As Ludum Dare 31 comes to an end here in a couple of days, I’m on the final push to play some more Ludlum dare games.  But before I do that, I want to take a little bit of time to talk about our game Galvatross

Galvatross is ShuddaHaddaLottaFun’s third Ludum Dare game, our fourth game jam game, and certainly the most complete one we have ever made.  Things went a little more smoothly, plus we are a bit more experienced, so that helps.  I don’t want to spend too much time on this, so I’ll just outline the good and bad.

THE GOOD

Complete art, that looks good too.

Complete game, and it’s playable!

We prototyped some nifty ideas

THE BAD

SFX balancing

Music

Joust

So let me talk about these for  a bit.  With the SFX, it became a last minute thing to fill out sound, so it was a lot of just plopping in sounds from SFXR without correcting their levels, making some of the sound effects Very annoying.  The Music actually had a lot of complements, so thank you.  But the reason it is listed in the bad is simply because it wasn’t what I wanted.  I had an idea as to what the music sounded like for Galvatross, but when I sat down to make it, it just wasn’t coming together in time.  Realizing I couldn’t waste my time trying to get what I wanted, I quickly threw something together in order to move on.  Finally, the Joust comparison.  When we first started working on the idea, we discussed how Galvatross was a period game, and we have a lot of backstory to the Galvatross franchise that don’t really fit into the jam, but in short the Joust influence is somewhat intentional.  Unfortunately it is too similar.  At first we talked about a shooting mechanism, but that would be too many buttons in our mind for an old arcade game with the jumping and zooming.  We then programmed it so you had the hit the Tranglors from the bottom, since you are protecting your little dude you’re carrying. That however made it too easy to accidentally kill enemies, and too difficult to do it on purpose.  The best strategy was just to stay still and let them land on you.  We switch that, but it just made it too much like Joust…

After the deadline we came up with a new idea for the attack controls that focused on the teleport mechanic.  Unfortunately with the holidays, I haven’t really had the time to get a working version implemented.  We have actually discussed continually working on Galvatross, which would be a first for us.  We have never continued working on a game jam game after the weekend has passed.

But you can help us! Yes! Inspire us!  We have 80 votes right now, which we are pretty sure is more then our other LD entries combined, which is great! We really want to hit 100 votes, and it would mean a lot to us if you could take the time to play our game before voting ends.

PLAY GALVATROSS

happy holidays everyone!