So I made “Animancer” for this LD and I’m pretty proud of the result.  It’s an action platformer where you summon woodland animals to help you fight against the robot menace.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=21927

Playthrough here: http://youtu.be/h5JT8bGcqKI

I think I learned a lot from my last game jam that I applied to this one. Namely that drawing in full color over the course of 48 hours when you have a pretty severe color-blindness is an exercise in futility. So I forwent the frustration this time and just made the entire game grey scale. After watching a pixel art stream by one of the makers of the game Crawl, I was inspired to do something much lower res than my last jam. It worked pretty well. Animating a run cycle when your legs are a single pixel wide makes things much more pleasant. Another thing that worked pretty well were the effects, of both the visual and sound variety. I did a couple of impact and explosion effects based on some ideas from 1Ship2ShipRedShiftBlueShift, which is another low res pixel art based game. The explosion technique is really easy to get right and something I would definitely not have come up with on my own. I wanted to have a classic SNES feel for the explosion sound effects, and I think it worked out by taking a recorded explosion sample, cutting it and speeding it up. The rest of the sound effects were also based off of real samples, and didn’t sound particularly good on their own, but with the addition of music and other sound effects they did their job just fine. The music is more dancy than anything I’ve ever done, but it turned out pretty good as well.

I still ran out of time though. I think somewhere around Saturday night, things started taking a lot longer than I expected. This meant not only a lack of sleep for that night, but it also bleed into the next day since at the end of the jam I only allotted myself about an hour and a half for level design. I didn’t get the chance to add some pretty important sound effects like hit reacts for the player and enemies. The hovering sound is pretty bad. Several of the animations were not tuned and had their default frame timings, so for example, the cat run cycle looks like it’s in slow motion. The environment art looks decent except for the foreground which is entirely composed of the same square black block everywhere in the game. I still haven’t managed to find the time to properly render out my characters. All of the robots are super flat looking like they were drawn in MSPaint (they weren’t). And then there’s the ever elusive screen shake and particle effects that I never seem to have the time to add in systems for.

All in all, I don’t think I learned as much as I did last time, but I think the end product is better. Next time I think I’m going to focus on making something more into the innovation category, and try to work on my pixel art shading.