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
Bubble Becky is probably the game I enjoyed the most this jam. really great job! I would love to play an extended version.
I thought it wasn’t too difficult even though i did struggle with the boss for a little bit. I also really liked the way you introduced Becky’s abilities.
Thanks for making it!