I’m a member of Team JMCJ, and this is our Ludum Dare Jam 43 entry!

Box Explorer is an infinite adventure/exploration game. In the game, you are trying to trip switches that are hidden around the map. Once all of them are tripped, the portal to the next level is opened. However, there are enemies who have other ideas. Use the power-ups scattered around the map and advancing to the next level to gain levels and become stronger. However, the enemies become stronger too. See how far you can get before you die!

How did we apply the theme? All bullets shot will bounce off the walls a couple of times, so you have to make sure that your aim is good. Therefore, shooting a bullet has the potential to be a sacrifice (of your health). Also, all power-ups scattered around the map have both positive and negative attributes, so you have to make a choice and see if that power-up is worth its trade-offs. (Also, we sacrificed all the graphics our graphics guy made because of reasons (sorry David))

Guide

This is you, the player. The green shows you the front of your character, or where you will shoot from. Use WASD to move and Left-Click to shoot. Use the mouse to aim.

This is an enemy. They aren't your friend. They will always move towards you and periodically shoot bullets at you. So try to kill them with your bullets.

Around the room, there will be 4 black boxes right on the edge of the screen. These are hallways to adjacent rooms. Moving onto them transitions you to the next room.

However, these black boxes that are in the middle of the rooms are the switches! Run into it to turn it green, meaning you have tripped it. The number of remaining switches is on your HUD

Any other randomly colored boxes are Power-ups! The color shows the level of powerup (gray, light-green, blue, purple). Run up to it to see what it would do to your player. If you want the powerup, simply press Space and you will obtain the powerup.

When you trip all the switches, the big red box in the starting room turns green. This is your portal to the next level. Running up to it will advance the level. When you do, you will get 3 HP and +1 to a random stat. However, all the enemies stats raise too. So watch out!

The game goes on forever! See how far you can get!

Box Explorer requires Java 8 or later. If you use OpenJDK, make sure you also have OpenJFX installed.

This is our second ever Ludum Dare game. We were able to use a lot of the knowledge we acquired from the last one (along with some of the code) in order to help us make a better game. While the graphics probably don't look as good as our last game, we feel like the game overall is better (from a code standpoint at least). Hopefully this trend continues and whenever you see us next, it'll be an even better game.

While we could've used things like Unity or GameMaker to help speed along the process of making the game, 75% of our team are current Computer Science students who enjoy the grind of problem-solving and writing a lot of code. At the end of the day, we care more about the experience of working on a big-ish project than how amazing the game plays out. So, at the end of the day, we are happy with the outcome. And we're sharing it with you in case you want to try it out. Treat it like a Proof of Concept game. Because that's basically what it is.

Enjoy!

Credits

• Parker: Development
• Trevor: Development and Math
• Jack: Development and Static
• David: Graphics that we didn't end up using (sorry) and Audio

We have published a version that contains code written after the Jam ended. It fixes a minor screen size issue, but otherwise remains the same to the LD version. Test whichever version your heart says is the correct version to test for rating.

Look out for some timelapse and Gource videos in the near future!