Strong Like Orc – Post-Mortem and Announcement
So my first Ludum Dare ever is completed! Hooray!
If you haven’t yet, you are welcome to try my entry, Strong Like Orc, a pseudo-hack’n’slash endless runner starring one (or two!) orcs who are training to defend their tribe against the humans by dodging and smashing their way through a dungeon full of crates. Sample gameplay below!
This was my first entry into this storied competition, though I tried and gave up once a few years ago. In fact, I didn’t even realize that LD was this weekend until 24 hours in! Deciding I had nothing better to do that weekend, I jumped right in to do some brainstorming. I’m very pleased with the results, simple as the game turned out to be. Everyone else seems to be doing it, so I’ll give a bit more detailed description of how everything turned out.
WHAT WENT WELL
Simplicity – After getting an idea and starting, I kept scrapping gameplay features – multiple characters/weapons, enemies to dodge, powerups – in the name of simplicity, and focused on creating a base experience with a (moderately) high level of polish. There’s less to do than I had envisioned, but with the amount of time I had, I think it turned out better for it.
Gameplay – The two buttons used were for jump and dash. Recharging the player’s air jump after a complete spear dash allowed for much fluid gameplay, and suddenly created the additional challenge of how long the player could stay in the air in one continuous dash/jump chain. I felt that the game was quite fun to play, and I received numerous comments to the same effect.
WHAT DIDN’T
Down to the wire – I started after 24 hours had already elapsed, and I had work most of Monday, so I ended up with very little time to work on the game. I only had an hour or so to do all of the audio, so that was a rush to make sounds in sfxr, and find free to use music online, though I am fortunate to have found music which suits the atmosphere of the game. Next time, I’d like to do my own music proper. Technically I went 5 minutes over time trying to get the music to play and fixing audio bugs (please don’t disqualify me).
Level generation – I ended up with a fairly simple algorithm for dungeon generation (place some rectangles randomly, put some boxes on top of those randomly), but there is no difficulty progression, and it is not impossible (however unlikely) to generate a completely impassible hallway. One of my highest priority post-jam improvements to work on is better level generation.
Player communication – I figured the best thing to do was tell the player how to jump and how to attack, and let them figure out the advanced combos. What happened was several people didn’t realize they could double jump until 5 or 10 minutes in, and one person even thought that infinite dash-jumping was a bug. I had added these as occasional gameplay tips when you die, but what instructions I figured were implied didn’t come across the whole time.
FUTURE GOALS
Multiple characters – Try out different weapons for different play styles, for instance knives which you can hold to dash forever, or a big mace which slows the player when they swing.
Level progression and enemies – In addition to the infinite random runner, I’d like to add a dungeon progression where the player clears out successive areas with different enemies/themes, and eventually take on the human army, culminating in wizard boss battles.
Level generation – Add some checks so that the generated hallway is always fair, or at least not impossible, and some progression so the game gets faster/more packed as the game goes on.
ANNOUNCEMENT
I got bored last night, and added an option for a second player, so you can compete with a friend in real time. If you’ve played before, perhaps try again with a second player for you to trounce with your existing skill.
There’s an issue though where if one player dashes, the other increases to the same speed. I’ve left it in because it would be quite hard to find a fitting solution, and because it gives players options to kill each other by dashing when the other is near a wall.
TL;DR – I completed my first Ludum Dare game, check it out here!
Let me what you think!
