A Quick post to say that for my first Ludum Dare I enrolled my two daughters: Lily 7 years old and Clea 10 years old. We had fun creating this little familly game! Clea and Lily did the 2D arts while we shared the designed and I coded everything with Tiny Project in Unity. It is also my first project with Tiny, a perfect occasion to learn ECS, by the Way great Work Unity people, keep on the good work and delever us a fully functional Tiny ECS versio of Unity very soon!

To play it: Emma is a small girly game avatar living in the Hammers' and flowers' world! She has a magic ability: She can give her health to the flowers she loves so much. But beware, Flowers are linked to the hammers sharing their same color! So choose the right ones or loose! Color all the flowers in the level to win (Sorry only one level, it was hard enough to make it so far in so few time!)

Ah I love gamejams. Being locked down because of the covid19 made things easier as my two daughters are confined with their mother (I miss you Cléa and Lily!) So 72 hours away from the covid is 72 hours of pure selfish fun. Ok now for the game itself. I code mostly and my game designs are always oriented with the kind of technology I want to explore. But I also do love to tell stories. And I'd have loved to practice my drawings. But hey it's not in 72 hours that you can change your old habits. Back to the LD46: The Theme. Keep it alive. Ok what does that tells me? The fire in me. Keep Faith in whatever you believe is or is right. Don't loose faith. So this is philosophically. How can I translate it to others and specially with an action game? I had in mind to mix 2 technologies (what a mistake) 3D Ragdoll and 2d rendering with Voronoï. Vornonoï I have some experience with, but still it took me time to render it the way i wanted to. Ragdoll, I was kind of new. I didn't expect it was going to be so difficult to keep the player in track (horizontal scroll) while moving the ragdoll. Well the clumsy effect I love it. Many games out there are using it perfectly (My friend Pedro or Eat the Rich from the FreeLives team) but ragdoll is hard to use in a game! Back to the story. So as I remembered Karateka from Jordan Mechner, I wanted to make a horizontal scroll action game with a narration at the begining... and at the end... yeah right, plenty of time, fingers in the nose. Hence the drawing of me by my friend Logan you can see here. So I spent the first day browsing Mixamo finding 2 characters and a dozen of animations and i tried to make my cinematic AND the game... Then the next day I started to implement my gameplay. And the last day, 6 hours before the end of the jam, i couldn't find a bug of some indices of colors wrongly set. I gave up, too tired, and uploaded the game as you can play it right now. Am I proud of it? Yes and no. No because it isn't as fun as I hoped to. Yes because I progressed with the ragdoll thing, yes because it is one more gamejam for me, and yes because it wasn't easy but we all did it as a community. Cheers, Stay safe at home if you can, and let's Jam in October!