Introducing Treasure Balloon, a sidescroller about collecting loot and bonking monsters. This is my first Ludum Dare game, and I'm pretty happy about how it came out!

Submission page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/treasure-balloon

Really happy with how far I've gotten so far this evening. I have the basic visuals and controls in, gonna work on the fundamentals now (start/end screen, penalizing you for driving into water) and then probably get going on the actual fish types tomorrow.

I know it's tricky to see at the reel speed, but you get different fish depending on whether you cast your bobber into shallow water or deep water. :D (And nothing at all if you cast on land or out of bounds.) Next up: add some chance to the fishing, and some timing for when you can catch and how quickly you have to react.

The reel speed is fast, by the way, because I'm completely cheating on the math; it just averages the x positions of the car and bobber, and the y positions of the car and bobber, and then puts the bobber there. Xeno's fishing line. :P

Now you need to catch fish to keep your car going! :D

A random delay before fish bite adds a surprising amount of fun for how simple it is. With the delay, I actually have to watch my bobber while I'm driving, and I want to cast again as soon as possible after reeling in the line instead of waiting to line up some easy positioning. I'm feeling optimistic about making something people will like playing!

Next thing I think is giving you a reason to keep driving continuously. I'm doing it here for funsies; I could just park in front of a lake and cast without penalty. So I'm planning to add timed checkpoints, like an arcade racing game, that you have to hit or else the game ends. (Once I've done that, I might change it so that driving into deep water no longer ends your game, it just slows you down a lot, which will probably end the game as a secondary effect but not as suddenly.)

Hey, is it fair game to post a build that people can play while the event is still going on? I'm interested in getting feedback as early as I can, but I don't know if playtesting counts as collaborating.

MVP achieved! It has the fishing part, and the racing part, and an end condition. I can spruce up the start and end screens and work on sound, but the big question now is: do I think I can pull off multiplayer in time?

I'm not 100% sure I'm going to get multiplayer done, but I'm gonna try.

I keep having to rein in the difficulty a little more after getting playtest feedback. It's easy to forget that playing it all day gives me a lot of practice. Nevertheless, playing both cars is still really hard, which is why I didn't do any fishing in this gif.

I had spent a day and a half trying to come up with good fish/car joke names when my roommate just casually dropped this one on me and I was like "Welp, that's the name then."

Really pleased to have gotten the game options done, too. At this point I could ship it if I had to, but I want to clean up the instructions page and get some sounds in, which realistically could take up the rest of the time.

There's one more feature I'd love to squeak in but I don't think it's gonna happen.

Submission page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/the-fish-and-the-furious

It's done! I'm really pleased with this one. :)

... to put the link to your game page in your announcement post! Not just screenshots or an itch.io link. :)