We already participated 8 times in the Ludum Dare jam, but this was the first time we had a dedicated pixel artist, Daniel! Also this was the first time we made a platformer.

Enjoying a late breakfast in our garden, we discussed many ideas. In the end, we stuck (pun intended :P) with our idea of using bubble gum as our ‘unconventional weapon’. During the process of making the game the following back story crystallized:

Due to an unfortunate typo, Gum has been outlawed in an alternate 90s-past. Young Superhero Becky rises to challenge the robotic law enforcement.

You can play our game here

What went smooth

• The graphics are much better than in our last games, thanks to Daniel, who worked on them the whole weekend. 😉 This meant that Anneroos now had a lot of time to help Jelle with the coding.
• Distribution of tasks was very easy: Daniel – graphics, Anneroos – coding & sound effects, Jelle – coding and music.
• First time using Git (instead of Dropbox), so we all could test our own changes, without the risk of breaking stuff for the others.
• It is playable! And it has an end, and a story (for us at least, probably not so clear for the players 😉 )
• The first time we made a platformer, and using Tiled went quite smooth.
• Crispy pixels 😀 (Daniel is very happy)
• We were relaxed! Except for perhaps the last 4 hours. 😉 We took time to dine with friends and juggle in the garden.

What went not so smooth

• Making the background music loop nicely.
• Level design/playtesting: it turned out that the 4 levels were quite hard for people that didn’t playtest the whole weekend. Next time we should put more effort into developing (shorter?) levels with clearer instructions.
• The bubbles were finished quite late, so the velocities and effects were not finetuned as they should have.
• The end boss. There was very little time to program the end boss, and it turned out to be quite difficult as well.
• Many sound effects were recorded last minute; we forgot to make a sound effect for jumping.

Conclusion

We had fun, and the game is more polished than any of our other games. Of course, there is still a lot of polishing and level design that can be done for a postcompo version, and some bugs to be removed (in particular the infamous infinite-bubble-spawn-bug). We were very happy to hear that some people actually played until the end and beat the boss!

Enjoy playing our game, and good luck with the hard levels