With sound: https://streamable.com/gz2sgo

I struggled a bit this Ludum Dare.

At first everything went well, I had the chore mechanic of jumping on notes to play music done within the first half day of the jam. Tying it to Beethoven as the game's character was also rather quick. But then I hit a roadblock on what the actual game play should be.

The prototype was a side scroller, but initially I had an infinite jumper in mind. So I switched to that but could not quite make the endless jumping work. As the character dropped, notes that spawned after the initial batch were too far apart form the character to ever get back up. I kept trying to make this work until shortly before the compo deadline. Defeated and exhausted I went to bed.

Five hours later after waking up, I decided to switch it back to being a sidescroller. I started by researching about Beethoven a bit, what compositions he made when, what his life was like, his struggles etc. Then after I had that I started transcribing three of his songs into text files, carefully watching simple versions of the songs on youtube. And thus Road to Joy was born.

The game is a bit rough around the edges, it lacks proper world graphics and some parts are horribly hard tuned. The movement mechanic can be quite awkward and difficult but very satisfying once learned. Playing Beethoven while jumping on platforms feels amazing to me.

I'm really happy with how it went, I just wish I had abandoned the infinite jumper earlier. If I had spent all of Sunday and the early hours of Monday on this, I think it would be a lot nicer looking.