Can I make it any more obvious?

Hello everyone!

We are SwanBoat, a team of 2 working on our first game jam together!

For this Ludum Dare we made an arcade slash-em-up game about a Manless Horse and a Horseless Man teaming up to take on a Kingdom of chess pieces.

In Horseless Headman you run, jump and dash through waves of enemies, while slashing them with your peerless companion, the steed of steel: Manless Horsehead. It would mean the world to us if you could check it out!

We are both finishing out some stuff we put aside for the sake of the Jam, but we are excited to check all the other amazing games everyone made!

-Swan and Boat

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/horseless-headman

As to be expected of such a short timespan for a project, we initially over-scoped our project and had to scrap ideas or repurpose them in some way. It's a natural part of experimenting and figuring out what works, but we'd like to share some stuff that didn't make the final cut in our game, Horseless Headman!

Slashing Animation:

While trying to flesh out the core gameplay feel, we tried to have the user slash with the cursor and the character would perform a slashing animation in response. But it felt really strange to have the character do that when it's all the way on the other side of the screen. It took some experimenting and happy accidents to settle on the idea of the character throwing the horse like a steely boomerang at the enemies.

This also meant we had to make a horseless version of all the other sprites, but that's kinda the name of the game isn't it? lol

Dead Horse:
It's implied that the horse has a will of its own, and we like to convey that thru subtle expressions in the face, particularly in the ending. We also had a dead sprite of the horse, but because of time constraints it didn't make it in the end. But there's no use beating a dead horse~

Old run cycle:
The main character went through some subtle changes as we were testing things out. This was an early sprite to test formatting of animations! It used to have a cravat and white shoes, but both were hurting readability when the majority of the backgrounds were pale white as well. We made the shoes red and kept the body area simple so players can easily see where the character is even in their peripherals.

Hope you enjoyed reading!
You can play our game, Horseless Headman here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/horseless-headman

-Swan and Boat

We wanted to share some more concept art of our game, Horseless Headman! The early ideation period is the most fun because anything goes but as we whittle down a project some things unfortunately need to get axed.

The game and character were originally going to be in full color, but for sake of time and readability we decided to go with a simpler palette.

It's fun to see what else survived in unexpected ways! The tiny king reveal still made it to final. Though unfortunately some enemy ideas had to be cut.

From the very beginning we wanted a fun reveal of the main character being two different entities. Here's the first initial sketch of the reveal:

The idea of the character spinning the head like a staff came after we figured out the spinning horse head mechanic in game, and that's how it was portrayed in the intro cutscene.

Rough sketch:

Final:

Fun fact about the animation, everything was broken up into pieces so we can reuse as many assets as possible to save on time, here is an example:

(the ball is subtle lore implications lol)

But this technique was used a lot to help us save on time, and it was also used quite a bit in conjunction with traditional hand-drawn animation in the intro too!

Hope you enjoyed reading!
As always you can play our game, Horseless Headman here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/horseless-headman

-Swan and Boat

Horseless Headman is now playable in browser!

Sadly the cool intro that Swan made is not watchable in this build, but everything else should still work as in the executable build, so if you were waiting for an html5 version your time is now!

It took some time to get this figured out because web exports in GameMaker have a lot of really annoying lil quirks, but we are finally over that hump, and now that both of us are a bit more free we can actually start working on the Post Jam version, with a lot of the cut content that was out of scope for the Jam, and polishing up a lot of the bugs that still exist.

And also we both wanted to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for all your amazing feedback, compliments and even fan art! This project means a lot to us and being able to share it with such an amazing community has made an already incredible experience even better <3

-Swan and Boat

This was Swan’s first time in Ludum Dare and they left the whole event with such a positive impression of the game jam community. All the kind interactions were very infectious, and they made us want to interact and engage more with the amazing things everyone did in such a short amount of time. It’s very inspiring to see what people can create and everyone should feel proud of what they’ve accomplished.

We are both very thankful for how receptive people were to our first time working together on something like this, and everyone made what was already a very special occasion even better.

Hoping we can join again in April!

-Swan and Boat