Lab Animals is our entry into Ludum Dare 43

Please play and rate it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/lab-animals

And let us know what you think in the comments!

Never under estimate the power of screen shake!

Here are some of my thoughts about the entry:

I think it turned out pretty well! It has a beginning, middle and end - and I think it's even fun to play. It features 3 unique enemy types, each with their own behaviour and attack patterns and 3 different power up modes to help you fight the horde!

For me the highest priority was to make a game that was fun to play in 3 days. If we could also make it fit the theme too that would be an added bonus.

When brain storming ideas we had a thought "What if the player had to sacrifice something, not the game character..."

You, as the player, had to give up your visibility of the game or your ability to control the game, etc, to get something in return.

I started to think that a top down shooter could be the way to go... I could build a basic one in the time frame and then you could collect or use powerups but they'd cost you something in return.

Good game feel was going to be critically important so I spend a lot of my time focusing on that.

At this point we still didn't have an art theme for the game. All I knew is that I wanted it to be top down with hefty meaty shooting.

Due to the day job Erwan, who provides all the original art for the game, had to go back to work on Monday. We spent all Saturday morning unable to decide what game to make so we really only had a day and half to get the majority of the art work done. Then on the end of Saturday we decided to switch to pixel art too! We never make it easy for ourselves! :sweat_smile:

So all things considered I think the art came out looking pretty good!

Erwan created our dog main character... ...but what does he fight and where? A Dungeon maybe? An Aztec temple in the jungle? Then we settled on a sci fi lab settings, fighting demons and mutants. Those scientists have been up to their old tricks and accidentally opened portals to hell again.

We had an idea and settings and a playable game with the chunky combat working well enough. I'm particularly proud of managing to fit in 3 different enemy types, each with a unique attack pattern. By now it was was 10pm (GMT) on Monday - now I needed to start working on including the theme by creating some power ups!

Health regen - your vision becomes blurry as you heal. In the end I used multiple shaders to create a 'drunk vision' style effect. (I had to compress this gif a lot, it looks better in game!)

Berserk mode - you gain speed, your enemies are slowed down and your hit much harder but you can only see whats just in front of you. Running into danger is very easy!

Infinite ammo - your shots don't use any energy but you can't choose when to fire or where to aim! You're also slowed down a lot.

There were loads of features and even art work that only just didn't make it in time. With just a couple of more hours I think I could have successfully added at least some of the following, all the art work was ready to go: - GORE! - A melee attack - pixel art main character - pixel art explosions - a 4th enemy type - a teleporter power up - use it to escape a tight spot by teleporting away.. you'll telefrag one random enemy a minimum distance from you but your controls would have been reversed for a while

You can play the game yourself here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/lab-animals

Thanks for reading!

-- Sam