So, this Ludum Dare was an interesting one, at first I was at odds with theme, “We’ve had this one before I thought, with You are the Villain, this one’s just the same”

But then, after the first few hours of my first coding livestream, consisting of me re-acclimatising with Unity, writing up a generic bunch of menu screens for transitions, re-definable controls, etc, etc. I noticed something.

The theme… it IS different!

Villains are, well, they’re just Villains, usually with some wacky plot and likable fallability about them. Monsters, are an entirely different breed, hideous and with their minds set on horrible, horrible things.

My next thought was along the lines of “Ohh Rampage, there’s a game I could try and emulate but no, everyone will probably do that and it’s too obvious an interpretation of the theme. What I need is something REALLY monsterous. But What?”

Okay, let’s make the player take part in something disgusting, I mean murdering characters is one thing, but that’s in almost all the video games, we need something worse, kidnapping the innocent, now there’s something monsterous.

To say making this game was unsettling to make would be pretty accurate, whilst it was fun making the voices of the various characters during the live stream it made me feel pretty odd about coding the thing up. Clearly Unity was also feeling odd and deleted my prefabs directory 2wice during the event, I could almost swear someone was remoting into my PC to prevent me from submitting with an hour to go all 30 prefabs went bye bye and any final polish turned into a race to get everything set back up and working again before time was up.

You play the role of a monsterous character driving around in your Van with the aim of capturing as many innocent kids within the time limit and can drop off lollipops to tempt the kids further, but, watch out for those pesky parents out to stop your plans, speaking of which. What are your plans? You’ll only find that out by watching the terrible ending unfortunately.

There were plans to make it so different areas would spawn more or fewer kids at different periods of the day, with the school buildings being particularly useful / troublesome depending on when you visited but the bug in unity prevented that from happening sadly. I might update this game later on, although I have many other games to finish off currently!

So yes, please play The Catcher Van, feel disgusted with yourself and enjoy the ending, you monsters!

PLAY ME DO. Playyy me dooooooooooo, cough cough cough cough.

During Ludum Dare weekend over £150 for the gamers charity Special Effect during my game jam and 10k run challenge which is awesome, thanks again to everyone who donated and shared, you rock!