my beat-em-up experiment for Ludum Dare

Why not give my beat-em-up experiment a try?

I didn’t mean to complete this. Just to have fun with graphics and mechanics. And it worked!
What I learnt on this project:
Enemy AI, beatem-up Z-movement, Finite State Machines, hitboxes and attack boxes.

Super Snow Girl

You rock, LD.

Gameplay gif of my beatemup engine “Super Snow Girl”

No, not the “unfinished game engine” kind, you big silly.

So I made this. It was exhausting and fun, and I hope you dig.

Love ya fellow LDers long time.

Click here to get to the game. Engine. Whatever I don’t mind that it’s unfinished. If Humanity needs it a whole lot, I have confidence it will get made. Otherwise it’s fine as it is!

I hope this time I make something fun, not just pretty.

Wish me luck, and shout out to all female gamedevs participating (a disappointing 4% last year)

Here’s some of my previous work:

Didn’t make it this time.
As I keep reminding everyone, I’m no coder. So even simple pathfinding leaves me scratching my head. This time it beat me completely. Maybe next time!

My game was going to be about greek goblins (kalikanjari, a common eastern european monster/malevolent spirit). They are supposed to live in the underworld and work all December to bring down the world tree. But invariably, their trickster nature gets the better of them, and they come to the surface for one night, which of course makes the World Tree heal itself, and their work is never done.

I’d like to see them succeed. Naturally influenced by the great Dungeon Keeper and some Amiga nostalgia, some time and resource management are needed, and a little fighting to keep things interesting. I worked hard for 2.5 days and disappointingly only have a design doc and a piece of music to show for it. I want to finish it, but I can’t make any promises. Pathfinding for the goblins in a maze of sidescrolling tunnels has left me stumped for now.

Not much more I can say. I will enjoy playing everyone’s games as always, even though I won’t be able to vote this time.

I love LD, thank you all for taking part.
Christina

I’m in for the 8th time!

First a serious note: as a feminist female gamedev, I can’t help but feel a lot of concern for Zoe Quinn’s abuse and harassment. None of us female game devs deserve rape threats and nude photos of us being posted against our will.

Here’s a good article for those of you who want to know more.

And now onto the fun!
Here’s some stuff I’ve worked on in the past

Shop Music – gameboy chiptune

Heaving of the Depths – jrpg for LD 29

Kumiho, a bullet hell by me and awesome gamedev Fedor Jutte, and one of the best games I’ve been involved in so far

Screenshots from Xenoball, a 32×32 game for #lowrezjam (WIP)

Legend of troll, a puzzle platformer. I want to make it a full game someday

Friendly advice, from an LD veteran (actually from all LD veterans :P) : make your game small and manageable. Otherwise, like me, you’ll end up with a super-ambitious project that isn’t finished or fun I’m hoping to take my own advice this year <3

Good luck to everyone, I love our community!

This LD I had the strange idea of making a j-RPG.
Thus Heaving of the Depths was born. You can play it here

WHAT WENT RIGHT

1. It’s pretty! I wanted a very beautiful game and I think that went well. There’s a ton of art in this thing. As usual, I create new assets as needed. I ended up with two large photoshop files: an overworld sea where you navigate the ocean in your pirate ship, and a battle screen, where I made all battle sprites and animations. What this lets me do is keep a consistent color palette and style across the whole project, and essentially replaces the concept art stage that a normal game goes through. I used amazing references like Legend of Zelda Windwaker and Breath of Fire IV.

Overworld assets

2. I learnt tons of stuff! I used cinema4D and my nonexistent 3D skills to make a fast and loose 8-direction ship with minimal effort. I tried my hand at procedural generation: all islands are generated randomly within certain limitations, to keep the level solvable and the sea traversable. I had a stroke of genius at the last moment and created a “miner” entity that swims through the level and places gold coins wherever it goes, at runtime. This was to ensure an interesting curving path through the level, so players would want to explore it.

3. It’s a complete adventure, my storytelling skills were also, I thought, nonexistent, but the story of Sunny and Cod just flowed through me like I was on fire. It’s got a beginning, middle and end, it’s got obstacles and emotions. I usually end up making a very unfulfilling game. This time I feel I made a difference.

4. it has a branching storyline. Well, ok, a few tiny branches. Such as when you are defeated by the 3 blacktopuses you get a different message to the one you get if you clear them. Or when Sunny tells you you need the fast sail if you don’t have it, but acknowledges if you’ve already bought it. But that’s still a lot of work. I have a much better grasp of how to implement a dialogue system.

5. it has a turn-based battle system: implemented from scratch. Boring and barebones, yes. But it gets the job done.

6. I get to develop it further. I’m dedicating the next 6 months to this game. I started a new devlog here

WHAT WENT WRONG

1. No sound  I didn’t have the time

2. Button-mashing battles the battle system is uninteresting. That’s ok, and it’s all I had time for, but if I’m going to make this a full-fledged RPG, I need a good battle system. Feel free to send me ideas. Grandia and Child of Light are obviously lovely choices, where the result of a battle can be spectacularly overturned. Also Persona 3 and Fallout 2 have good battle systems. Since you’re spending half the game in battle, I owe it to myself to fix the button-mashing boringness.

3. Time management. Well I don’t know, I did a lot for three days. But it’s not as fun as a more complete experience such as the amazing SCUBA BEAR (go check it out NOW). On the other hand, I like to follow through with my ideas for Ludum Dare, instead of making a smaller game just because of time constraints.
Here’s my Timelapse video:

And thanks to everyone who commented, everyone who played my game, everyone who made a game for us to play. I love Ludum Dare, I want to never stop making games.

Until next time,

love,

Christina

It’s called “The Heaving Depths” and it’s mainly about my fear of dark spots in the water when I go swimming. But cleverly disguised as an RPG and a love story between two girls.

You’ll see!
I barely got any sleep, my code started breaking apart at the seams after a while, but I kept at it.

If you play it, and feel the urge to tell me what you liked or disliked about it, please do, I’m all ears. I’m probably going to finish this if there’s enough interest, so it’d be cool if I made something you guys like to play.

PLAY IT HERE

Let me grab the opportunity to tell everyone how much I love, love LOVE LD, I never want to stop!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thank you everyone for making this, my 6th Ludum Dare a joy to participate. Thank you for making games, thank you for commenting on other peoples’ games, thank you thank you thank you!

Expect a postmortem and a timelapse soon.

I’m in!

Construct 2, Photoshop and FLstudio are my weapons. This time I’ll be trying to concentrate on FUN and replayability. Good luck to everyone! I love LD, let’s make games forever! Lovely to see female gamedevs on the keynote.

Here’s a pixel I prepared earlier.

OK, this is my game for this LD!

A sandbox mix of Terraria, Populous, that old game “Diggers 2: Extractors”, Dungeon Keeper and From Dust. I tried to be 100% bound by the theme, and decided on “you’re a Goddess, and you only get one Follower”.

Since there’s not a lot of gameplay, it’s still too early to say if this has potential. If it does, please let me know. If it sucks, ditto.
If you have any requests/ideas or know how to make an A* Pathfinding algorithm that works for platformers and doesn’t make my AI look dumb, please PLEASE chip in

It’s my 5th LD and I loved every minute of it. I had two panic attacks during my 3 days of making it, but anti-anxiety medicine are my friends these days anyway.
The most rewarding part was, even though I’m an illustrator I actually spent more time coding than doing graphics! Like, a lot more.

Timelapse and Post-mortem coming soon.

Game Created in 72 hours

FLstudio for the music
Adobe Photoshop for the art
Construct 2 for the code.

PLAY IT HERE

I don’t trust myself too much, because of panic attacks, so I’m joining solo. Worst that can happen is I don’t make a game.

But I’m in!
As usual:
Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash for the art
Construct 2 for the code
FLstudio for the music

This is my last game, Legend of Troll

Hi fellow LD gamedevs! My game PAWS has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund its completion. We’ve been working on it for 19 months and it’s really starting to shine, we think.

Take a look at our screenshots and please try the playable  alpha demo. If we get funded, the game will be available to the world in 6 months. If we don’t, it’s 19 months of work down the drain, because we’re poor gamedevs like everyone, and will not be able to develop it further. So please support our Kickstarter. Thank you for your time,

love, Christina