We are in! Had a very late and a slow start, but things are starting to shape up.

First screen of our mystery game: http://imgur.com/a/SgXLi

Progress has been quite slow, but the game is starting to shape up. Our idea is to make the world shrink in size as the player takes damage. Meaning.. the world size is player health. Oh and the level is generated on the fly!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LziUZdvxcIY

Our game is shaping up nicely. The world size (the circular area) is your health, and it shrinks if you idle or take damage from enemies. You can grow it by collecting health and killing enemies! :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MutES4Aab2E

Good luck for the final day everyone! :)

Started our third day by working on the title screen. "Quanta Blast" is still a placeholder name until one of us (or someone) figures out a better one.

We are polishing and balancing (at least trying to..) our game. It's still called Quanta Blast since we haven't figured out a better name..

Here's a fresh look of the gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4uO3OVkjyk

Our game, Quantum Blast, is now called Quantum Catburetor.

Quantum Catburetor is a colorful and trippy bullet hell shmup, where the world is procedurally generated on the fly. What you see is the only world that exists - and if you go back, things are never the same. The world size/canvas also acts as player health - shrinking down if you idle or take damage.

We also got a badass song for the game by @MrJoshuaMcLean :)

We managed to finish our game, Quantum Catburetor. Check it out! It's now 4:25 AM here in Kuala Lumpur, which means it's bedtime. :sleepy: Will write a longer postmortem or something after I have regained my energy. Over and out!

Quantum Catburetor is a colorful and trippy bullet hell shmup with a procedurally generated world. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/quantum-catburetor

:sleepy::zzz::zzz::zzz:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXk3MMRXbjA

HD gameplay of our trippy shmup Quantum Catburetor. I dare you to break my highscore of 154 300. :cat: You can play the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/quantum-catburetor/

First time I took part in Ludum Dare was LD32, this was my second time. I only considered joining LD38 the night before the event started. I messaged my friend asking if he was interested in participating with me - and luckily - he had also considered joining. Funnily, last time he took part in LD the theme was a tiny world. He lives in :flagfi: and I am based in :flagmy: so we had to deal with a 6 hour time difference. The night before the event, I prepared an empty unity project with Bitbucket + Git setup, so we could jump straight into development.

Procedural Exploration

Eventually, we joined the jam 6 hours late and started brainstorming for an idea for a small world. We came up with this idea of having the player stand in the center of an area of 5x5 or 10x10 tiles and having an algorithm procedurally generate the world in the direction the player is moving, based on the neighboring tiles.

This would mean the player has extremely limited visibility of the world (a small world :upside_down:), but it would allow us to do some interesting visual trickery, like making the world materialize out of nothing. We considered doing something like Proteus, where the gameplay would be based on wonder of exploration.

Procedural Bullet Hell

After prototyping the system for a while, we felt a bit lost about which direction we wanted to take the game. It was probably because we didn't really have any interesting gameplay elements that we could develop the game around. We then decided to turn the idea to something more simple. After some coffee and more brainstorming, we decided to turn the game into a shmup.

Turning the world to a health system

We kept the core idea of generating a world on the fly as player moves around, but we turned the world into a health system - also changing the shape of the world from rectangular to circular shape.

Everytime the player takes damage, the world canvas shrinks.

When player heals or destroys enemies, the world canvas expands.

The health system proved to be very interesting;

• The player will be safe if he just stays still, since enemies appear only when world is being generated
• Staying still reduces the chance of survival, since the world keeps shrinking in size
• The smaller the world canvas, the faster it shrinks
• World canvas can be enlarged by killing enemies and also by collecting the health packs dropped by them

This system enforces player to be active and engage in combat with enemies. One inspiration for us was the combat system of DOOM (2016), where the player gets rewarded with extra health drops by taking risks and engaging with enemies in close combat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXk3MMRXbjA

If you are interested in checking how the health system works in action, you can play our entry here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/quantum-catburetor/

Or just grab the game from itch.io https://jushiip.itch.io/quantum-catburetor (Windows, Mac & Linux Available)

Thanks for reading! :grin:

Hey all! As the rating system is finally up, we wanted to remind you that we exist, and our entry for LD38 is Quantum Catburetor. The game is a trippy, twin-stick bullet hell shmup. Grab your gamepad and play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/quantum-catburetor/

Gamepad highly recommended for the best experience! :cat:

I'm in with my good friend @lag. This will be his first time doing LD and my 3rd.

Starting a bit late since I couldn't get myself up from bed at 4:00 AM. (It's very comfortable in bed when it's cold, Finnish ~~November~~ December outside..)

We are doing some sort of traffic management game. Let's see how it goes! Good luck everybody! :red_car:

Here's a short progress video of our traffic jam avoidance game thingy!

There's 5 seconds of black in the beginning of video. (why OBS?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YwugaQ9qL0

First day progress of a game I'm working with @lag. :blue_car:

Our game is a traffic management game, where the road network will grow the better you do - and avoiding jams will eventually get much more challenging!

No name has been decided for the game yet. :cryingcatface:

So initially, the goal of our game was to avoid traffic jams, but we decided to turn everything upside down and now your mission as a traffic guard is to cause jams! After you cause a big jam (jam meter % fills up) the road network expands and you have to cause even bigger jam!

Next up: - better camera controls - clearing the cars when you get to next level/rank - bug fixes - music - time limit

Here's what we currently have. The game needs work, but everything is going so smoothly we can surely finish this on time tomorrow!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TILHS5HL0sc

Even though it's just crossroads, the city starts to look pretty!

Probably introducing "Rush Hour" powerups so you can boost traffic by clicking on a crossroad.

Just implemented a timer and a game over state. We still want to add some abilities which you unlock by increasing in rank. These would be increasing the traffic, and speed of cars that spawn from certain roads.

Also, we still need a name for this game.. any ideas? The goal is to get promoted in rank by creating a big traffic jam.

Aaand.. gotta start thinking about audio soon. :grimacing:

Gif in video format:

https://youtu.be/MZ6NM9ozDuU

We are finally done. :grin: Like last time, I have no energy left and will go directly to bed now. Will write a bunch of stuff later.

Anyways, good luck! One more hour to go!! Try to finish your games on time!!!

You can play our game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/traffic-jammers

Gameplay video

https://youtu.be/N0B2FktRe7Y

Traffic Jammers Ltd. is looking for amateur or more experienced jammers to join our company ranks.

We offer good benefits (dental, company car) and a competitive salary. Also here at Traffic Jammers Ltd. you will pose opportunities to get promoted if you perform well in your job. (no previous jamming experience required)

Please send your CV with a cover letter at: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/traffic-jammers

Entering the jam with @marjo (designer), @hanybal (designer/artist), @wattumartti (programmer) and me (programmer)

Good luck everybody and have a nice compo/jam! Let's hope for a good theme :smile_cat: