The team at Ponywolf is planning on rocking the jam AND I have a question.

How do people feel about an Android APK as the final submission. We’d love to use our dev tool of choice–CoronaSDK–but it builds to iOS (which is out of the question to post over a weekend with signing/approval) and to Android. The APK could be easily hosted and even posted to the Play store for free, but will folks give it a shot vs. an HTML or Windows download?

About an hour into the brainstorming someone said…

So what if an angel and a devil were connected by a rope?

So, we took a shot at a mechanic that could only be achieved on mobile. Tilt side to side to move a player (who’s chained to another character from below) and flip the device to gain control of the other character (and flip the gravity in-world.) It sounds more complicated than it is, or maybe it doesn’t.

It feels a little more like a prototype than a full game, but it would be interesting to see how it plays out in a bigger universe. The team ended up being four folks and we worked in total about 25 hours each within the 72 hour window.

Good compo, thanks to all.

Before the competition I posed the question, “What if our team submitted an mobile only game?”

Really, due to the long approval time for Apple apps, that meant, “What if our team makes an entry that only works on Android?”

Our concern was the tool-chain we use for everyday development which targets iOS/Android (and targets them well) may limit the number of players and therefore the number of reviews. We received mixed responses via LD comments, Reddit and Twitter to the question with almost as many saying “don’t bother” as people saying “I’d play it.”

In the end, we came up with list of three rules for what we wanted to see out of our Android entry:

A good reason to be mobile.

We decided early on, whether it was touch, tilt, camera, etc., our entry needed to be designed to be played on a mobile and not just a mobile version of a desktop idea. We chose a tilt to move, touch to jump platformer with a twist. You control two characters who are chained together and–depending how you have your device turned–you control whoever is on top and drag whoever is on bottom. Flip the device and the roles (and gravity) flip as well.

Easy to download and play

We posted the APK on our own server and posted it on the Google Play store, making sure that no permissions were needed to download and play. We also targeted Android 2.3.3 and limited the frame rate to 30fps. So, outside of needing hardware accelerated OpenGL, the system requirements remained very low. Th game played just fine on a $50 Samsung Reverb. Some respondents also mentioned adding a QR code to the google play link which we did in our main screenshot.

Show me… something

We pushed a YouTube video (which I’m currently re-building) the second we pushed the entry, in hopes that people who couldn’t play would see (and maybe share) our entry. After three days we have 75 views so we are seeing some traction there.

Results

I’d say we are pretty happy so far. We rated about 15 games a day, off and on and would get about 10 ratings a day. Comments are pretty positive, even from those who only watched the video. Friends and family drove our download numbers up, with about 40 total downloads as I’m writing this.

So if you have an Android device lying around, check us out.

We couldn’t be happier about our Silver Medal for Dead Weight. All in all, the game had a strong showing across the board.

We had debated not doing LD30 at all because our Web engine wasn’t quite ready to roll and we thought there wouldn’t be a big enough base of mobile Android users to place in the results. I guess we were wrong, or right depending on how you look at it.

We tried to collect our thinking and approach around doing a mobile only entry in this post from a few weeks ago.

Thanks to everyone who played!

Nothing like an empty map and a freshly cloned framework to get the ludum dare juices flowing…

Michael Wilson and James Lloyd of @ponywolf partnered with Scott Meyer from @mutatedsoftware to create a multi-player deathmatch entry titled Flat Earths.

We are petty fracking excited about how it turned out, both from a playability and visual polish standpoint. If you haven't, stop reading this and grab a controller (and a friend or two) and give it a shot.

What went right?

Nearly everything

This was by far the smoothest LD I've worked on. We made some rough sketches pretty early on and had a prototype (for single player, no bots) working in just a few hours.

Look and Feel

This is our first try at putting shaders into our workflow, and we really come up with something fast and simple that looked interesting. Without the pixel-y look I think this game would have not gotten as much attention.

CPU/Bots/AI

I didn't have much confidence that AI would work in this game at all, but for a few minor issues (see What went wrong?) the bots are a huge addition to the game and lets anyone pick up and play--and hopefully return with a few friends.

Controller support

We got PS4, Xbox, Xbox One, Steel Series and some old school Game Pads AND Keyboards all working on both PC and Mac... Some are better than others, but all in all you should be able to scrounge up a decent 4 player setup with thrift store quality controllers.

Squishy/Juicy

Much of the physics are fairly rigid bodies, but the characters (built in Spine) are hooked up with a pretty loose "follow" function. This gives the game a feeling of just being on the edge of control, which we really liked.

Humor

We didn't get as much text into the game as we wanted, but the descriptions and tweets we done for the game all have a great tongue-in-cheek tone.

What went wrong?

Fixing bugs and adding features too late

We got stuck in the all too common trap of trying to fix bugs on one system while dropping a few new maps and scoring features on another system which led to more bugs, and so on and so on. We did 3 or 4 patches in that last 4 hours and still messed up the timer and scorekeeping in the final game. On first blush you wouldn't notice, but the scoring isn't quite correct.

Character differentiation

The characters and their aquatic rides don't have enough visual differentiation to make it easy to find who you are after a respawn. An easy fix, but we were too busy on showstopping bugs to re-visit this in the last few hours.

CPU/Bots/AI

Scot did some incredible work to make the bots functional, but again the time didn't allow us to tweak them to make a single player experience that would be a consistent challenge. That said, just the fact there is AI in there at all is a huge win.

LAN support

I personally wasted a bunch of time trying to get local LAN support working that could have been used to make the game better. I almost always give up on a feature in LD games, and I should have given up on this sooner.

Scanlines needed an off switch

GIFs of the game with scanlines on look pretty messed up, and (unless you are at least 1080p) captures are equally dicey.

In conclusion

Again, I am super-proud of the team and we were over the moon (that is also flat) when we saw a group of four from Stumpt play a few round on their Twitch channel.

https://youtu.be/cq9ScVPrmsI?t=15m52s

In a world where everything is subjective, it's hard to dispute that Ponywolf and Mutated Software took 35th place in the 72-hour #LDJAM for Flat Earths!

We really enjoyed making it, and now we have the heavy burden of deciding if this a high enough finish to make a post-jam version.

You can play it on itch.io or play it on Gamejolt or read our postmortem.

It's a Card Swap Dungeon Crawler--probably one of the most straightforward games we've ever done for the Ludum Dare. So, let's get to it!

What went right?

• The gameplay didn't really gel until late on Sunday, and we were pretty lucky that the balancing worked out well
• The art, although simplistic, struck the balance between something quick that could be slapped together and something decent enough to get noticed
• Picking a design that can actually be accomplished in 72 hours. Something we haven't always been great at.
• The UI lent itself to being very mobile ready, and we're toying with app store version as we speak

What went wrong?

• The tutorial deck at the beginning doesn't really explain enough on how to play, and the rules card (which I thought was a great idea) is quite confusing
• The card swap mechanic isn't the most intuitive, and our post jam version has more of a slide/re-order feel to it
• Not enough visual/audio feedback. Why did that on-screen thing happen? I don't know!

Wrongish Right?

• Prototyped on paper, which was quick and got us to a reasonably balance right away. However, playing with physical cards vs digitally brought up an unexpected issue with pacing. As you're moving things around and rolling dice physically, the game seemed to have a great pace... but when done automatically by a computer the game seemed slow and a bit boring. We had to do a decent amount of last minute redesign to make the digital version more entertaining.

So, all in all, not too shabby.

Here's the link to enjoy!

...and I wanted to test embedded GIFs

Cut me Mick! I gotta get back out there and work on my second genre!

Feel free to suggest a name...

Only about 20% as violent as actual boxing...

As always, a race to the finish...

Super proud of @james-war-lloyd for sticking the landing on art, and really being the design lead on the surgery portion. The duel genre really was lucky for us as @mutatedsoftware and I were able to divide the work between the two different games and pass values back and forth.

The game probably has too much discovery as you need to experiment with both games to get them working, and I doubt that anyone will find the victory state (but it's there.)

It gets heavy on the cartoon gore as ailments stack up, but I think it's not too over the top. (Feel free to let us know :smile:)

This is our first browser-based LD entry, and out tools did not let us down (outside of a minor, cosmetic error box in Safari.) We'll take a breather, get back to the real world and post desktop and mobile builds of the coming weeks.

Thanks for reading!

We spent a few extra hours fixing some stuff and implementing some feedback in a downloadable, post jam version of Boxing Surgery Simulator 2000 thats available to indulge your pugilistic tendencies for PC + MAC.

The HTML version is the original Jam Entry. The Desktop Builds have other nonsense added. If you are judging the game, play the HTML version first, then cry, then get the desktop version, then cry less.

We were pretty stoked to have Alpha Beta Gamer review our little entry. He even made a little playthrough to help explain WTF is going on :smile:

Read his take here...

https://www.alphabetagamer.com/boxing-surgery-simulator-2000-game-jam-build/

and get your grubby little gloves on it here...

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/boxing-surgery-simulator-2000

We thought that Boxing Surgery Simulator 2000 might be popular with streamers and youtubers, but we were quite surprised to find a 125k view lets play by Russian youtube gamer Kuplinov ► Play.

https://youtu.be/QH7087v4Meg

My Russian is pretty much non-existent, so I can only judge from the laughs that he's having a good time :smile:

Any Russian speakers out there? Wanna make your own video?

Here's the link to Boxing Surgery Simulator 2000

Boxing Surgery Simulator 2000 has had over 10,000 plays between itch.io and GameJolt. If you played it and didn't rate us, now's your chance. Also, grab the post-jam version from either site.

Make sure you follow @ponywolf on the Twitters for more updates!