About Toaster Boy

This was my first Ludum Dare! I'm 11 and have been coding for a few years, mostly with Minecraft mods. I worked on Toaster Boy by myself, mostly. My dad helped me with time management and some audio work. He did voice of the kitty. The Basic premise of the game is to save the kitty by building a toppling tower up to the branch. If an object falls on your head, it's an instant death. About halfway up, a helicopter will come by and start shooting butter at you. At this point it's time to start shooting your toaster to take it down. Reaching the kitty will end the game!

What worked

I added a mini map in the last 30 minutes. My dad thought it was too hard to tell how close you were to the kitty. It could be just a few pixels off screen, but it felt like it was miles away. Once the mini map was added, you could instantly see how far, or close you were.

What didn't work

At first we tried to keep the falling props active in physics. This caused the tower to be almost impossible to climb as the objects would fall and push around the other props. We changed this to be half a second before the prop locked into place. This ended up being the final mechanic.

The helicopter started right away at first. It was hard enough to get going building the tower for new players, so it made sense to have the difficulty ramp up the higher you get. As a bonus, this increase in difficulty urges you to try harder as you almost get there.

What I learned

I learned a lot. I learned how to use lists and arrays to get the props and toast spawning properly. Having clones of objects was a new thing for me. I had to think outside of the box and at a larger scale than just one thing at a time. I had to think about what would be next and how it would fit in. My dad taught me a lot about time management and scaling back on ideas that would require much more time.

Tools used

• Unity
• Photoshop
• Garageband

Play the game!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/toaster-boy