This past weekend, the team and I decided to participate in Ludum Dare 60. We did our first Ludum Dare back in LD45; I think the year was 2016. Our first game was called The Yellow Jacket Man, a 2D top-down shooter where the guns were unconventional weapons. We had a penguin grenade, a fried chicken shotgun, and finally a rat gun that shoots out rats. The entire game was handwritten by one of the co-founders of Givit Game Studios, and Gustav van Rooyen was the programmer. GameMaker 1.4 was used back then. Since then, we have switched over to the Unity game engine.
We took a break from full development of our next game THE SOPHISTICATED ART OF FRIENDSHIP: TALES OF A LOST FRIEND. We needed to clear our heads and develop a small game for Ludum Dare 60.
The theme for this jam was: OLD TECH. This is a great theme, as most of us on the team grew up in the nineties and early 2000’s. Yeah, unfortunately, tech that came out during the nineties and early 2000s is now considered OLD. We had some great ideas, but we also had not that great ideas. From old McDonald's toys to vinyl players where the player is playing a running hurdles game. SPORTS.
A couple of years ago, I played Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart. I really loved the mini-game where you play as a small bot and try to destroy the viruses on a computer system. I told the team, “What if we created our own version of that small mini-game?” The team loved the idea. We decided very early on that we wanted to make a 2D game. With not much time, we started. The game came together very quickly. We had a working prototype about an hour into the jam.
With level design and gameplay mechanics, we went with the Binding of Isaac mechanics, where the player uses only the keyboard to control the player and shoot projectiles in the required direction. It was simple, and it made the game feel like you were playing it on OLD TECH. With the levels, we took a hybrid approach. The levels are hand-crafted; the game decided which level would be played. So, I guess we do have some sort of random generation going???
As storytellers, we really wanted to tell a story, but unfortunately, time wasn't on our side. But boy, do we also like arcade games. We took the arcade approach for more fluent gameplay. We really wanted to make a game that the player can play on repeat. All of the systems were working and done by the end of day 1.
Early on in Day 2, I was thinking about how we were going to end this game. Are we going to create a simple end-game boss, or are we going to make the game “endless”? The thing is. We are still storytellers at heart, so we decided to give the game a proper ending and create a boss fight. With that, that rounded off the game nicely.
The game got done fairly quickly at this point, and all of it just clicked. The game ended up being so much fun that we, as a studio, started playing it more and more. We think that there is potential for a full release here.
The game is currently available on Itch. We will also link the Ludum Dare page to the game so that you can read all of the wonderful comments that we are getting about the game. The LD community is super awesome, and there are some great games.
Thank you for taking the time to read this blog post. If you do not mind and wishlist our game on Steam and the Epic game store.
You can download the game here ->