Cat Summoner by Tod Semple
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In the year 1985, you lived your life in a small house next to the ocean. You had a lot of cats. 22 to be precise. One day a few months later, a supervillain, a wizard named Doggydoom, came to your house and crushed your front door to pieces. THAT'S UNFORGIVABLE! He walked inside and took 21 of your kittens, too! Then he ran outside to his headquarters and trapped each of them in a different cage! Now you must confront him and save your cats!
Use the arrow keys to move the Cat Summoner around. Try to line up with a ball of yarn. Snooky will shoot every few seconds. You want to collect gems to get upgrades.
Controls
Move: WASD, arrow keys, or a joystick.
Select: space bar or joystick-A
Gameplay
This game is a cross between Jetpack Joyride and Vampire Survivors with a very 80's synthwave vibe.
There is 1 endless level. The "level 1" at the start is aspirational thinking.
About the game
I worked on this game with my 2 kids (8 and 10). When I said the theme was "summoning" my girls instantly thought cats. The minds of young children are inspiring.
2024 is my year of Music Nation. I composed the synthwave track for the game. Go me! I'd never really composed a song before this year.
We drew most of the art by hand and touched it up in Procreate or Photoshop. I used Ableton Live for the music. Most of the instruments and sound effects are from Splice. My daughter did all the VO and put some effects on it. I used a custom game engine I’ve been tinkering with for the last few years. It’s C++ with emscripten for the web build.
I didn't use any AI directly in the game, but ChatGPT drew a lot of concept art, and Copilot suggested a lot of code. The future is here.
I love the Extra format! It’s the only way I can make a game with everything in my life. I put in about the same amount of effort as a Jam game but spread over 2 weeks. For this LD, I put in about 26 hours. The time was evenly spread over art, design, coding, and audio.
Thanks for playing!
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/cat-summoner |
Ratings
| Given | 25🗳️ | 34🗨️ |
I got 781 gems.
This is a really cool game. Gives lots of arcadey / flash vibes :D
I love all the upgrades you can get. Its very well made!
Towards the end when I got the orbiting balls and such I found I played move of a dodge role than aiming to shoot any but it was still cool!
Can you please vote on my game? :)
Also I am a sucker for neon aesthetics. good work!
Congrats! "Cat summoneeeeeer!" :fire:
It's perfect! Love the music and sound effects! :D Maybe the summoner could be a bit smaller so you have a chance at squeezing through some gaps (maybe that can even be an upgrade).
A very cool reimagining of vampires! Love the balance of almost all abilities and the increasing complexity of the game in the process. The sound design suits the game well. Really liked that you can play with one hand.
Not very comfortable that the cat is constantly moving down. It makes the game a little uncomfortable. If it didn't move down it would be better. Also didn't quite understand the green cat. He seemed useless and slow to me.
What a cute game! I really love that you made this with your kids! That's really so cool of you to do that. Overall I love the idea and would like to see it be improved on! It's actually so addictive haha. Overall really fun! Great work!
What's the green cat for?
Addictive game! Only suggestion I have to improve it other than balance etc is to have a cooldown time if you get hit, as it's a bit annoying to lose 5 lives instantly because you failed to avoid a clutter of yarnballs.
Lovely that you made this with your kids, I hope they had a great time!
Well done!
I wish that your character moved a little faster by default. If you spend too many upgrades on movement, the game quickly gets too hard, but if you don't, it's a little sluggish.