I did my first Ludum Dare as a team alongside @don-juan-javier and had a blast. We ended going with an intense action shooter where your ship changes modes automatically every 10 seconds (thats the theme tie-in, obviously). We went with a relatively simple flat vector art style as I think we both tend to wear the programmer hat pretty well. That said, the audio ended up coming in strong, thanks to Don's skills.

If you are into arcade experiences, give Dreihander a shot! Definitely keep speakers on, fullscreen, and bring the gamepad - controlelrs are fully supported.

Itch: https://jclayton128.itch.io/dreihander

LD: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/dreihander

So 418 is the current high score that I've seen for my team's LD51 submission, Dreihander. It is an arcade shooter with 3 distinct game modes. In testing, the most I was able to get reliably was about 80-90, and so the score-keeping mechanism (the counters in the top right) only go up to 99. After that, they reset back to 0. Watching the video, I realize that we probably should have included some mechanism to slowly up the difficult, either by introducing tougher enemies or just increasing the rate in which the current enemies spawn. As it is, excellent piloting and shooting allow a good player to keep the hordes in check so there never is more than a couple on the screen at a time. Maybe we'll address that in a post-jam edition?

LD Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/dreihander HTML5 Link: https://jclayton128.itch.io/dreihander