Woo. I’m finally done with my first Ludum Dare entry! The game is called Canon. You can find the LD entry here.
Screenshots don’t really convey the game very well. You can watch a gameplay video I made of some of the later levels. Or just play the game on Kongregate. (I’m doing a couple more rounds of bug testing before submitting it to LD.)
It’s a very simple “run and jump” game with a small difference: the game takes place on a square. Instead of moving in a straight line the obstacles move around the sides of the central square, and you control a jumper block on every side. So in essence, you’re playing four games at once, each slightly offset from the other.
A canon, if you will.
And to reinforce the idea of a canon, each jumper makes a nice little tone (same note, different octaves) when it jumps. So what started as a simple idea of “hey what happens when you change the topology of an autorunner?” became a crazy mix of run and jump and rhythm and music and patterns. I suppose that my interpretation of the theme (beyond the minimalist graphics) was that I took a very minimalist genre and added lots of repetition to it.
Oh and it has Dvorak keyboard support and Kongregate stats, because I am crazy.
Inspiration
This game was definitely inspired by Canabalt, and the working title of the game was actually Canonbalt—the last level of the game is still named Canonbalt as a tribute. Other inspirations came from weird musical things like handbell ringing and shape note singing. The arrangement of the octaves actually comes from a somewhat obscure American vocal music tradition, and having them arranged this way means that you rarely get successive octaves being played and so things don’t sound boring. The ideas of a finite number of repetitions per level, a practice loop (for the relaxed difficulty), the music happening as a result of player reaction instead of a built-in metronome and some of the level designs were inspired by my long time obsession with American folk dances.
Ludum Dare
This was my first LD and my first real game, though it’s my second game jam and probably my twentieth game if you count all the joke games and fan games (using/referencing other IPs/assets) I’ve made. Oh and I guess I made some crappy Visual Basic games decades ago but those don’t count. The theme definitely made the competition much, much easier as I’m pretty bad at art and music composition and being able to finish all my art in less than five minutes meant I had more time for other things. I’ve slept more than I’ve been led to believe that LD participants should partially because of the theme and partially because Stencyl 3, the toolkit I have been using, is stupidly fast and powerful. Perhaps I will learn what it’s really like when the next theme is “Fancy Art and Full Orchestral Music”.
Post-Mortem
Not that I’ve gotten much feedback yet, but I think the biggest issue I’ll run across is level design. First of all, there were definitely not enough levels. I find myself wishing for more when I playtest the game, and I definitely have ideas for more varied and challenging levels. The problem is that I’m not very good at the game myself (I had to cut out about 50% of the footage from the gameplay video because they were of me failing) and so it’ll be tough making sure any more levels get tested properly. That brings me to the other thing: I’m not very good at games like this. A lot of time was spent making sure that all the jumps and levels were possible, but that meant that for people who are really good at the genre the hardest levels would not be too challenging.
