Our team participated in the jam as a final for our game development course! We went with a tiny-planet platformer. Check it out at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/$26014

[picture uploads don't seem to be working at the time of writing. I will add photos of the game in development when that feature comes back online]

Game Page

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/horizons

Theme

We thought that a planet-platformer game would be a fun way to implement this year's theme. The key points of our game design were: - Multiple gravity sources (tiny planets) - Levels that had aspects of platform games. Jumping from planet to planet. Must reach a "goal planet" to get to the next level. etc. - We wanted the levels to have some puzzle aspects to them. For example, pressing a button causes a black hole to appear and destroy enemies that would otherwise be difficult to kill.

Goals

Our initial goal was to implement and polish the mechanics of the game. We wanted to make sure the game would play well before putting any effort into the design of the levels. We also wanted some kind of simple but interesting combat system. We decided that the player should have a weapon that can shoot missiles that follow a straight path as well as launch bombs that follow a gravitational trajectory. This would allow the player to decide which weapon is best for any given situation and hopefully add some depth to the game. In addition to this, we added a sort of trajectory estimator that the player could activate by pressing 'E'. This ended up not working very well, as it was a last minute addition to the game and we couldn't get the gravity simulation to accurately reflect what the bomb would do after being launched.

Level Design

After we felt the player controls and the overall feel of the game were up to our expectations we began designing and implementing levels. We were able to create a surprising number of interesting mechanics using the basic building blocks of our game. (gravity, bombs/missiles, planets, black holes, flying and grounded enemies)

Tools

Since we were participating in the Jam, rather than the Compo, and we wanted to focus most of our effort on the mechanics of the game, we got most of the assets from sites like opengameart.org. We used the following tools to develop the assets that we weren't able to find online. - Bfxr was used for all sound effects - Pixen was used to create the background

Roadblocks

We spent an inordinate amount of time getting the player rotation to lerp correctly when transitioning across gravitational fields. We had lots of last minute issues with Unity collab. Buttons would lose their referenced Unity action for no clear reason. This means we would have to test every button before deployment just to make sure they didn’t arbitrarily stop working. Also a ton of the items would also lose prefabs when pulling from Unity Collab, which wasted a lot of time. The bomb trajectory feature was reasonably accurate on our machines, but didn’t come close to working on the web build.

Moving forward

Over the next week we intend to do the following - Add more levels/refine existing levels - add a game intro to make the narrative a little clearer - add a final "you won" scene