We really struggled to come up with an idea for the theme but I eventually had an idea about keeping servers alive as a basic premise. Since neither of us were super confident in the idea we decided to make it a learning experience by trying to make it a 3D game which neither of us had done before in Unity. I did the majority of the programming while my teammate created the assets and the scoring system code.
We received lots of positive feedback and suggestions from the Ludum Dare community with most seeming to like the overall concept and interpretation of the theme. However they would have liked to see more events, better scoring balance and a better player model. We received above average scores on most categories with our best scores being in the Innovation and Theme categories.
A lot of time was spent by me trying to make sure the server modules and racks were all coded using OOP principles to make the gameplay programming a lot easier as they could all be treated as generic types. This was a massive improvement to previous jam games I’d made, where I just rushed through this part and then regretted it later when I would spend half of the jam making overly complex interfaces to try and wrangle it together into gameplay code.
You control a data center robot whose job is to maintain the servers and expand their capacity as your company gains more users. The server shards will also occasionally break and require a replacement. We had planned on adding a bunch more random events that you would need to deal with but we unfortunately ran out of time.