You read that right— I created Readybuns 100% using software on my smartphone.

I didn’t think I was going to succeed, but I figured it was worth a try since I’d be pretty bummed to lose my streak of participating in 15 Ludum Dares in a row. But this time the odds were against me: @Strega and I had a trip scheduled during the jam so I was thousands of miles from home, my teammates were unable to participate, and I had just my phone on me. With those constraints in mind, here’s what I did:

* Game Design *

I wanted to make something extremely simple, plays with one button on a single screen, and incorporates the theme in a slightly different way. I observed how my group would take a while to get ready during our vacation adventures and making our Ubers wait. This gave me the inspiration I needed. We summon the Ubers and then they summon us to the car.

* Game Engine *

I chose GDevelop after a while researching and saw it had promise. I played with the templates but ultimately just started from a blank project. The level editor was straightforward but the “coding” was interesting to adjust to. It was an events-based system presented in natural-ish language and dropdowns for filling in data. I found the built-in movement and collision behaviors didn’t quite suit the gameplay I was looking for so built my own tile-based movement behavior for the bunnies. Alas, logic and math are nowhere near my wheelhouse, but fortunately I was able to bug @Strega to help me learn and debug. Thanks!

* Art and Animation *

I was already familiar with pixel creation on my phone and my app of choice was Dotpict. I decided to go with a monotone 1-bit style to keep things simple. I chose bunnies as the characters you’re summoning as I pictured a family of bunnies with a bunch of kids you’re trying to wrangle.

The first day I haven’t figured out data roaming on my phone but fortunately Dotpict works offline, so I pumped out the art assets during downtime, in the Ubers, at cafés, etc. Dotpict has built in animations, and all I had to do was export each individual frame of an animation and load them into GDevelop where the rest was easy to figure out. After setting up proper internet access, I put together a basic level layout, had working “honk” behaviors, and bare minimum UI to make it count as a “game”: a title page and an ending screen.

* Music and Sounds *

Once the game was fully playable I had a few hours to spare and thought I’d dive into a domain I have very little experience in: music. I generated a simple honk in a web tool called jsfxr which my team has used before for our other jam games. Then I found a site called BeepBox which looked simple enough, I just click the little boxes like pixelart, right? I vaguely remember our musician, @Tenki, explain layering so I picked three instruments on different layers and played with a little melody I was humming. I’m surprised at the end result for my first song ever!

All in all, I think I took a total of around 10-12 hours to make Readybuns. I would have made more levels but the free version of GDevelop only allowed for 2 scenes, so I just stuck with a title and a single level. Despite that, I am actually amazed at what I created in the limitations I had. I’m not going to transition away from Unity and Aseprite as my primary game dev tools, but it’s awesome to know that it’s entirely possible to make a whole game just on your phone while on the go. I implore you to give it a try!