LudumData

LD46: The Lighthouse at the End of the Universe by LMB

[raw]
made by LMB for Ludum Dare 46 (COMPO)

You are the keeper of a lighthouse in the end of the universe. Keep it alive from hordes of evil guys!

Instructions

Try to keep the lighthouse intact wave after wave of enemy attacks.

​Controls are optimized for a controller with analog sticks, but you can play with the keyboard, too.

  • Move: Left analog tick, arrows, ~~WASD~~(*)
  • Fire: A button, Cross button, Control(*)
  • (*)As some have pointed out, Ctrl+W closes the current browser tab :face_palm:, so please use the arrow keys or a controller when playing in the HTML5 version!

Destroy blue asteroids for replenishing your own health, or red asteroids for fixing damage to the lighthouse.​

Tools and credits

Author comments you probably don't care about

Very happy with this game. The idea is not creative at all, but overall this is my most well-polished Ludum Dare submission ever! (I am particularly fond of the title screen: kind of minimalist, but quite moody in my opinion!)

I had a playable game, with sound, music and particle effects at the end of the first day. I then spent the second day basically improving it: implementing better enemy behavior and new enemy types, adding asteroids, removing bugs. My latest commits (the last one was two minutes before the deadline!) added new sprites for the player and enemies, which were very ugly before and now are passably elegant (if simple).

Didn't do much playtesting or balancing, but did a bit.

Oh, and if the game idea is not creative, I think the title is! :wink:

title-screen.png

playing-03.png

Youtube https://stackedboxes.itch.io/ld46-the-lighthouse-at-the-end-of-the-universe
Youtube https://gitlab.com/stackedboxes/protos/ld46-the-lighthouse-at-the-end-of-the-universe
Youtube https://stackedboxes.itch.io/ld46-the-lighthouse-at-the-end-of-the-universe
Youtube https://stackedboxes.itch.io/ld46-the-lighthouse-at-the-end-of-the-universe
Youtube https://stackedboxes.itch.io/ld46-the-lighthouse-at-the-end-of-the-universe
Original URL https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/ld46-the-lighthouse-at-the-end-of-the-universe

Ratings

Overall 869th 3⭐ 27🧑‍⚖️
Fun 803th 2.92⭐ 27🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 1038th 2.32⭐ 27🧑‍⚖️
Theme 806th 3.313⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 821th 2.94⭐ 27🧑‍⚖️
Audio 439th 3.18⭐ 27🧑‍⚖️
Humor 795th 2.087⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Mood 761th 2.9⭐ 27🧑‍⚖️
Given 26🗳️ 23🗨️

Feedback

Fryer
21. Apr 2020 · 01:57 UTC
Nice mix of asteroids, shooting games, and keeping it alive!

I played the web version and it has a problem: Ctrl+W closes the currently open tab, so I had to avoid going up and shooting at the same time. If there were more alternatives for shooting that could be avoided.
James Beninger
21. Apr 2020 · 02:16 UTC
That's a nice, clean graphics style. One minor complaint about the key bindings: having WASD and Ctrl at the same time make it easy to accidentally close a browser window in HTML5 mode (with Ctrl+W).
🎤 LMB
21. Apr 2020 · 02:27 UTC
@fryer @james-beninger About the Ctrl+W issue: :face_palm:! (As a workaround, you can use the arrow keys to move. Or, better still, use a controller!)
Caveman54
21. Apr 2020 · 02:47 UTC
Very well polished game. Really enjoyed how it played. I wasn't very good at it though.
gagouman
21. Apr 2020 · 02:51 UTC
Fun little game, easy to understand the concepts and to play, nice work!
zillix
21. Apr 2020 · 02:52 UTC
I really enjoyed it! I actually loved how your own bullets damaged the lighthouse; I had to be strategic in my aiming my shots. Great work. :)
Itskdog
21. Apr 2020 · 02:55 UTC
Nice job. I liked how it automatically zoomed in and out. I think the movement of the ship could be better. It seemed to have specific movements that made it difficult to actually hit a ship because it could line up with it.
Nick Rafalski
21. Apr 2020 · 03:02 UTC
This is a fun game that was executed well. I really enjoy the camera behavior of zooming out when you're moving faster. The whole thing has a kind of mellow vibe that makes it different than similar games. My only critique is that it's hard to hit the enemies with the very discrete 8-way aiming. It seems they can shoot at any angle and are much better at hitting me than I am hitting them!
🎤 LMB
21. Apr 2020 · 13:36 UTC
@nick-rafalski Yes, you are right about the 8-way aiming. One of my self-imposed, secret goals for this Ludum Dare was to learn how to implement proper analog controls, so I optimized the input for controllers.

Maybe I should have used a different control scheme for keyboard users. Perhaps something like left/right turn the ship, up moves it forward, down moves it backward (or makes a 180-degree turn). Not ideal, but probably better.

Thanks for the comment!
blobo
22. Apr 2020 · 16:59 UTC
Cool game! I like how if you shoot the lighthouse it still damages it, so you need to be cautious about how you play.
Shawn Moore
23. Apr 2020 · 00:26 UTC
You had me at the name, I wonder if the restaurant is nearby? I think polishing the ship movements (e.g. with some lerp) would really add a lot to the game!
Rafa Braga
23. Apr 2020 · 00:30 UTC
The game is good bro, simple but very fun to play! Think that the graphics could be better, but overall its work, well done :)
mvanbaalen
23. Apr 2020 · 01:24 UTC
Simple and fun! Happy to see Godot :)
IDidGame
25. Apr 2020 · 14:44 UTC
fun old school gameplay and nice bgm!
i got 926, difficulty ramps up quick maybe reduce regular enemies once the tougher ones are added
meelo
27. Apr 2020 · 19:53 UTC
Fun little game - it reminds me of a lot of this sort of "fight lots of spaceships with little geometric graphics" that I've much enjoyed in the past. As has been mentioned, the controls didn't feel so great on a keyboard - I can see that a controller would make this a lot better. One thing to consider for keyboard users would be to have the ship move along arcs of a circle, so that it turns smoothly from one orientation to the next or just to make aiming less important by giving the bullets a bit of homing ability or just having them fired in some spread pattern. The music and sound design were really nice.
LeviDSmith
27. Apr 2020 · 23:09 UTC
Nice little shooter. I made it to wave 4 and my score was 320. I liked how the camera zooms out as you start to move around.
cheesepencil
28. Apr 2020 · 03:53 UTC
I like compo games with extravagant backstories and this had one! Also space games are my jam. I made it to wave 5, which I think is pretty good and the gamepad controls worked very well. The BGM was also nice and I thought fit the overall mood of the game well. I didn't sit still very long but when I did the zoom effect was neat.
eduardogacn
28. Apr 2020 · 06:28 UTC
good game
🎤 LMB
28. Apr 2020 · 23:29 UTC
@cheesepencil Thanks for the comments! Good to have some feedback about the gamepad controls! :video_game:
🎤 LMB
29. Apr 2020 · 00:34 UTC
@meelo Hey, thanks for the suggestions! You are probably right about having the ship "move along arcs". In the beginning I didn't have a clear vision of how this game would play. It wasn't meant to be so everything-happens-in-circles-around-the-lighthouse. But now, in retrospect, I guess it could have made sense to use a polar coordinate system for everything, including controls.

(And I am writing this comment while listening to your game's music in background :musical_score:)
xart2012
04. May 2020 · 03:41 UTC
yeah, closed browser tab too: )

may be use mouse to control rotation? enemy can rotate smoothly, but you can't.
Vex
05. May 2020 · 08:28 UTC
Hardly playable with keyboard, sadly. It's very difficult to target the smoothly moving enemies. I like the background musics a lot, and the pew pew pew sounds are making me so nostalgic.

I'm not a fan of the airplane design of the enemy ships though. That, of all things, felt so wrong.
tgb20
06. May 2020 · 01:34 UTC
It seems enjoyable, and I like the idea it had, but the keyboard controls were lacking. When using the arrow keys on a Mac and shooting I would constantly end up switching windows. Also having the enemies have full axis movement but the player locked to 4/8 makes it really hard to get to them. If I was able to test with a non browser I might have made it a bit longer.
🎤 LMB
08. May 2020 · 00:36 UTC
@tgb20 Thanks for the feedback! Indeed controls were optimized (well, maybe "optimized" is an overstatement) for analog controllers. If you have one around, you should be able to use it even in the browser version. But, yeah, lesson learned, next time I shall give more love for the controls, especially for keyboard controls.
TheWinrawr
09. May 2020 · 22:59 UTC
I'm one of the people that played it on a keyboard, and like the others who've already commented, I found aiming to be really difficult. I would make it so that if you're playing on a keyboard, pressing the arrow keys makes the ship rotate gradually instead of going at strict 45 degree angles. Using the mouse as movement would've helped too.

You did really well on the audio though. The background music is fitting and the SFX reminds me of those old-school retro games, which is good.
12. May 2020 · 13:41 UTC
It's very hard to aim since you can only rotate by 45deg each time. Still it's a very fun game!