and thought it was fun. Any critisism I recieved such as the jumping or movement being weird was justified and I knew that, but it has motivated me to create more.
I learned a lot from this process, and I will definitely be taking part in many more jams.
You can check out all of the links for the game here.
Ludum Dare Page
Itch.io Page
GitHub Source Code