LudumData

John and the Stairway to Zion by Dissing

[raw]
made by Dissing for LD26 (COMPO)
A simple jumping platformer.
Help John find his way to Zion.
Jump though 10 exciting and crazy levels!
Collect orbs to open gates.

In case of motion sickness. Try to disable "Shrooms" under Settings. (Forgot to change the name!)

Tested on Windows 8, OSX Mountain Lion and Ubuntu 12.10

Second Ludum Dare entry and first time composing music.
I think it went better than expected.
Did not have time for optimizing, so the game can take quite some CPU. If you get weird unregular controls, try setting messing with the options in the settings menu.

The crazy background color and rotation can also be disabled in the settings menu.

Hope you like it!

All platforms(Java) https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30245119/LD26/LD26.zip
Source https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30245119/LD26/Source.zip
Original URL https://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=17718

Ratings

Coolness 77% 2
Overall 3.16 563
Audio 3.24 236
Fun 2.60 908
Graphics 3.33 352
Humor 1.87 826
Innovation 2.15 1181
Mood 3.64 94
Theme 3.51 584

Feedback

KoryWazHere
29. Apr 2013 · 09:18 UTC
Thomas Was Alone clone in 48hrs not bad :)
ella guro
29. Apr 2013 · 09:24 UTC
i realllly like the mood set by the environments. the lighting is really cool. but your character being a big orange-ish rectangle kind of clashes weirdly with the great style.
jami
29. Apr 2013 · 09:26 UTC
Nice game! Great atmosphere!
johnste
29. Apr 2013 · 09:29 UTC
Very atmospheric, loved the music and the lighting.
Mythalore
29. Apr 2013 · 09:54 UTC
Really nice art style and good music but John is a little short. :)
glisk
29. Apr 2013 · 09:55 UTC
Nice thomas was alone clone with great atmosphere, the music combined with graphics is really nice (I like the orange color for the player btw).
Magnus
29. Apr 2013 · 09:58 UTC
Agree with ella, the player being an orange rectangle looks kind of off.
karsyf
29. Apr 2013 · 09:59 UTC
Pretty cool version of TWA, jump collision felt a little splashy sometimes but the atmosphere\music, little touches like the gently swaying level all cool
Muu?
29. Apr 2013 · 10:01 UTC
Great setting.
But some jumps were to hard to achieve.
Morgawr
29. Apr 2013 · 10:02 UTC
Really smooth game, the rotating room gave me a bit of motion sickness and the gameplay was a bit slow/sluggish but pretty good nonetheless!
KEFIR
29. Apr 2013 · 10:13 UTC
Got to the end! My game have almost the same ending and main character looks very alike :) A little annoying that you need to be maximum accurate in movements or you will fall and have to climb back again.. and again.. and again.
Very good level design work though!
The Jahn
29. Apr 2013 · 12:47 UTC
I like the ambiance, though jumping can be a bit iffy at times.
Yezu
29. Apr 2013 · 13:45 UTC
Great! The graphics are super, the ambient soundtrack fits well. Only the jumping mechanic could use some work.

What are shrooms?
🎤 Dissing
29. Apr 2013 · 14:58 UTC
@Yezu
Oh forget to fix that!
Shrooms was a reference to an internal variable. It should have said crazy mode or something like that. Disabling it removes the swaying and background color changes.
EdoMiyamoto
29. Apr 2013 · 16:14 UTC
Great mood
William Bundy
30. Apr 2013 · 04:41 UTC
The creepy music and lighting enhance the mood of this game, but the context set up by the dialogue snippets really define it.
BarrensZeppelin
01. May 2013 · 08:07 UTC
Are the shadows rendered real-time? If they are, there's such a huge amount of potential wasted by not making something move in front of the light sources, it's almost sad. :/

The ambience was really cool though, and I was not affected by the dizzying effects, excellent job!
Pixelfan Games
02. May 2013 · 11:56 UTC
Good game i love the music
ShellfishGames
02. May 2013 · 12:07 UTC
This was great, I really like the atmosphere. What you did with the shake-effect (felt like it all took place on a ship), the lighting and the ambient sound is really exceptional and totally pays off.
The only complaint I got is that it's really quite repetitive and a little too long (John seems to be of the same opinion). Other than that it is one of the best LD26 games I've played yet.
KilledByAPixel
04. May 2013 · 19:05 UTC
Level design was good but maybe too repetitive. Good visual style, maybe need a bit more contrast between solid tiles and background for some colors.
MinionStudios
08. May 2013 · 00:41 UTC
Excellent work. Please ignore any "Stairway to Heaven" or "Jacob's Ladder" references, lol.
cakemonitor
12. May 2013 · 18:33 UTC
good sense of mood and nice to see a game which follows a character through a story. it was a little slow paced for me but a really nice game none-the-less
dector
13. May 2013 · 19:59 UTC
Reminds me "Tomas was alone".
dremelofdeath
17. May 2013 · 09:23 UTC
Didn't work for me, just printed out a stack trace and died :/