After a nontrivial amount of home IT support for myself, my son and his friend (both of which are also participating in LD42 and have Compo submissions in!), I'm finally able to get my uploads worked out. Fixed a few bugs along the way, hope no one minds. All substantive work was completed by the deadline, I swear. :)

Der Raum is strongly inspired by an arcade game from my youth, the name of which I'm not going to reveal just yet to see if anyone recognizes it. I spent many, many quarters on the game as a teenager.

The gist of it is you're trapped in an ever-shrinking room and need to get out... and you will, only to find out you're stuck in another room, over and over again, and it's only getting more and more crowded each time.

I have more enemy types partially complete but not playable in the game. The game should be a progression of enemy types, each with their own behaviors. But, since I don't have them all ready, I've opted to let you play one room over and over again, with sliiightly increasing difficulty every runthrough. It does get quite challenging, and eventually, of course, you WILL fail.

CONTROLS:

As follows, but note:

A DUAL-STICK CONTROLLER IS REQUIRED! (keep reading)

• Left stick: player movement
• Right stick: shooting
• Start / A: start the game from the title screen
• M on keyboard: toggles audio muting on/off

While the arrow keys on the keyboard still work for player movement, this game is controller-based. It's a twin-stick shooter, basically, in my incarnation... although I have limited the firing to eight directions as a hat tip in the general direction of the yet-to-be-revealed arcade original.

And for those of you that don't have controllers, I am truly sorry. I'm OK with it being a controller-only game. It was developed and tested with a newer bluetooth-capable Xbox One controller, both via BT and via USB cable. I suspect any reasonably-modern dual-joystick controller would work (old PS2/PS3 controllers, 360 controllers, random Logitechs, etc). If any of you try other joysticks with success, I'd love it if you'd let me know. :)

I created some music using Auxy on my iPad this time. I'm not a musician, and I'm not a composer. It's not exactly the music I had in my head when I was making the game, but I figure something is better than nothing. I'm also not all that wild about most of the sound effects in the game... but again, solo compo participant, limited time, and it's still better to have something than nothing.

I both love and hate that audio can really make or break a game's feel. Hopefully it'll grow on you. I think I'm missing a few sounds here and there, but nothing crazy-important. And again, the M key on the keyboard is there if you hate it all or just wanna quietly play. ;)

I spent a lot more time on art this time, which I'm pretty happy with, though most of it like the majority of the mechanics work, you won't get to see--yet, anyway, I hope.

TOOLS:

Game was made with Construct 2: https://www.scirra.com/construct2

Audio was created using Auxy on iPad, bxfr, and ChipTone.

Auxy: http://auxy.co/

bfxr: https://www.bfxr.net/

ChipTone: http://sfbgames.com/chiptone/

Images created in PyxelEdit, with some light MS Paint usage: https://pyxeledit.com/

Progression tables done via Google Sheets.

Google Home streamed "Code Radio - 24/7 concentration music for programmers" from freeCodeCamp.org via YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ22pgaXog4

WinSCP used to upload HTML5 code and the various game builds to my website: https://winscp.net/eng/index.php

If you find any breaking bugs or other annoyances, or even *gasp* an Easter egg or two (maybe?)... please let me know. I'd also love ANY other feedback you can offer.

Those that leave a well-intended comment, I'll definitely rate you back!

And since my son and his friend were here all weekend making their games, why not reward them with a rating? I'm sure they'd appreciate it, and I'd like to think they'd also rate you back. :)

My son's game, TENORMS: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/tenorms

His friend's game, FaceGuy: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/faceguy

Thanks for reading this, have a great LD!

-A

If audio/music doesn't autoplay when you start the game:

I thought I had a bug, but I'd forgotten that Google changed Chrome to disable the autoplay of video and audio--as many users were annoyed by auto-playing ads. This sadly also affects games.

You have two options: Hit M twice on the keyboard to toggle the audio off and back on again. Another, more "permanent" option is to change the setting in Chrome. This will, however, affect anything that autoplays audio and video, so you may not want to make this change. I wouldn't blame you. However, I'll provide the information and you can do with it as you please.

Put the following into the Chrome address bar:

chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy

You'll see the option at the top of the page called "Autoplay Policy". From the dropdown to the right, select "No user gesture is required". You will likely need to restart your browser.

If I were you, I'd just double-tap M and leave your browser settings alone.