Heey I’m Andrew Tollett, 18 years old, and this is the first time I’m participating in the game jam. I know a decent amount about alot of different languages as opposed to alot about one. for the competition, I’ll be using game maker studio. I mostly program and do very little art and sound, so that part is going to be a bit of an adventure for me, but I’ sure I’ll have fun regardless! Good luck everyone
Tags: GameMaker Studio
I felt the need to make this post because of a particular theme that made it to final voting which makes me want to strangle 2 puppies simultaneously. “Lose abilities as you progress” This is literally the exact opposite of what makes intuitive sense from a game design standpoint. by giving your player abilities over time, it gives them a feeling of growth, allows you to explain and explore each skill individually, and lets you make the level design progressively more intricate, especially with movement based abilities.
Taking away abilities as you progress means having a bunch of complicated abilities you don’t really understand how to use at the beginning of the game. There’s 2 ways this could go in terms of level design. Early levels are way too complex and then towards the end you feel like you’re putting the square peg in the square hole and that’s the entire game, or you have the same levels throughout where people could complete the earliest levels without using ANY of the abilities. It just doesn’t work well.
While alot of the themes are really cool, a few of them stand out as just plain annoying. along with “lose abilities as you progress”, “build your weapon” seems overly complex, like something you’d do in call of duty, not over the span of 48 hours (the only way i see that going well is making a bubble tanks clone, which kind of ruins the point of the compo). and “Nonviolent combat” following the explosive success of undertale, i don’t see where anyone else could go with this.
In terms of themes I liked, “One massive enemy”, “Break it” “Journey into the unknown” “Death is not the end” are all good themes in my opinion because they leave so much open for you to decide and play around with. It’s a starting point and not a massive annoying wall you have to work around, which is just the way it should be
How Dangerous
I went with ‘Z’ and the space bar for my two buttons.
Space makes you go up, gravity makes you go down. Z makes you shoot. It’s a pretty nifty.
The game itself is a bullet hell shooter, in the style of the ridiculous danmaku games.
If the video isn’t loading you got here a tad early.
Sneak peak to the first boss fight. Still have to tweak some values so it’s actually BEATABLE but here we go.
math nerds unite
Just doing runs to find bugs
Here’s a shot of what the title screen looks like
this is what I’ve got right now. have to include the win condition, make a title screen, sound, then pump out as many levels as I can
oh yeah baby shift… those… shapes.
I really stretched here but when i came up with this I just had to do it
but I finished on time. you should totally Check out the finished product because I’m quite happy with it
Check out my game! click the image!
With LD35 wrapping up I’ve noticed that amidst all the praise in the comments about my game, very few contain any actual criticism! I know it’s a dumb complaint to have, but it would be great to hear about some more stuff that I can improve for the post mortem version. getting access to a large number of playtesters doesn’t come often and I’m just trying to take advantage of it.
Don’t think it as in, you have many mechanics, then it dissapear overtime. For example, someone got lost kn the woods, overtime he gets weaker. But the mechanics increase as he try to figure out how to survive.