King of Tiny Mountain was my third time participating in the Ludum Dare jam, and I think it's the happiest I've been with a LD project so far.

Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/king-of-tiny-mountain

I wasn't able to start working on the game Friday evening, but I did have time to think of ideas. I knew from the start, based on the theme, that I wanted to do something where the entire level fit in the screen. Initially, I had thought of having the game take place on a cube-world with warps taking the player from one side of the world to the other, and with the player able to freely rotate their view.

Ultimately, I decided against this for a couple reasons. One, I thought it might end up being too complicated to implement quickly, giving me less time to work on the level deisgn that was going to be the focus of whatever project I made. Two, I felt that having a single-screen level that you could rotate the camera around would be a bit to similar to my other current project. Third, if I made the camera static, it would give me a chance to try out an idea for a control scheme I had had recently: if the player doesn't control the camera, you can have a 3D game with both Twin Stick shooting and jumping.

So I deicded to make a 3D platformer with twin-stick shooting where the entire game world (containing multiple levels which get unlocked as you play) is visible on screen at once.

I made a plane in Blender which would contain the entire game world. I then started modelling out a test area, and got the movement and shooting down, as well as a few basic enemy types. I also put in collectible items and doors which could be opened with those items. I then did a second pass on the test area and turned it into a proper first area of the game.

By the end of Saturday, I had basically sectioned off the plane to make room for the second and third levels, and the mountain where you'd fight the boss.

The next day, I had planned to show gradual process of the map being filled in, but I ended up pretty much doing a first pass on the rest of the level design within the first hour of working, so by the time I took another screenshot, it looked like this:

At that point, what remained included sound effects, feedback effects, victory text, and, of course, the boss itself. I also tested and tweaked the level design and added an effect to let you see a translucent image of enemies and the player when they're hidden behind objects.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with how the idea turned out.