I’ve officially run out patience. Here’s the first build of my game, Droplet.

It uses both themes – you’re a growing droplet of liquid AND you can only use A and D to move.

http://metabog.itch.io/droplet

I finally got around to making some multiplatform downloadable binaries for my game Droplet! It turns out Unity’s Web Player is fairly unfriendly to most browsers.

Droplet is a moody game about being a droplet of water. Your goal is to get bigger and bigger by absorbing other friendly droplets and not getting sucked up by evil red blood droplets. It uses some unusual raytraced rendering.

You can find the entry here:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=45345

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I normally use some kind of existing engine to make a game for a jam, but this time for some reason I decided it would be brilliant to make everything except the renderer from scratch. Did I mention I've barely used javascript before? Phew. I learned a lot doing this and tried some stuff I've wanted to do for a while, mainly terrain generation and tileset stored in a quadtree to speed up physics and rendering queries. Unfortunately these basic systems took up a lot of my first day's time, but now I have a system I can reuse for future jams!

It's also submitted in its p5.js ide so you can update the code and try changing stuff yourself and just hit play.

I didn't have much time for audio but for the music I made an AdLib/DOS inspired ambient tune.

The game itself is kind of simple:

-Survive waves of enemies -Till ground, plant seeds, wait one enemy wave to see them grow to up to 2 levels -Harvest the resulting bushes to get health upgrades, jetpack fuel and wood you can use to build reinforced walls

Kill the enemies, which will drop seeds you can use to plant bushes. Ultimately it's a gamble between harvesting bushes now or on the next turn. You also need to kite the enemies to a place you can easily collect their dropped seeds, but the enemies also damage ground so you have to make sure they don't come too close to your bushes. When bushes are harvested or destroyed, they destroy terrain below them, which means you can't keep farming the same locations.

Because I implemented an (ostensibly) efficient quadtree, the game world is actually quite huge and different each game.

I had fun this weekend doing this little game, I wish a lot of things were more polished (especially character movement and the memory leak in the audio engine that I couldn't fix) but I'm glad I was able to get it over the finish line!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/harvest-looper