Make a 3D game, overlay it with a 2D game, and have the same controls for both. What could possibly go wrong? "Well, that sound incredibly confusing and annoying" You may think... You'd be right!

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Day 1: theming.

As soon as I came up with the concept I knew I was asking for controls-based trouble. In an FPS you mostly move forward, and on a platformer you mostly move left and right. With this in mind i tried to make the 2D game have a lot of ladders so "forward" in 3D would move you "up" in 2D.

On the first evening I had my voxel world running with a 2D graphics overlayed (yes, that's Pitfall II from the Commodore 64 splatted on top of my voxels). Moving around in the voxel world would also move all the little green characters. I decide controls might work - so it was all-in on the concept.

Day 2: the prototype.

Day 2, I got a basic tile map level with a controllable 2D character that could climb ladders. I could bound around the voxel world and choose where to move in 2D. Positive stuff!

Now I needed a theme, and some sort of aesthetic. Having programmer-art skills really hurts here, but I noticed my bright minecraft-esque setting, coupled with a colourful foreground, was incredibly confusing and distracting. I realised I'd have to go with something dark and low-contrast in the background, and have the foreground "pop" a bit more.

"Obaké" felt like the perfect concept. It generally means "ghost" in Japanese, but really they are way cooler than ghosts. Kind of weird an spooky spirits. I ended up going more "The Ring" than regular ol' obaké, but the concept fit will with both my color requirements, and the idea of a 2D + 3D crossover game. The spirits would cross over from the flat lands to the real world. Spooky stuff!

I made a super-quick, heck-a creepy video of Mrs Speaker walking - it was just a test shoot, but as with all things Ludum Dare, it was also the final product. I didn't have the time or talent to model and animate in 3D, so I went with billboard sprites: and hey, it fit the theme of "ghosts from the flat lands"!

Final stretch: oops, no game yet.

The last day, and I had a concept and a prototype: but still no game. I wasted a bunch of time getting my ghost sprites into my hand-rolled voxel world. I failed to get a real billboard sprite renderer working, so I just used good-old trigonometry to always face the quads towards the x/z axis of the camera. I made my pixel art character, who I was going to model after a Ghostbuster. I made some very quick placeholder art that I would replace later. (Spoiler, I never replaced it).

I came up with some great mechanics that would work across the 2D/3D dimensional bridge - and then I dropped them all as I completely ran out of time. All I ended up with was "touch a ghost in 3D, it spawns in 2D where it can kill you". Then I added some pickups, and had myself a win/lose state!

With the final 14 minutes of the compo I made ALL of the sounds and theme song. I had 6 minutes to completely record, produce, and master the music. I recorded me noodling some chords at 200 BPM, then bumped the tempo down to 70 BMP, added reverb, delay, and compression and hit export without even listening to it.

So it actually took me less time to record the theme song than it does for the player to listen to it! That's pretty funny.

https://youtu.be/GnwduaUkMq4

In the end I was pretty happy with how it turned out, and I'm kind of considering testing out some of the inter-dimensionaly game mechanics I had planned: as well as making the 3D world look way more "graveyard-y" and the 2D world look way more "crypt-y".

Of the people I watched play the game, they tended to fall into one of two camps: those who instinctively strafed, and those who didn't. People who strafed found the game too easy, everyone else found it way too hard! I need to figure out how to introduce the two control systems in a more natural way. If I can do that I'd have the base of an interesting (and spooky) puzzle/platformer/FPS game!

Play the game in your browser | LD entry page