Title: Grow Big and Go Home

Description: Play as a worm trying to return home while avoiding crows and picking up DNA sequences that allow you to evolve and grow body parts!

Growing Theme: As you progress through the game, you obtain DNA sequences that allows you to grow new ligaments that grant new abilities. The first DNA sequence gives the player tentacles and the player learns to duck to avoid enemies. The second DNA sequence gives the player legs to jump over obstacles. The last sequence gives the player arms to climb up trees. The player grows from a worm to a bipedal creature.

Two Button Controls Theme: To comply with this theme and keep the game as a platformer, I had to restrict the player to only two actions:

1. Only being able to walk right with the right key.
2. Only being able to perform one action with the spacebar.

Things that Went Well:

• Conforming to both themes – I was really happy I got both themes in and didn’t just stick to one. Having two themes was challenging, but rewarding.
• Pixel graphics – I’ve never been good with pixel art, but being restricted to creating only 8×8 sprites with just the PicoEDITOR on my iPhone actually made creating pixel graphics much easier. Although my flexibility in animating these sprites was very limited, it gave the game a nice retro look which is what I was going for.
• Music selection – A lot of people who commented on my game loved the music since it went so well with the graphics. I got the music from OpenGameArt with a public domain license. Ironically, the music was used in a Ludum Dare 33 entry. You can listen to it HERE

Things that Did Not Go Well:

• Text/Fonts – This was my first game and I am still new to Unity. I had trouble finding a quick and easy tutorial on placing and triggering text that would appear in the game. Instead, I had to resort to making all the text into sprites/prefabs and using that. This is why the text looks blurry, out of place, and distorted compared to the rest of the assets.
• Sound effects – Although the explosion sound effect when you get hit by an enemy plays fine, the pickup sound effect after getting a DNA sequence is really distorted compared to the original sound clip being used. Still trying to figure out why that happens…
• Lack of save state/lives feature for the player – A lot of people think my game is too difficult and should have save states/lives. Besides the fact I haven’t learned how to implement that feature in my game yet, I didn’t really think this game needed either of them. The game is actually very short. In the walkthrough video I created below, you can see me beat the game in 1 minute and 10 seconds! I thought this was very doable after a few tries, but then again, when you’re coding a game for two days straight and constantly testing and playing the game yourself, you lose track of how a new player will adapt to the controls. Here, I learned that I should have other people test my game before publishing to see how quickly a new player gets used to the controls.

Overall, I’m really glad I entered Ludum Dare 34! I learned a lot in the process and haven’t done a coding jam session like that since my college days, so it felt great!

Thanks for reading and playing! Play and vote for my game if you haven’t already!