Ludum Dare 40 game done! Not quite what we hoped, better than we expected.

Teamed up with some of my advanced students to try a weekend long school activity. The game is done, my students are happy, and now, I am going to sleep.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/kittie-reaper-a-depressed-cat-tale

No downloading, just an html5 embeded game to play!

My second LD, but the first I have tried with a group of students in my class (I am a teacher). We planned on 8 levels each with its own target, but ended up with 4 and just one old, wheelchair bound bunny to find.

My students are pumped and this may be the beginning of an annual event for my site, we will see. Either way, time to rest, recuperate, and play a ton of LD games.

Thought I would share what worked and what didn't in my experiment to use LD as a teaching event. We had a total of 1 teacher (me) and 8 students on our core team, with help from two adults bringing food and helping drop off/pick up students.

Location/Assets - Used my classroom with permission from our principal - I have 9 desktop All-In-One Dell pc's as well as 4 high end laptops (my personal ones from the years). - 5 full sized white boards around the room with hundreds of markers - Many desks to organize into configurations for food, meeting, drawing, and computing. - Two students brought their own laptops

Plan for Friday - Meet @ 6pm. - Brainstorm, eat, and break up into teams to create 2-3 games with the idea of continuing on with whichever game was turning out the best. - Use whiteboards, drawings, etc. to have game design document with plan of starting development in the morning.

Plan for Saturday - Meet @ 10am. - Split into teams - Work until 12pm with breaks for lunch and dinner.

Plan for Sunday - Meet @ 10am - Test and polish game with plan to be done by 6pm (it is a school night after all)

What actually happened - Students all stayed after school, crazy nerd fest from 3-6pm, and really did not want to go home, everyone brought sleeping bags and pillows for the second day - Brainstorming went pretty well but everyone was hyped about one idea after our elimination round, so we made one giant team instead of 2-3 smaller ones. With this came some serious management issues - Started working on assets immediately instead of waiting until the morning (they were too excited) - Everyone was most excited about story, art assets, music, etc. which left me with programming (not too unexpected) - Had to have breaks here and there for outdoor activities as well as media breaks (youtube videos, etc.) - I got too tired to safely drive by Sunday, so had to rely on some reinforcements from awesome teachers (Cooper and MaDd) to save me and make sure students got fed. - By Sunday, half of the students were pretty delirious.
- Students were in my room Monday still working on the game with me after school until we submitted @5pm on Monday. - We wanted 8 levels, each with its own target, but ended up with 4 (including the tutorial) and they all have the same target

Takeaway - Students asked when we were doing this again, so we succeeded on the student engagement front - People have been pretty positive in the comments, and while I don't think it is the beginning of a AAA franchise, I think our game is fun-ish

So if you want any more info on how things went, feel free to send me a message. Otherwise, hopefully some people can play our game some more. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/kittie-reaper-a-depressed-cat-tale

All of our music was made on one of my students phones.

Title Screen Music - Click Here To Listen To Title Music

Game Music - Click Here To Listen To Game Music

Feel like seeing everything in action? Don't worry, quick html5 game, no big commitment here.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/kittie-reaper-a-depressed-cat-tale

Our game was supposed to have 8 levels and quite a bit more art, instead we finished 4 and went with the art we had completed. Here are some assets that were not quite ready for the game.

*A cute dog (I am bummed we didn't get to put this in): *

*Our beginning of a bunny (definitely needs some work): *

Not sure what we were going to do with this (but, artists... you know?):

As always, a play-through would be appreciated. Our game is browser based, fast, and easy to play. So if you are looking to boost your "Coolness" or just something to do, check us out. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/kittie-reaper-a-depressed-cat-tale

For some reason I really expected more cat games. Did I miss any?

Kittie Reaper https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/kittie-reaper-a-depressed-cat-tale#/comment-106241

Kitty Chaos (my 3yr old son keeps having me go back to this one) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/kittychaos#/comment-137613

Kittea Party https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/kittea-party#/comment-126443

9 Lives https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/9-lives#/comment-135078

Introspection: We have received so much feedback on our project. We definitely need to update collision detection (this could be updated pretty easily, but for the LD entry we feel this would not be a bug fix), and make our art a little more consistent. Our original idea of 2-3 targets per level with 8 total levels seems like what people wanted. So we feel justified in our idea, but with such a short window, as with most LD projects, cuts had to be made to make.

We hope to get some more ratings, but are also pretty happy and thankful for the feedback so far. If you have 90 seconds to play and 30 more to rate (for a grand total of 2minutes) we would love for you to play our game.

No download, just an embed https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/kittie-reaper-a-depressed-cat-tale

We would love to see one of the categories, any really, turn from 2 digits to three. We are so close and would love the help, who is going to be magic 100?

Fast game, just an embed, no downloading required

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/kittie-reaper-a-depressed-cat-tale

It's Friday minus one, and you know what you need, a depressed cat reaper!

Real fast, no downloads, easy to play

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/kittie-reaper-a-depressed-cat-tale

Well, he moves, jumps and can shoot. It's a start. Now we just need enemies, physics, art, music and the game is practically done!

I am teaching my Game Design class right now, and I am playing LD games in front of them. Anyone want their games (preferably HTML5 so we don't have to wait for an install) to be played in front of a bunch of students? Post and let me know!

Feel like playing a quick game? Check out ours

Thanks to everyone who gave me links to their games to play in front of my class, I will be playing more of them next week. If you think your game would make a good lesson, let me know.

Thanks @rainysolar for your links and game, made an interesting lesson.

If you feel like playing my game (the game was just myself collaborating with friends this time, not students) feel free https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/miss-piss

We made our game in Google Forms (yes, those forms), so it should work on ANYTHING. Want to play on a chromebook, got you covered. Iphone, go for it. Feel like not being shamed in front of your friends for your Windows phone but still want to play a game from Ludum Dare, then we have the game for you.

Aberth https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/aberth-simple-text-based-choose-your-own-adventure

Thanks for putting up with us trying something weird.

When we started mapping out our interactive story we were using a whiteboard, but quickly ran out of room. So we turned to our old friend, Google Docs (we actually tried Google Sheets and found it not very helpful). We looked up some different mind-mapping style software and couldn't find anything that was simple, free, and/or cheap.

We color coded it. Blue meant choice, white was story text, lavender was separating sections, red meant fail/death. This worked out ok for our needs but was definitely not a long term, feasible solution for any future, larger projects. Anyone out there make one of these before and use the end all be all of choose your own adventure planning software?

Then we managed to plug the whole thing into our Google Form to complete our unholy Googley abomination. We thought about using game maker or another development environment, but what would the fun in that be?

If you feel like seeing how this worked out, its over here

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/aberth-simple-text-based-choose-your-own-adventure

I'm going to be in some meetings tomorrow that I could play some games in between, but they will need to be webgames. If you made an HTML 5 game (or some other neutral, widely used web format) drop me a line.

If you are looking for a fast webgame to up your coolness feel free to try mine, but recipricosity is not needed, just looking to fill my time with some LD goodness.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/aberth-simple-text-based-choose-your-own-adventure

We used Google Forms to make a choose your own adventure game. While this definitely had some pro's and con's in comparison to a normal game development environment. One pro we hadn't counted on was the data.

Google Forms keeps track of all the answers so we get to see what people choose. We were happy to see that almost everyone wanted to be polite to the cleaning lady.

But a little worried that 1) you played our weird @$$ game, and 2) you chose to just try and stare through your therapist, despite being covered in blood

Either way we have been pumped about the feedback, and if you feel like playing a fast, weird, possibly disturbing web game, come on by.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/aberth-simple-text-based-choose-your-own-adventure

I have some more time for another round of Web Games (I made it through the entire list from the last post), anyone need some ratings? Let me know so I can get some more play time in!

If you feel like playing a Web/Interactive story feel free to try my game (short, weird, dark), but reciprocation is not required, just looking to play some more games.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/aberth-simple-text-based-choose-your-own-adventure

Want to see a game made completely with tools not made for game design? Want to follow along a story that turns and winds then abruptly stops, as if there were some time constraint on its production. Are you ready to play a game that walks up to the edge of decency and has a panic attack and then vomits on it?

Then please play our Google Form/Choose Your Own Adventure game. If more people play, my robot overlords have promised a 10% reduction in beatings for the next 4 hours.

No downloads, just a fast webgame to try and tolerate.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/aberth-simple-text-based-choose-your-own-adventure