Hello, folks! My name’s Nick and I’m one of those two guys who made Don’t Crawl. Do you remember it? The game was originally made for Ludum Dare 33 (theme was “You are the Monster”), and over a year reworked into a full-scale Steam release, complete with matchmaking, map editor, and Steam Workshop support for sharing maps.

Initially, I just wanted to see how would the general idea of Powerhoof’s Crawl work in a classical platformer – I wasn’t even intending to make a “complete” game. It seemed to work pretty fine, we were even approached by someone to potentially release a more polished version of the game for their platform. Fortunately or unfortunately, that deal didn’t work out, but this suggested that the game has potential, so we continued working on it. And now, a year after the initial release, the game is on Steam!

Huge thanks to the LD crew and local community! You made all that possible!

Hello, everyone! Do you remember Don’t Crawl? It’s been a while since initial LD#33 version (the theme was “You are the Monster”), and, oh well, we’re still developing it. And now… now we’re on Greenlight, isn’t that cool? (:

This is how it all began

We added a bunch of new monsters and traps, water, waving trees, fans, new levels, reworked the “ghost mode”, added shops and hero upgrades … Uh, sorry for the list, but these are far not all the changes that we have made.

And that’s how the game’s played now

Huge thanks to the LD crew and local community! To be honset, it’s YOU who enouraged us to continue developing Don’t Crawl.

Monster Academy

Almost Heroic

Underworld Siege

Monster Disco

The Monster Files

Don’t Crawl

(The last title is our game and it’s not in the list. But you still don’t want to miss it, right?)

Hey! My name is Nik and I’m a guy behind art, SFX and core game mechanics of Don’t Crawl. In case you haven’t played the game yet, it’s a multiplayer competitive platformer. One player controls the hero while the others take control of the monsters in attempts to kill the hero and take their place.

Don’t Crawl is a game about monsters. They are, obviously, what makes the game fun. I planned them to be very unique, balanced and easy to control. Initially, I was going for a bird (flies in a straight line and drops eggs), a hedghog (can’t jump, but can’t be killed by jumping on it) and a frog (moves via jumping only). But lately I removed both the frog and the hedghog – the last one was too primitive, and I was afraid that the frog would have too much movement freedom. So I went for a slime that makes the ground stickier while moving (it combos well with other monsters and traps) and for a demon who is immune to stomp damage and can dash upwards.

Here came a problem of monsters’ interactions. Shall eggs kill other birds? What happens if demon lands on spikes? How about laser traps? I didn’t have time to draw demon death animations (he looks almost like the player, so he is expected to leave a corpse) and thus protected him from spikes and eggs. It definitely made the demon quite unexpectable and unbalanced, but well, I didn’t have that many options…

Another huge problem I faced was level design. The point was to make the play session fun both for the hero and the monsters. Here are a few examples of how I tried to achieve this:

And this is my attempt to implement “built-in tutorial”. I wanted to make sure the player knows how to play the game. That’s why I tried to teach him level-design-wise:

And these are the tricks I used to eliminate “camping spots”:

Well, that’s it. Thanks for listening! Oh, and how about giving Don’t Crawl a try?

Don’t Crawl is a multiplayer platformer game in NES stylistic.

One player controls the hero while the others take control of the monsters in attempts to kill the hero and take their place. The game features online multiplayer and can be played either directly (the “host” player will need to forward a UDP port) or by finding the opponents via “hub”.

Unfortunately, “hub” server is only supported in the post-jam version. While it was largely done during the jam, we couldn’t get it reliably working in time so had to take it out of the original jam submission.

Please, play, rate and drop us a line in comments, so we know how to make Don’t Crawl better!

Hello, everyone!

I’m a novice game designer and programmer straight form Siberia, though not that handy with pixels.

I did a couple of Ludum Dares before, as well as some 7DRLs, and some really small games like this one. Yes, the art doesn’t look that bad, but it wasn’t made by me, it was just found on the Internet and then adapted to actually fit the game (which is not a huge fun to do).

So, I’m looking for a pixel artist to make it through this LD!

I really mean you can manipulate them easily. Enjoy your stay.