LudumData

Unfinished Game (Keep the Ball Alive) by StanleyGray

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made by StanleyGray for Ludum Dare 46 (UNFINISH)

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This is an unfinished/buggy Pong-like beach volleyball simulator (not quite a game).

Note: If you're here because I commented on your game, do not bother playing this. Seriously. It's not worth anyone's time to comment/rate. I posted it just to have a record of having participated.

My original idea was to make a dungeon defense game where you protect a defenseless king/queen by placing traps, but it failed to come together and I abandoned it at the end of the first day of the jam.

Day 2, I switched gears and started making a game where sports fans inside a stadium have to keep a beach ball in the air. That didn't work out either. Among other reasons, I spent too long trying to make a pseudo-3D effect where the ball appears to go up toward the the top-down camera (along the non-existent Z-axis, since it is a 2D game). It really needed to be a 3D game, but I don't know how to make those yet.

I still wanted to salvage something out of this mess, and so I was left with this: a reduced form of the stadium idea. The best I can say is that it was a good learning experience, with me being new to game jams and these development tools.

Controls

  • Select player: left-click
  • Movement: WASD or arrow keys

Tools used

  • Engine: Godot
  • Code: GDScript
  • Art: Aseprite
  • Music: cgMusic, LMMS
  • Sounds: BFXR
Link https://stanleygray.itch.io/keep-the-ball-alive
Link https://github.com/StanleyGray/LD46
Original URL https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/unfinished-game-keep-the-ball-alive

Ratings

Given 28🗳️ 36🗨️

Feedback

TolMera
23. Apr 2020 · 08:16 UTC
This is actually a pretty good game if you think of it as "try to keep the ball in the air" - It's fun enough to keep you entertained running aorund the other players and punting the ball into the air before it hit's the ground.

Think you should change it to a normal game (not unfinished) and see what kind of rankings you can get, honestly I think it's as good as some I've played)
🎤 StanleyGray
23. Apr 2020 · 10:52 UTC
@TolMera Thanks for the feedback! That's nice of you to say. Though it's more likely that I will pursue some of the other ideas that came up while brainstorming which seemed more promising, but would take me more than 2-3 days to finish at my current skill level.

FWIW, to meet the minimum qualifications of a "game", it was supposed to count the number of consecutive hits until the ball lands (streak), keep track of your high score, and have a failure condition (limited number of balls), but I ran out of time/motivation. And the player sprites are just my placeholder squares that I took 10 seconds to scribble a face on. It actually pains me to look at it. :)
Erkberg
23. Apr 2020 · 17:13 UTC
It might be unfinished and buggy, but as has been stated, it's already kinda fun to keep that ball in the air. Reminds of the good old Blobby volley quite a bit :) The music is quite nice too.
It might be worth it to think about putting this or a similar mechanic into a different context.
JesterSeraph
25. Apr 2020 · 18:55 UTC
Definitely unfinished, but oh my gosh my friend and I laughed a ton playing. Comment from my friend: the selecting a player with the mouse constantly was surprisingly innovative, and having to constantly switch between them was great.
Trigueiro
30. Apr 2020 · 00:47 UTC
Well for an unfinished game I still spent quite sometime messing around having fun. I stopped when, for some reason, the ball went out of the camera view (top). Given you changed so much from the initial idea I think you still were able to achieve something nice. I assume the idea of this was to keep the ball without touching the sand and if it touched then the hit counter would reset or something. Seems it could be very simple but fun game-play. I think that the players should have been made bigger so it was easier to click on them. That's my 2 cents :)