Man those final hours are a push. Anyway, journal entry just for the +1 goat image. Our game is based on a portuguese folk story.

Because I’m some kind of masochist, I set out to program this game entirely from scratch using only JavaScript and Canvas. With a friend covering the artwork, we set out to make a game that I should have known from the start was entirely too complicated for two people with little prototyping experience to finish within 72 hours.

The result of a few hours of planning was Recluster (name coined by my partner; recluse + cluster of rooms), a game in which you are the great evil who wants to lure heroes into your lair with treasure in order to kill them. The bulk of the game was to play out like a JRPG (the tentative name was VRPG, for Villain’s RPG, which is still shown on the opening screen next to the nearly illegible logo), where you watch as the hero fights trash mobs and collects items, then you control the mini-bosses guarding treasure rooms, then control your own boss character when the hero party finally reaches you.

However, before that, there needs to be a dungeon for you to dwell in. While the treasure rooms and composition of the hero party are locked in place whenever you set to start a new dungeon (though they are random each time), you are able to place each regular room in the dungeon and determine where the heroes enter and the tile upon which you wait. There are a few different room types, each would have different enemies for the heroes to face. This would let you strategically place rooms based on the hero party’s composition, or try to condition them to lack certain items that some monsters may drop. The trash mob spawn rates would also be slightly configurable, allowing you to make certain monsters appear more often in random encounters than others.

In the end, I spent too much time working on basic engine tech (rendering, user interface, pathfinding) which were all using strategies that I actually hadn’t tried before. To render, it uses three canvases, copying two background canvases to the main canvas to display everything. The canvas-based user interface is far too complicated to make sense in a Ludum Dare title and all written from scratch within competition time. I’ve never even used pathfinding in a game before, let alone wrote an a* implementation. Probably not the best idea, but I’m incredibly proud of what I have made. The game design exists, but you can’t see it in the submitted product. I’m excited to continue development on this once I’ve recovered from this stint. Good luck to everyone else.

Tags: postmortem

Phew! We are done! Congratulations everyone!

So… hello! This was my first Ludum Dare… and we just finished developing President VS Eevol. It was hard, but we did it!
For my first Ludum Dare I decided to join in and do the Jam with a group of friends. We worked tirelessly for three days and we just finished working some minutes ago. I came up with the main design and programmed, while my friend Whitesora and Daniele did programming and art respectively, other than helping with design. Another old friend of mine, Matteo, supplied some awesome music. We used Flashpunk for engine purposes.

We didn’t think we would make it. We had little experience, and this is actually our first complete game. We all thought we were going to end up making something simple and of little worth, but now that we’ve gone through with it, we are really, really happy with our results. We managed to meet all our goals, didn’t compromise much on the design and learned a lot more in the last three days than in the last year.

And that’s it. I hope you all enjoyed Ludum Dare 25, because we surely did! Be sure to check out our game, President VS Eevol.

President VS Eevol

Click here to play the game!

Yupi. We’ve managed to finish our first LD Jam !

Team Squad:

radek_ne:  www.netrostudio.com

michax: www.animuj.com

Hope you guys will enjoy it. Here it is:

Play and conquer!

Post mortem is comming along.

This has been my 4th Ludum Dare and this time I decided to work with a friend, so we submitted to the jam. Also, the extra time was helpful since we had things to do throughout the weekend. I was the programmer and he was the artist. I used a framework around SFML that I wrote right before the competition.

Overall, I think the game came out pretty good. We did have to let a few features go, but that happens every time. Basically, you are an overpowered villain who attacks hordes of brave marines with your many powers. You can zap people like a Sith, move objects around using telekinesis, and spawn spontaneous explosions!

What went right: The framework. SFML is on par with root beer on my list of cool things. The SFML code was clean and easy to implement into an object oriented framework. The framework I wrote has some cool ground features like physics, lighting, and easy input handling. You can find it on GitHub: https://github.com/DrSuperSocks/Fission

What went wrong: Me and my friend had very different opinions on how the final game should look. Also, towards the end of the competition, I had little motivation to finish after not getting enough sleep. Also, I was stressed because my car wouldn’t start, but it was just a simple electrical issue and it was finished. Yay!

Play the game right here

Screen shots!

Play it free here!‘

Things that went right:

• The game is actually kinda fun in my opinion! (may be biased)
• It’s done!
• It’s mostly balanced!

Things that went wrong:

• Didn’t get everything I wanted in (branching class paths, cross class abilities).
• Some of the graphics could use some work
• Few bugs here and there, none really show stopping
• Trouble shooting of several bugs took more time than it should have
• Class balance is a bit off, but not too bad.
• Wished I could have gotten more abilities in

So all in all, I’m pretty happy with the results of my game. I mostly handled the code, and a buddy of mine handled the assets. It has a few bugs in it, for example sometimes (very rarely) you can get cut off from the stairs, which is a problem. Had to work a bit on getting class abilities balanced, they still aren’t perfectly balanced. Being a bandit and spamming increased strength is pretty potent.

I wish I able to get in branching class paths (For example, Warlock X level + bandit X levels = arcane trickster, etc.) and I wanted to add in learning new abilities as you leveled, but the time just didn’t permit it to get in.

If I had to do it all over again, in hindsight i probably should have worried about tweaking combat less and getting more elements in. At the end of the day, though, it turned out really well and is easily my best entry into LD yet! I certainly learned a lot! This was also my first time using Java to make a game and moving out of my comfort zone of using XNA + C#.

Tags: ld25, postmortem

Man, yesterday and today were pretty much a lost cause.  I got sick on Saturday with a head cold of ever-increasing intensity, so my productivity for yesterday and this evening pretty much dropped to zero despite spending a bunch of time staring at the project thinking I was working.

With all of my assets created on Saturday, I planned on spending all day Sunday on gameplay mechanics and programming, things I figured I was much better prepared to jump into.  With such a good day of progress on the first day, I really thought my game idea was within reaching distance for the Jam.  It’s sort of a bummer to have crashed halfway through when I was having so much fun with it, but in the end I got what I wanted most out of this round – a better understanding of how to model something in Blender and how to put together a basic music loop without spending a hundred years one either.  I’ve got some questions to look further into on these, and there’s plenty of things I didn’t have time to do (like texture and rig any animation).  Overall, though, I feel much more confortable with these tools.  It’s amazing what a dedicated day of sitting down and playing with them will do.

An in-game screenshot showing an active character in the movement phase, with movement radius visualized.

I did get some basics implemented, but in the end I don’t think it’s enough to consider an actual gameplay loop so I couldn’t submit it to the jam in good conscience.  So what worked and what didn’t?

What Worked

Assets first – Working on the models and music first let gave me a few early endorphin bumps seeing my progress on stuff I don’t normally even get to.  It was a lot of fun seeing these very “physical” things come together instead of seeing a bunch of grey boxes moving around.

Pathfinding in Unity – Once I got a chance to play with it and look through the documentation, the API is pretty simple and getting it up and running was super straightforward.  This is a really nice feature for rapid prototyping any kind of indirect movement (either AI controlled or, in my case, executed by moving a unit from one spot to another).

What Didn’t

Visualizing the movement radius – I really wanted this to be something similar to XCOM’s movement area, but I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to calculate that region without having a literal movement grid for characters to move around on.  If I had a discrete space like that, I could have just brute-forced the problem and checked each cell.  I started this whole concept with the goal of not having a discrete space, though.  I tried things with the built-in pathfinding in Unity and raycasting out potential paths from the character, but eventually I pretty much punted to move on to other things and just drew a circle around the character using the excellent Vectrosity library.  I’d like to revisit this after the jam to figure out how to do

Unity projectors for user interface stuff – I honestly didn’t expect this to be a big deal going in.  I wanted to project a contextual pattern on the ground to signify selected units and potential actions.  I remembered working with a projector way back when I had run through some Unity tutorials to do things like slap a blob shadow on the ground under a character.  Hey, thats exactly what I want to do here!  After ages of playing around with texture import settings and possible shader combinations, I realized that the projected texture (even at all white) was way too dim, that it was taking light from the scene and there wasn’t a shader that would ignore this and just show the pattern the way I drew it.  I haven’t had a chance to look into writing custom shaders (maybe for the next jam), so the projectors were pretty much a dead end.  I ended up slapping the texture on a Unity plane and moving it around the scene.  Crude, but it worked.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t conform to the terrain and has other issues.

I’ll be working on this idea for a while even with the jam over with.  I think it has some potential, and I’d really like to implement some of the artistic and thematic elements I didn’t get to.  Here’s one last look at the scene:

A birds-eye view of the scene at the close of the jam.

Tags: gamejams, ld25

Well, this evening I decided to sit down and write something along the lines of hall of the mountain king, and it wasnt happening, however, I did end up writing this other song which was a bit cooler.. I went back to hall of the mountain king but my version just sounded too bizarre. I think the first song is more appropriate, so I batched it in my game as a raw .wav. The solo sounds almost..

Heroic!:

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/71654278” params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Less heroic!:

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/71655434” params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Anyway, that left me with about two hours left..

For sound effects, I tried recording random voice clips with audacity, which wasnt happening (everything was greyed out), so I recorded in riffworks and split it in Goldwave, phew! The AudioManager worked a charm, I just had to put random calls throughout my events. The sound effects probably arent a selling point, but I got them in just at the end.. Until java decided to lose the manifest at about 15 minutes to deadline. (on top of that, its bugged so the dragon noise doesnt play when you are hit).

I also added a Thread to add scripted stuff to the gamestate over time.. This works pretty well, though the Object handling over time just gets to the point where java has to gc at bad times. (Your dragon explodes temporarily for a second or two.. thanks java!).

Oh, and I added a goat.

I need some rest now.. Cant wait to see what’s happened to some games I’ve been following!

Before I forget.

My goal for this LD was, as is my habit, to prove some engine tech. (I’m tired of building tech, but I’m also having trouble stopping while pursuing the games I want to make.) In this case, I had three major pieces going on:

MIDI Synthesizer

This thing is a bear, and it will probably continue to be one so long as I stay inside Flash and target my current machine(a 2009-era Intel dual-core laptop) as the baseline. Although I had enough ways to tune the quality to fit, it continues to suck up a ton of CPU with a relatively small number of voices(16-32). And I found flaws in my MIDI playback technique that made looping and dynamic tempo adjustment…”interesting.” Fortunately it works for the game to sound a bit hiccupy.

Stage3D

It works reasonably well, if you aren’t on Linux. I did have a last-minute performance issue where I was doing things wrong with the updates of the tilemap, but that was my fault and was more of an engine bug than anything.

Client-server architecture

Yeah…this game is actually doing a lot more work than you’d think, under the hood. It’s built on top of an engine that is intended to be multiplayer-ready… (someday, not now) and it sucked up so, so many hours figuring out solutions for things like “picking up items” or “timing the bombs going off.” A playthrough-stopper that I’m still unsure whether I solved or not, because it has a non-obvious trigger in normal play, is something related to the synchronization of entity despawning. All this added up to the game being very bare-bones, without some of the stuff I wanted like NPCs to oppose you or powerups or chain reaction explosions.

However…I managed to get through the jam without very many terrible hacks. So in the aftermath I can start going back and whittling away at the problems, and that is going to help make this codebase very strong…although I really want to get away from Flash at this point, I’m mostly waiting on Haxe/NME. It’s currently an NME-oriented engine, but I’m definitely considering dropping NME, porting towards the Haxe CPP and JS targets alone, and getting away from Flash for good \o/

A bit on the game design

It was actually pretty straightforward to come up with a design for this one, by shamelessly stealing from Wreck-It Ralph.

1. Villains tend to destroy things (but they don’t have to be evil mustache-twirlers)
2. Make a character whose ability is destruction and is driven to become the bad guy.
3. Give them a space to destroy.
4. Make the destruction engaging.

The only part I kind of missed on was the last, simply because of a lack of depth.

We failed, for a couple of minutes but we failed…

I’d say that’s all folks, but it isn’t, we may not be on the ludumdare competition after all but we got a nice little prototype to work on!

And more important was all the experience we got from this and what we end up in hands, and of course, what we’ll choose to do with it. My other two Sahara Penguins (our collective) fellows are also very happy with what we came up with, and it’s 99% of chances that we’ll polish the game.(the other 1% are the mayans)

What I have to say is: this wasn’t bad at all, for a first ludumdare I enjoyed it very much, lots of pixels to paint, platforms to create, lots of robins… but I noticed in the end I got the hang of pixel art (something that wasn’t my style) and actually came up with a style that I’m gonna use more often from now on! I also did some sweet music for the game, I didn’t made any update about it but it was a good practice. It was really good to rock this project and see what it can give us, you should be expecting a nice game from us in the future…

Finally, the game is submitted, and we can relax a bit.

The process was much more chaotic than we’d expected:

1. We tried using a kind of management tech to track the process – it failed. We simply worked, worked, sweared and worked, and seeing someone submitting a finished task on the board was rare.

2. We wanted much more content added – upgrades, random caravans, maybe a kind of quest system – failed. Art took longer than we’ve expected, coding stealth and life-sym systems was already a huge challenge.

3. We wanted to add ending cinematic or two – well, you know. Failed 😀

But what got in the end is still great – I enjoyed working on a stealth game in an open world, even if it’s not as complex as SC, or as big as Skyrim. We hope you enjoy the game we made.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=12415

This is cross-posted at my blog, “Radiator.”

“Barback” is a 1-2 player cooperative / competitive Tapper-ish variant about 2 brothers and a bar. It should take you about 15-20 minutes to play through. It’s a “jam” game; I spent 72 hours instead of 48, and used remixed assets from outside sources. The extra day was worth it though.

Theme-wise, perhaps it doesn’t really fit with the “You are the villain” theme, now that I’m done with it and looking back.

I didn’t want to make a game with obvious villains, but I think about my mental concept of a “villain” and by definition it seems to involve blatant villainy and a twirlable moustache. In this narrative, the villains are mundane: your own crushing feeling of failure, or people who care about you but are very pushy, etc. Oh well, guess I won’t win in the theme category?

Originally, player 2 was just a barback and couldn’t serve drinks… but if they sabotaged the bartender enough, then they’d get to switch roles next turn. (This resembles the resentment in real-life bartender-barback apprenticeships; you look at the bartender and think, “s***, I can do that!”) But the barback class was really boring to use, and what happens a lot is that one player ends up being a barback anyway, so the psychology is intact without concrete constraints.

About the game design: I thought Tapper’s sudden death rules were too strict and didn’t allow enough “s*** to befall you” before the game shutdown. Tapper multiplayer is also really horrible; one player sits out while the other gets to play. I had other stuff I wanted to add — some patrons would pay with tabs / credits cards, branching dialogue based on player performance, etc. Maybe I’ll add those features in January.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with what I managed to put out, even with the instability and bugs.

– all art by me, most of it handpainted within 48 hours
– Rokkitt font by someone else
– music by “Stormby” http://ccmixter.org/files/Stormby/39747
– lots of freesound.org samples
– some mechanics from “Tapper”, but it’s a very different game altogether with my rule changes

I haven’t been this proud of myself in a long time! I’m so glad to be sharing this with you!

Play it
Also, I didn’t manage to get all three pieces of music in the game (because I’m not a proper programmer), but I promise I’ll upload the soundtrack soon, as I’m proud of it too!

Thank you thank you thank you, for the fantastic experience, third time in a row!

Tags: LD #25, ld25, success, success story

1. Random sweater colors.
2. Multi-barking.

These are just aesthetic enhancements, and do not affect gameplay at all from the previous post-compo build.

Tags: Bad Puppy, Chris Sanyk, enhancement, GameMaker Studio, ld25, ld48, post-compo

So it’s been a day, and I haven’t been able to add any polish to my game since I went to bed late last night (or early this morning, I guess).  So, I’ve had a day to contemplate about how it went, and I feel pretty good about it over all.  Because of the rest of my life, I wasn’t able to dedicate the whole weekend towards the game. I’m still quite happy with what I accomplished.

What went well?

• The idea was simple and small
• I was real pleased with what I came up with
• I was able to stay on track most of the time
• Even with limited time, I got a game done
• I was able to extend my engine with some really good solutions
• I didn’t spend hours on sprites

What didn’t go as well?

• AI
• Because of AI, didn’t do any polishing
• With a week AI, the challenge level of the game is low, and it’s fun is limited
• I spent way too long on the “swords” sprites
• I was somewhat constrained to make this kind of game because of my engine

I decided to do this Jam not just to force myself to write a game from start to finish.  The engine I used is actually one that I wrote for my larger project BiFission, and I just submitted that project to Kickstarter at the end of last week, and have been waiting approval.  I decided to use this jam to prove that the engine was usable to make a game from start to finish, and help me understand what part of the current code is the engine and what part is the game.  In that regard, it’s been an outstanding success.

Tags: postmortem

We are very happy about that fact that we’ve finished and submitted our Jam entry! We failed last LD but managed this time.

Post about development will be later. Right now we just need to get a good sleep, I’m sure, as everyone else does.

Go check Mad Professor, if you like Flash & HTML5 are available

P.S. Can’t wait to play and rate all these amazing games created this weekend!

Submitted my game with about 1 minute to spare! This was my first LD ever, and it was a huge learning experience. I enjoyed every minute of it, and will definitely be looking to partake in my game jams / Ludum Dare competitions in the future.

As for my game, Prison Break, it’s probably not the most polished out there, but I still feel really good about completing it. I’m usually the guy who starts projects and abandons them halfway through, and having a clear goal and deadline like LD really helped me focus on getting it to a playable, release-able state. I also now have a really good idea on where my strengths and weaknesses in game development lie, and how to improve my skills for the next round. See you guys next time!

Below is the text from the “How To Play” menu of our game, in case people are having trouble reading it with the lower resolution.
The intention was to make a nice pretty graphic that explained each trap in detail, but time was short so we made a wall of text instead.

Check Out the game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=18600

Unfortunately the doesn’t really address “how” to  use the interface, so I’ll briefly describe it now:
Clicking a room in the isometric view will select it, and the options on the interface will be for that room.
So selecting a trap will place a trap of that type in the room, spawning minions will spawn minions to the room etc.
Once an trap or minion is placed, it is removed from the available pool, and cannot be moved again, meaning minions will stand in whatever room they are spawned into, and engage the Hero if he enters that room.
The different traps behave differently, with some allowing you to activate them after they have been placed.
For example, the Damsel can be activated to “cry”, alerting the hero to her presence if he is in an adjacent room, which may make him decide to go and rescue her.
The Henchman is a unique case, as he can move from room to room and change function as desired (eg: The Henchman taunt is nearly identical to the Damsel’s cry, and will lure the hero toward him.)

Try experimenting with combinations, for example:Lure the Hero through a Blast Door with a Girl-bomb’s cry. Just after the Hero starts working on the door, activate the Girl-bomb’s Time-Bomb function (Button labelled: Dam-bot Time Bomb when the room with the Girl-bomb inside is selected). This will result in the bomb going off just as the hero attempts to disarm it, “killing” him and getting you ever closer to victory

How To Play:

In order to win, you must attempt to stop the hero from reaching the centre missile room before the counter reaches zero and the missile launches.
The hero will move around the map looking for the 3 randomly placed objective rooms (Library, Armoury and Server Room)
Once he has completed all 3 objectives, he will head straight for the Missile room in the centre of the map and stop the launch.

The heroes progress can be tracked by seeing which rooms he has cleared, as the light goes out in cleared rooms.
Minions and traps cannot be placed in cleared rooms, and the hero will avoid going through them again if he has a choice.

Additionally, the hero’s First Person View can be seen in the top right hand corner.

The hero cannot be stopped. There are several ways to “kill” the hero, but these just result in him reloading tinto the previous room, which costs him valuable time.

The different Difficulty levels change the amount of traps you have, as well as the time on the countdown clock.

In order to stop the hero, you have access to the following:

TRAPS:
Time Bomb – Can be placed in a room, and later activated. A few seconds after activation, the bomb will go off, destroying everything in the room and forcing the hero to “reload” at the previous room he was in.
The hero will attempt to disarm the bomb, so if poorly timed it will be wasted.

Damsel Trap – If the hero encounters her, he will take the time to free the poor lady. She can also be activated to emit a cry, and increase the chance of the hero coming from an adjacent room.

Fake Damsel Trap – A combination of the Time bomb and Damsel trap. Can be activated to emit a cry to attract the hero, and a timer can also be activated to behave like the Time Bomb. Also like the Time Bomb, the hero will attempt to disarm the trap before it goes off.

Snake and Spider Trap – The hero is notoriously afraid of Snakes and Spiders. This trap will cause the hero to flee the room as soon as he enters it, and resist going back into the room if he can avoid it.

Room Alarm Trap – This will “lock” the room, forcing the hero to disarm the trap before continuing.

Teleport Trap – When choosing the Teleport Trap, you must also place a destination pad. If the hero comes across a Teleport trap without a destination, or a destination pad on its own, he will disarm the trap.
Teleport traps are destroyed after they are triggered.

Death Ray – The death Ray will destroy everything in the room, killing all minions and forcing the hero to reload.
OTHER:

Minions – Up to 5 can be placed in any non-objective room. Will slow the hero down as he kills them. Cannot be moved once they have been spawned.

Blast Doors – Doors can be upgraded to blast doors, which will take longer for the hero to break down. The hero will prefer regular doors to blast doors where possible, but this can be overridden by the presence of an objective, or the cry of a Damsel/Girl-bomb.

The Henchman – The Henchman is a powerful unit, and the only one that can be moved around the map.
The Henchman can be set to act in several different ways, but only has limited power.
Once his power is expended, he can no lnger be used.

Henchman Powers:

Fight (Cost: 1) – This is the default behaviour if no other power is selected. The Henchman and the hero will get into a gun battle if the hero enters the same room as The Henchman.
Taunt (No Cost) – The Henchman will attmept to taunt the hero. Similar to the Damsel/Girl-bomb cry, the hero will come to investigate. This is a risky maneuver, as the taunt cannot be disabled once activated, unless the Hero enters the room (at which point the two will Fight)
Teleport (Cost: 1) – When selected, you must also assign an adjacent room as the target. If the hero enters the room the Henchman is in, the Hero will be teleported to the chosen room.
Kill (Cost: 2) – If the hero enters the room, the Henchman will kill him outright, forcing a reload at the previous room.

Windows download.

Play in browser (Unity Player).

LD Page.

Coded by Alex Rose @Vorpal_Games
Delightful illustrations by Antony Dewar @Panttts

You are Rude Bear. Your aim is to.. smash.. things and.. wreak.. generic havoc. Take that, society.

You’re a British Gangsta youth yob whose only aim is to misrepresent bears amongst the animal kingdom.

It takes place in some deranged puppet form. It’s vaguely like a running game, except you have full control of your character’s direction, attacks, dodges, equipped weapon, etc.

List of creatures:

GRASS SPAWNERS:
Sheep – Docile
Goats (+1!) – Kill these for SWAG.
Punch Drunk Pigs – Policecop pigs who punch you.
Dark Knights – AKA bats. Should’ve called them Battymen in hindsight.
Ostriches – Swoop down.
Baseball Bats.
Army Boars.
Brown Bears.
Wide Load Pig – A pig with a pistol. Dodge when it says “Bang”
Flyin’ Lions – Masked superheroes
Rocket Boars – Use Rocket Launchers.
Cyberdemons – He’s the chief of police.
Trident Lions – If you meet one of these, you will die.

POND SPAWNERS:
Ducks – Docile
Flamingos – Kill for SWAG
Furry Beavers – Fast and annoying.
Chainsaw Beavers – ARGH. They do 3 damage.
Glockodiles – Use shotguns. Not glocks. Pretty OP. Just like in IRL. Execpt without the whole.. shotgun.. thing.

There’s also bear traps, bins and beehives that you can destroy with weapons for SWAG.

Max out your SWAGGER bar to hustle. But don’t get too cocky with it; you’re not invincible.

When you right click (or space) to dodge, you are temporarily invincible though, so that’s useful, but it has cooldown.

The chainsaw does 3 damage, but it’s pretty slow. The bat does 2 damage and has good range. The claws are really fast but have low range and only do 1 damage.

#YOLO, but when you die you can REWIIIIIND to see how far you’ve come and restart the game. You’ll also be told what killed you, how many kills you had and protips on beating what killed you.

With that in mind, I would absolutely love if you sent me a tweet if you got to a really spectacular monster or got particularly far. If people like this I might put a high score board on my site. @Vorpal_Games

Each monster seems fair, especially given that you’ll have new weapons, but you should think about what weapon you use and when to dodge. If you play for a while you can get really good at dodging everything.

Hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it!

What it is

This is what was done by 3 hours after Jam closing. You can spam the “3” key (no other key does anything) and lightning enemies will spawn at random locations and swarm the Goat Ship. The Goat Ship will attempt to target the nearest enemy until it’s dead, then target the next enemy, and so on. Since the lightning ships can’t actually shoot lightning yet, you pretty much have to spam enough up them to overwhelm the firing rate of the Goat Ship (4 shots a second). The 10 in the upper left corner is the number of enemies that are currently being tracked (two are in the process of exploding). There needs to be around 40 to overwhelm the Goat Ship.

What it was supposed to be

The bars at the top of the window are different kinds of energy. You press the corresponding number key to spawn an enemy that uses that kind of energy. If the enemy damages the Goat Ship, you get more of that energy back for your bar, allowing you to spam more enemies of that kind or allowing you to save that energy up for the final battle.

In the final battle, you are the end boss. The end boss moves around the screen in a pre-determined or random path (the player has no control over this) and you can use your energy stores for attacks. Only the end boss can kill the Goat Ship.

What went wrong

On theme night I lost 6 hours due to not coming up with an idea that I thought was completable in 48 hours. My initial idea was a platformer where you’re the end level boss (very similar rules to those stated above), but I thought a platforming AI would be a bit beyond my ability. It wasn’t until nearly midnight that I realized the idea could still work so long as I didn’t have any pesky platforms to have to jump around.

The next two days development was pretty slow. I did get a decent amount of content done. I spent entirely too much time playing with autotracker-bu and Open-MPT (generated approximately 50 songs), and though I’m quite proud of my pixel art, it took me a while to get it done. Most of the real hardcore development occurred after the compo deadline and during the final jam day. But that just wasn’t enough time for me to get through all the little oddities I hadn’t expected to come up. In hindsight, nothing really sticks out as something that tipped the failure point though.

What I’d do different

I don’t know if I could do anything different about theme selection – if inspiration doesn’t hit you there’s not much you can do short of just going with a bad idea. But once I had an idea, I should have got the core mechanic in without any assets. I wasn’t very motivated this weekend, and having something in front of me moving and playing is one of the best motivators. While I had a Goat Ship in the game on Saturday and the lightning ships in on Sunday, they didn’t do anything in game except animate in place until late Monday!