Welcome to Cupcake Collector!

A sugary adventure where one brave (and weaponless) crusader faces their sweetest challenge yet… literally!

You’ve been sent on a mission of confection perfection: to collect every cupcake and prove your worth in the Great Pastry Trials!

Sounds easy as pie, right?

Well, there’s a catch — a sticky one.

The local candy-flinging spiders have decided you look like the perfect test subject for their “flavor experiments.” Their aim? Surprisingly good. Their weapon of choice? Gobs of gooey candy that’ll leave you slower than molasses on a winter morning. Get hit, and you’ll be stuck faster than icing on a hot bun. Yuck!

So grab your courage (and maybe a napkin), and prepare to dodge, dash, and delicately devour your way through increasingly chaotic levels filled with cupcakes, keys, and creepy-crawly confectioners. You’ll need both keys to unlock the exit — and your full collection of cupcakes to pass the ultimate taste test.

With each new level, the stakes get higher and the sugar rush gets stronger. Can you stay light on your feet, or will you end up in a sticky situation?

Get ready to prove once and for all:

You don’t need a sword when you’ve got a sweet tooth!

About the Game

Cupcake Collector is a sweet little platformer where your goal is simple — collect cupcakes to pass your final trial! Unfortunately, a bunch of mischievous spiders didn’t get the memo and have decided to pelt you with sticky candy instead.

Each level challenges you to snag every cupcake, grab two magical keys, and make it to the exit — all while avoiding an ever-growing storm of sugary projectiles. The more you progress, the more enemies you’ll face, and the trickier it becomes to stay un-gooed.

Getting hit isn’t the end, but it sure isn’t pretty! Timing, precision, and a little bit of frosting-fueled bravery will be your best friends here.

What starts as a cute confection soon becomes a sticky situation... can you stay cool under sugar fire and prove you’re the ultimate Cupcake Collector?

A Note on our Game Assets

Originally, our team included a dedicated graphics and sound wizard, but real life had other plans! When they had to step away before being able to complete any part of their usual supreme wizardry, the two of us carried on — frosting-smeared but determined — to finish the game.

As a result, most of the visuals and audio come from carefully selected third-party assets under appropriate licenses, with the exception of two dev-recorded voice lines you’ll hear in-game. We focused our remaining time on level design, gameplay polish, and making sure the whole experience still felt cohesive and fun.

These assets are:

Kenney's Platformer Art Candy and Kenney's Platformer Art Extended Enemies

Platformer Vector Assets by Pumpkin2D

10 Retro RPG Menu Sounds by leohpaz

Cute & silly rpg music pack by chajamakesmusic

Controls

Keyboard and Mouse

• WAD for movement
• Shift to dash
• Space jumps (in case you prefer that instead of W)

Controller Support!

Yes, we have controller support! Tested on Windows 11 with a wired Xbox controller.

Heads up: If your operating system detects another device (like a joystick, steering wheel, or even certain USB devices) as a controller before your actual gamepad, it can cause some in-game controls to stop working properly.

The fix: Unplug any other device your OS might be misidentifying as a controller, then plug in your game controller. This should restore full functionality.

• Left stick - Character movement
• A button - Jump

Words from the Dev Team

Fgeva - Programmer

I'm quite happy with what we achieved. Of course I'd have preferred to present a 100% home-built effort, but since that wasn't really possible this time, I'm happy there is such a vibrant community of artists and musicians who are willing to let people use their work under very free license terms, so many thanks to them! I think once we got into the new adjusted rhythm and had selected one of Kenney's very nice tile sets (not to disparage the sound people, but we chose graphics first), we did manage to produce a reasonably polished game that's at least as good as our last effort.

Balimaar - Programmer

I had a very productive first day — once again enjoying the rare joy of time zones working for me instead of against me! It meant I could work a solid 12-hour stretch, hand things off to my teammate for their 12 hours, and we’d both still get some decent sleep in between.

While I caught some rest after that first push, our audio and graphics guru unfortunately had to step away due to unforeseen circumstances. We completely understood, but it left just the two of us to pick up the frosting bag and keep the project on track. So, fgeva and I quickly switched gears, finding creative ways to fill the gaps with the tools and assets we had available.

Then, toward the end of my second shift… disaster struck. Godot suddenly decided that every single scene depended on scenes it claimed didn’t exist — even though they were right there! Clicking “Fix Dependencies” did absolutely nothing (thanks, Godot). Thankfully, fgeva swooped in with some text-file surgery magic after I’d exhausted every possible fix, saving around 12 hours of work in the process. Seriously, MVP moment right there.

From that point on, it was smooth sailing — or as smooth as level design can ever be when you’re still learning it on the fly! Despite this probably being my most stressful Ludum Dare to date, I’m genuinely proud of what we pulled together under pressure.

Here’s to learning, laughing, and leveling up — bring on Ludum Dare 59!