So… our jam is over. It was a pretty crazy few days. We weren’t huge fans of the theme to begin with, we were hoping for Upgrade Yourself, Chain Reaction or Only 5 Minutes but alas. Fate wasn’t on our side. That all being said, after a few (six) hours of chatting about ideas, we began working on a 2.5D platformer.

The original idea was to write a maze generator, drop the player at the start of the maze and have them run, jump and dodge to the end. We would have generated traps and obstacles throughout the maze to add variety to each time it plays. However, while writing the movement code, we very quickly decided against a common platformer and attempt to achieve movement similar to Super Mario’s water levels. What we ended up with is pretty good (I think).

 
With this new idea in place, we began steering away from procedural generated levels and opted for a hand designed world, giving us the ability to design trap placement and collectable locations ahead of time, which gave us a further sense of the old school platformer in which we were targeting.

Things that went wrong:

• We overscoped on art, given that we started with two programmers and one artist.
• We ran into multiple version control issues.
• We lost a team member, with no warning or communication, half way through.

Things that went right:

• The overall style and gameplay feels pretty nice (we think).
• We made something we’re proud of.
• We successfully made a game in under 72 hours (woo hoo!)

Have a look at our submission, Squiddy. Leave a comment, start a conversation and have fun!

I look forward to the rest of the submission, happy jamming to the final people.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-37/?action=preview&uid=83538