For the first time, Twirlbound joins the party!

A quick introduction: we are Twirlbound, a group of very enthusiastic game developers. My name is Matthijs van de Laar, I take care the business side of the recently registered company. We consist of three students of International Game Architecture and Design:

1. Marc Peyré, programmer
2. Timo van Hugten, artist
3. Matthijs van de Laar, designer & producer

A gamejam forms the perfect form of entertainment after working hard on our website and With the Wind, a mobile game we are currently developing. But that’s enough info for now: here’s our game!

We went with the following idea: 10 seconds is short, so it would have to be a repetitive process that still stays interesting. Interesting in two ways: every 10 seconds need to be interesting, but also the collective set of multiple repetitions needed to be interesting.

QuickHunt is a topdown shooter, where we took inspiration for the camera view and movement out of Minigore, but not your average one: you hunt animals and you need to be fast at it.

We’ll update some more in a bit, good luck everyone!

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Not waiting until the end, because I know how important front-end interaction and layout is for the (first) impression!

Quickhunt has this really clean, flat-shaded style, in which these menus fit quite well. Thanks to DMesh, a piece of software that turns images into triangles with a special technique, I could turn my first-regular image of a scroll into something that fit the game better. Try it out! Beware: no undo function or zoom function; it’s no Photoshop.

Stay tuned!

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But not for us… the second day has just begun!

We immediately went on with creating level borders, more animals to hunt for and an opening sequence / main menu. Here’s a quick screenshot! We play with the lighting some more and the skybox needs to be spiced up a bit. And of course, more trees and forest, but that’s a 2 minute job.

That’s it for now, stay tuned!

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It still all goes well, and it doesn’t seem to stop. More animals are being added, AI for them is being scripted, ready to be hunted. Instructions of the game come in the form of an advertisement of world’s fastest hunter!

Obviously new is our stylish Fox, currently chasing our new Frog. We’ll play with lighting some more to get the best results. Stay tuned!

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None of us had this in mind when starting our first Ludum Dare: we managed to overachieve and keep overachieving over the course of 2 days. It’s 4:30 here in The Netherlands, so time to update and then go take a quick nap. We learned so much today!

We approached the game with a style we had been willing to do for about 2 years, but we never got to actually make it. We attempted some small experiments and within hours we had a style that we ourselves fell in love with… I hope you guys and gals like it as well!

This is our progress for today! Tomorrow we add two more animals (a chicken and a boar) and then the system is done, which leaves us with about 12 hours to playtest and finetune the gameplay.

The top image is an animated gif showing you really quickly what the game is about and how it moves. The player plays the world’s fastest hunter and he promises to take 10 seconds or less for every animal he hunts. In the bottom left corner is his hitlist: strike the next animal to proceed to another one and try to end up with the highest possible time score.

The game is almost done, as it is supposed to. It’s fun, it’s challenging… we’re very proud!

Last but not least, due to popular demand, we will release wallpapers of the QuickHunt animals when the jam is over.

Good night, folks!

After three long days, QuickHunt is almost done! It has become more beautiful than we ever thought it would be and it’s good fun to, if you ask us. Stay tuned, more in about an hour!