Ludum Dare 37 Warmup | Ludum Dare 35 | Ludum Dare 33 | Ludum Dare 30 |
 Jupi's Jam Favorites Awarded by Jupiter_Hadley on December 1, 2015 |
SKIPCHASER is a story driven sci-fi fantasy shooter with weapon customization, procedural levels and fast paced gunfights. Battle and loot your way through an abandoned mining wasteland while upgrading your gun and gear along the way.
Started as the Mimic for LD 35, we hit #12 in graphics and top 200 overall. Find us on Steam Early Access!
We built a little open source platformer in CoronaSDK–thinking we’d use it some of the classes as a starting point if we made a platformer in a jam in the not too distant future. Alas, we’ll be too busy and won’t be in the December jam.
Our loss is your gain 
Grab the source code from itch.io.
It’s been an interesting couple of months for sure. The Mimic, our LD35 Jam entry, performed the worst of all the games we’ve EVER done for Ludum Dare. Despite getting #12 in jam graphics, our overall score barely cracked the top 200. Control issues, scope-creep and a mad dash fix bugs toward the end made this jam the toughest.
That said, we were really happy with the finished project. It wasn’t overthought; there was no explaining the hook; just pickup a joypad and shoot random monsters on a random map. So, we made a big list of things we’d like to see in a complete game and spend the next 4 weeks polishing our gameplay and sharing the results in the Steam community under a new name–Skipchaser.
Today, I’m happy to say that we were “greenlit!”
Skipchaser on Steam
Our game is still what I would consider in an “alpha” state, so it will be months before we have something we’d be willing to call a playable, but it’s nice to have so many people interested in Skipchaser.
We’ve been enhancing our entry–The Mimic–over the past few weeks and have decided to post it on Steam Greenlight. If you have a steam account we’d love to get your vote.
We’ve changed the name to Skipchaser and added more Roguelike elements and weapon crafting.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=678046165
Nothing like an empty map and a freshly cloned framework to get the ludum dare juices flowing…
We updated our Top 100 Ludum Dare entry from last August 1-800-Monsters with a bunch of new content and made it available for free at GameJolt and Itch.io.
Dial up 1-800-Monsters and begin your quest as the hapless Jimmy, ex-pyrotechnician, now birthday party entertainer extraordinaire. Destroy castles, steal the presents and avoid children on your way to victory.
This update includes:
So, I made this sweet, sweet GIF of our LD33 entry in action. And I’d love to have it play on our entry page… I’ve seen some other entries do it, maybe through the EMBED link. (We’re currently using the EMBED for a YouTube trailer, but I don’t know if that’s more confusing than it’s worth…)
At least it can live on the home page for a few seconds…
We couldn’t be happier about our Silver Medal for Dead Weight. All in all, the game had a strong showing across the board.
We had debated not doing LD30 at all because our Web engine wasn’t quite ready to roll and we thought there wouldn’t be a big enough base of mobile Android users to place in the results. I guess we were wrong, or right depending on how you look at it.
We tried to collect our thinking and approach around doing a mobile only entry in this post from a few weeks ago.
Thanks to everyone who played!
Before the competition I posed the question, “What if our team submitted an mobile only game?”
Really, due to the long approval time for Apple apps, that meant, “What if our team makes an entry that only works on Android?”
Our concern was the tool-chain we use for everyday development which targets iOS/Android (and targets them well) may limit the number of players and therefore the number of reviews. We received mixed responses via LD comments, Reddit and Twitter to the question with almost as many saying “don’t bother” as people saying “I’d play it.”
In the end, we came up with list of three rules for what we wanted to see out of our Android entry:
A good reason to be mobile.
We decided early on, whether it was touch, tilt, camera, etc., our entry needed to be designed to be played on a mobile and not just a mobile version of a desktop idea. We chose a tilt to move, touch to jump platformer with a twist. You control two characters who are chained together and–depending how you have your device turned–you control whoever is on top and drag whoever is on bottom. Flip the device and the roles (and gravity) flip as well.
Easy to download and play
We posted the APK on our own server and posted it on the Google Play store, making sure that no permissions were needed to download and play. We also targeted Android 2.3.3 and limited the frame rate to 30fps. So, outside of needing hardware accelerated OpenGL, the system requirements remained very low. Th game played just fine on a $50 Samsung Reverb. Some respondents also mentioned adding a QR code to the google play link which we did in our main screenshot.
Show me… something
We pushed a YouTube video (which I’m currently re-building) the second we pushed the entry, in hopes that people who couldn’t play would see (and maybe share) our entry. After three days we have 75 views so we are seeing some traction there.
Results
I’d say we are pretty happy so far. We rated about 15 games a day, off and on and would get about 10 ratings a day. Comments are pretty positive, even from those who only watched the video. Friends and family drove our download numbers up, with about 40 total downloads as I’m writing this.
So if you have an Android device lying around, check us out.
About an hour into the brainstorming someone said…
So what if an angel and a devil were connected by a rope?
So, we took a shot at a mechanic that could only be achieved on mobile. Tilt side to side to move a player (who’s chained to another character from below) and flip the device to gain control of the other character (and flip the gravity in-world.) It sounds more complicated than it is, or maybe it doesn’t.
It feels a little more like a prototype than a full game, but it would be interesting to see how it plays out in a bigger universe. The team ended up being four folks and we worked in total about 25 hours each within the 72 hour window.
Good compo, thanks to all.
The team at Ponywolf is planning on rocking the jam AND I have a question.
How do people feel about an Android APK as the final submission. We’d love to use our dev tool of choice–CoronaSDK–but it builds to iOS (which is out of the question to post over a weekend with signing/approval) and to Android. The APK could be easily hosted and even posted to the Play store for free, but will folks give it a shot vs. an HTML or Windows download?
