LudumData

Lily vs. the Swarm by Coda Highland

[raw]
made by Coda Highland for Ludum Dare 46 (JAM)

It's spring, and that means new life! But not all of that life is friendly. Keep your friend, the butterfly, safe from the bad bugs!

Join this fairy and her friend in a child's imaginary adventure.

Controls

  • Move: Arrow keys, WASD, or touchscreen D-pad
  • Fire: Space bar or touchscreen button
  • Bomb: Shift or touchscreen button

Defeated bugs drop energy. When your energy bar is full, a bomb becomes available. Bombs deal damage and heal you or the butterfly. You can carry up to 5 bombs at once.

The game is over if either you or the butterfly take too much damage. Watch out for the bosses!

Too hard?

This is a shoot-'em-up game, not quite a bullet hell or danmaku but still relatively challenging. If it's too difficult for you, the first time you get a game over you'll unlock an Easy Mode. In Easy Mode, you start with more bombs, you can survive more hits, and the butterfly is immune to damage so you only need to worry about protecting yourself.

Programmer's Notes

This is, without a doubt, hands down, the most content I have ever gotten into a jam game. It's also the most complete -- Nullified had game progression and a meaningful end state, but it was missing a lot of things that were in the plans. For this game, I think there was only one feature I wanted to get in that I didn't have time for, and one piece of artwork that Ginny drew that I didn't have time to clean up and incorporate.

It would have been nice to write another couple songs, but I'm INCREDIBLY happy to have an original composition of my own creation in here. The music in Nullified was my own composition as well, but I only did the remix of it during the jam. This was written in 3-4 hours Saturday night, and I haven't written any music in years.

License

Software copyright (c) 2020 Adam Higerd

Sound and music copyright (c) 2020 Adam Higerd

Graphics copyright (c) 2020 Ginny and Adam Higerd

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Youtube http://greenmaw.com/ld46/
Youtube https://bitbucket.org/ahigerd/ld46/
Original URL https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/lily-vs-the-swarm

Ratings

Overall 1339th 3.452⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Fun 998th 3.429⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 2018th 2.85⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Theme 700th 3.9⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 1065th 3.737⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Audio 676th 3.525⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Humor 1740th 2.361⭐ 20🧑‍⚖️
Mood 1214th 3.4⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Given 8🗳️ 11🗨️

Feedback

matt2728
21. Apr 2020 · 13:45 UTC
Great job! constructive feedback: I was a little confused at first that when I would destroy a minion the green thigns flying at my were not projectiles. Super minor though. I liked the music and artwork! Great job! You should rate some games to increase you games exposure on the main page filters!
Yubs
22. Apr 2020 · 20:48 UTC
Love the music and graphics, and really enjoy the flow of the game and the way the music built up to the game play moments! Took me a second to realize I wasn't taking damage from the pickups after killing enemies, other than that loved the game and the concept!
awruh
24. Apr 2020 · 16:20 UTC
I really like the graphics here! it's is cute and the game is kinda challenging, though fun, definitely. great work overall, the music is nice too and fitting. :smile:
BarravelBZH
24. Apr 2020 · 16:23 UTC
Unlucky, music shut down after my first shoot. I listened to the music then and really good one. You respected well the theme.
Eran Haas
24. Apr 2020 · 16:27 UTC
Love the hand drawn look!

Seconding Matt's point about the collectables feeling like projectiles, even after I knew what they were I had the urge to dodge them,
xel
24. Apr 2020 · 16:29 UTC
Great concept and really loved the hand drawn graphics and the animation for the butterfly!
Kate90
24. Apr 2020 · 16:32 UTC
Nice! Lovely art and music. Good luck with the game!
Shugor
24. Apr 2020 · 16:33 UTC
very nice style, reasonably difficult. music died when i used the bomb, but on the plays where that didn't happen the music was lovely.
🎤 Coda Highland
24. Apr 2020 · 16:34 UTC
@barravelbzh I had someone else report that same error. I've got an inkling I know what the problem is. In the meantime you can reload the page and try again.
Rhiz
24. Apr 2020 · 16:38 UTC
I like the hand drawn cutout look.
Nomppie
24. Apr 2020 · 16:47 UTC
There are a lot of times when I don't think I can avoid taking damage. Even on easy mode, the game is quite difficult. I would recommend having some kind of dodging mechanic or maybe make bombs more powerful because when I used them it didn't feel like they did much, or at least not as much as they needed to. Another thing I would add is perhaps some kind of way to clear bullets from the screen and push enemies back similar to blanks in Enter the Gungeon.

I also kinda wish the butterfly could shoot bullets as well. Maybe you could upgrade it to shoot or something, I dunno. Upgrades would be pretty cool, but as a developer, I know something like that can be hard to implement at this point.

Aside from all that, I really liked the art style and the music, and I thought the final boss was pretty dang cool. I think that with enough polish and elbow grease this could be something really special.
SimonReiser
24. Apr 2020 · 16:49 UTC
Nice graphics, I also love how the sky darkens, whenever a boss approaches.
It's really hard to dodge bullets that come straight at you and wished to be a bit faster (or the bullets to be slower). That's why I don't want to event go in front of the wasps :sweat_smile:. Also the game over screen does not seem to trigger.

I enjoyed the music as well.
CreamyBacon2
24. Apr 2020 · 17:40 UTC
That was fun, I love a good scrolling shooter, I would like to shoot faster, but It's not really a complaint. Other then that the art is cool, and the music works well. Good Job!
🎤 Coda Highland
24. Apr 2020 · 18:00 UTC
@creamybacon2 The rate of fire was tuned for game balance reasons. It was faster early on but it made it possible to just sweep up and down the screen and plow through without any risk.

@simonreiser I'm open to considering an adjustment to your flight speed, because you're right. Thanks for the bug report (pun not intended) about the game over screen! I'm not sure exactly when that broke but I can certainly fix it.
🎤 Coda Highland
24. Apr 2020 · 18:02 UTC
@nomppie The bombs DO clear bullets! They have to actually make contact, but using them to get out of a jam is definitely an intended mechanic.

I actually had an upgrade in mind but I didn't have time to implement it before the end of the jam. It wouldn't have been particularly difficult to do (the advantages of building your own engine!) but I thought it was more important to get the final boss done first.
Super Hadoken
25. Apr 2020 · 18:32 UTC
Balance issues aside I enjoyed your shooter. The fairy would only fire when enemies were on the screen, not sure if that was intentional but it felt a bit odd.
Nice artwork too, especially the bosses.
p.s Moonkins rule.
jk5000
26. Apr 2020 · 08:32 UTC
This is overall a fun little shooter. The music and the visuals is overall pretty good. The UI was a bit confusing. I don't know if it is mistake, but my game just ended, with me flying around with no enemies and nothing else happened. Overall is this a pretty good jam game. Well done.
TerribleTrioJoe
29. Apr 2020 · 02:03 UTC
Fun game overall! There were a couple times when it seemed like I wasn't able to shoot, even with enemies on the screen. Might have been due to accidentally having caps lock on, though.
lespaul59
30. Apr 2020 · 08:49 UTC
Hey nice entry. The difficulty level is good. And the graphics and mood has its charm. Keep up the good work :)
🎤 Coda Highland
01. May 2020 · 20:19 UTC
@super-hadoken It isn't a matter of whether enemies are on the screen or not. There are just a couple places where firing is explicitly disabled for gameplay reasons.

@jk5000 Did that happen when you or the butterfly died, or after you beat the boss? There's a known issue with the game over code not working reliably when you die but I'm not aware of a problem with the endgame.

@terribletriojoe That's really weird. I wouldn't expect caps lock to make a difference because the space bar doesn't capitalize. I'll see if I can reproduce it. Were you still able to maneuver around the screen?

@lespaul59 Thank you! :)
jk5000
01. May 2020 · 20:34 UTC
@coda-highland "Did that happen when you or the butterfly died, or after you beat the boss?" I believe the butterfly first died, and after this the game just continued like nothing happened. It was after I beat the end boss that the game just continued with me flying around with no enemies and nothing else happening.
🎤 Coda Highland
01. May 2020 · 20:40 UTC
@jk5000 Oh, that's interesting. That's a failure mode I didn't anticipate. Beating the final boss (it should have been a patchwork monstrosity made of the other bosses) doesn't check to see if you're still alive afterward so it shouldn't break because of that. I wonder if there's some other unrelated place where the state is getting out of sync... like it thinks it's already in game-over state so it can't change into it again, but the UI is still in gameplay. Thanks for the report and I'll look into it.
TerribleTrioJoe
02. May 2020 · 17:53 UTC
@coda-highland I don't think it was caps lock when I tried again. The unusual thing I saw was that I died and went to a "pause" state instead of game over, and when resuming the game was so full of enemies that the bullets didn't have time to appear on screen before hitting something, so that might have been what happened to me before.
🎤 Coda Highland
03. May 2020 · 20:23 UTC
@terribletriojoe Oh! That's REALLY informative! Thank you so much. If it's related to the handling of the pause state then it really narrows down where the bug might be.