King of the Ring by Lomby
LETS GET READY TO RUMBLE!
There can only be one King of the Ring so step up and defend your honour!
Everyone wants a piece of your crown but how long can you survive. Every 10 seconds new contenders enter the ring and believe me, it can get quite crowded. Flush out these impeccably timed adversaries and avoid being shuffled off to oblivion.
Also available on Itch below if the embed above fails to load.
(Our first game jam & published game so please be nice!)
Edit 6th Oct:
Controls:
a / d - left / right
w / space - jump
i - grab / throw
Game made in Unity & Piskel for the graphics.
Thought I'd add in a retroactive Dev Log & some of the progress gifs / images in case it's of interest! Took us a little while to settle on an idea (we weren't very prepared for this theme) but eventually agreed on a Royal Rumble type game with a new wrestler entering every 10 seconds.
Our runner up ideas were playing as a deckhand on a pirate ship (taking orders / plugging holes in the ship / bailing water etc), or a hero of the village type game where you had 10 seconds to find various things to feed the beast/monster terrorizing the village!
We looked into some classics like the Burrito Bison series, Guacamelee, RetroMania Wrestling and the upcoming indie game Punch-A-Bunch for some inspiration.
We started work on a basic gamescreen (boxes for the ring / players / enemies), a basic UI, and the character controller.
We wanted to have movements like grabs, throws, slams, and drop attacks (like an elbow drop) but most of these ended up getting cut due to time constraints. Jake had some fun chasing down some bugs implementing the grab mechanic:

While playtesting some more and brainstorming we came up with the idea to go for playing cards to tie into the Royal part of the Royal Rumble, with an idea to build up to a special move if you manage to knock out each of the cards of a suit to make a royal flush. (We might still try that for a future update!)
I had a little go at my first pixel art (I've watched a lot on YouTube, but this was my first try at it!) but was really pleased with the result.

A few of the actions and other other characters were coming together:

And a few other bugs keeping the grab and throw testing amusing:

We cut down the scope and got the game to a stable(ish) state with about 3 hours left, so we (luckily) decided to test out the submission process to avoid any last minute panic. Unfortunately, there were a few issues uploading so we had to scrap some quality of life changes we were hoping to include, but we're going to try to add some of the cut scope over the next few days (and maybe submit the updated game in the extra category). I'll drop a link here if we do!
Thanks for playing & looking forward to future jams!
Jake & Alex
| Itch.io (recommended) | https://lombygg.itch.io/king-of-the-ring-ld51 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/king-of-the-ring |
Ratings
| Overall | 1070th | 2.964⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1122th | 2.643⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 914th | 2.927⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 746th | 3.488⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 910th | 3.048⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 277th | 3.427⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 940th | 3.025⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 67🗳️ | 66🗨️ |
2/10

I had fun chucking some guys out of the ring. I wish the sprites were different colors so I could see if I was picking up the enemy or they picked me up.
Nice work for your first jam! Looking forward to playing your future games.
There is a slight shading difference between the player and the enemies, but it's clear by all of the comments (
@adamphoebe @russ-moonbase @matt-ravenhall @leonel @genpaku @ccsjk98 ) that it wasn't anywhere near enough!
(We actually weren't too sure if it might make it more fun if you couldn't easily see you character to add to the chaos / feeling of getting overwhelmed in the rumble, but on reading your notes we think we're going to try to make all the enemies at least different suits from the player).
The difficulty curve is definitely an issue too ( @mr-danh @crimoudin @rawb @logan-hughes @fadrikalexander @darkmax14 ). We're thinking of adding more potential spawning points above the ring, with a counter to track the number of enemies in the ring so that we can start spawning more enemies if the player clears the ring quickly, and fewer if they're struggling with it.
Thanks also for the feedback @elmoeinstein @amarokczukay @house-trap-charlie for pointing out both issues above!
Great ideas @human-writes-code & @sohei , especially about limiting the player with either a cooldown / stamina bar. As you say it's a little too easy to just spam the throw to clear the ring at the moment!
And finally thanks for all the support & kind words @wavertron @sanemsky @paloobi @pineapplegladiator & everyone else! :smile:
Keep on doing !
The pixel art is decent and I'm so glad you added a music and sfx volume slider.