It's a game where the inputs are being recorded, and replayed every 10 seconds.
Neither of us have much time to work on the game tomorrow, so I expect that this is very close to the final state. Hopefully, I'll do a bit of polishing tomorrow before publishing.
Also, this is the first time we've participated in a game jam! I think it turned out pretty good, all things considered.
Still need to think of a proper name...
This was a lot of fun. I'm pretty proud of what we managed to put out, given that none of us have made games before.
We only thought of the slime theme in the last couple of hours. It was near-impossible to think of a decent name for a game about neon squares. I only wish we had had more time to make the theme more fleshed out, but oh well. No regrets.
The game is pretty fun though, give it a shot!
Now I'm gonna play all of the other LD51 games <3
It cost me $2 for a year. I'm happy with this decision.
I'm just hosting it on Gitlab pages. So I get hosting for free. They take care of getting TLS certificates for the domain and everything. Plus, the hosted files are just the result of my CI pipeline, so deployment is super easy (automatic).
I guess I have to be careful not to commit anything to main while the rating game is active :sweat_smile:
If you had a highscore on asbjornolling.gitlab.io/timeslime, it won't transfer to timesli.me.
Since we used Gitlab CI to automatically build our game on each git push, we have easy access to bunch of builds of earlier versions
of the game online.
EDIT: Apparently Gitlab CI artifacts expire after 30 days, so all of the links in this post are dead. Oh, well..
I thought it would be fun to post some links to earlier versions, so you can see how our game came along.
Commit ea57884d - Saturday at 3PM
We had the top scanner bar working, but it doesn't display any inputs. All the graphics are the godot logo. We were going for an orange UI at the time. Movement was continuous, and not on a grid. There are no bounds, and larger screens just get a larger visible area.
Commit 873067c6 - Saturday at 6PM
We decide to make the movement grid-based, to make the loops more predictable. Back when they were continuous, it was impossible to avoid drifting (a lot) on each loop. It was also hard to visualize the movments in the top bar.
We made the background dark. We changed controls to have movement on WASD, and shooting on Arrow keys. There was some discussion about this - and some players have commented on this after release. (We should probably make this configurable, post-jam).
Commit 20e4b744 - Sunday at 4PM
We have a (temporary) start screen and a game over screen now. If you've played the final game, you'll know that the game over screen didn't end up being so temporary. Very typical...
We removed the Godot logo sprites and added a big bad glow effect. We made the bar in the top larger, and made the background completely black. We put stuff on a centered, bounded grid (but it's still invisible).
This game plays more or less like the final version. The most notatble differences in mechanics here are that bullets can shoot bullets, enemies killing enemies gives you points, and the spawning logic is a bit different.
Commit 1d4adc3c - Sunday at 10PM
We add a grid to the background, make the top scanner bar pretty. There are now particle effects when killing enemies. It's beginning to look similar to the final version.
This game still has way different strategies than the final game. If you spam enough shots, you can practically become invincible. A playtesting friend managed to get thousands of points in this version.
Commit 75406e0a - Monday at 6PM
The main character now interpolates between grids when moving, instead of just instantly blinking over. We added controls to the background. We added a highscore screen. There are now particle effects when the bullets hit the walls, and screenshake when killing an enemy. The shots are colored according to who shoots them.
In terms of gameplay, we added the ability to melee-kill opponents, and we added the miss-bonus so prevent players from wanting to fill all squares with bullets. We added the restriction of shooting only once per round, and we added the +10 point clear bonus to incentivize players to get out there and shoot stuff, instead of just dodging bullets.
The game still doesn't have a theme at this point.
Commit 4763b71d - Monday at 11:40PM
We were having a really hard time coming up with names. Loopy Boi? Cyberspace Timeloop? They all kind of sucked.
We decided of forcing the game into a more concrete setting, instead of trying to find a name for the abstract game we made. Once the name "Timeslime" was suggested, we commited hard and started making the main character look like a slime. We added the particle effect slime trail behind it, we made it more green and rounded the corners, and we made it stretch a little bit when it moves. Then we hurriedly made a cover image in Aseprite and slapped a logo on it.
This is the game we submitted for LD51.
Sorry if this was a bit much of a wall of text - I hope someone out there enjoyed stepping through the process with me :3
Let me know what you think! How was your process similar or different?
Results are in!
Pretty cool to get 30th place in a category in our first gamejam. Top 300 overall feels pretty good too. I wonder how many games participated overall.
As always, you can play the game at timesli.me
We're ready to go!
We've set up a repo to build Godot v4.1 games for web using Nix Flakes.
The repo is here: https://gitlab.com/pyjam.as/ludum-dare-54
We have beer in the fridge and microdoses in backpack.
I'm going to be tooting about our progress on Mastodon - and maybe here too.
I'm asbjorn@norrebro.space on mastodon. And I'll be posting with the #ldjam hashtag. Come say hi!
I still need to figure out where to host it. Recent versions of godot require SharedArrayBuffer support, which requires some specific HTTP response headers. ...and gitlab pages doesn't let us set these. I'll probably end up self-hosting something.