(That we know of!) We've seen people make it to level 5, and a death on the final boss... can you beat it and make it to New Game+ for the extra characters?! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/derps-n-dergs-one-shot-to-save-the-world
You can now play Derps N Dergs in HTML5. Sorry for the hassle! (Also turn down your volume, it's loud. Sorry.)
https://misaravensoul.itch.io/derpsndergs
Game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/derps-n-dergs-one-shot-to-save-the-world
In Twin Tails Jetpack, you play as our Twin-Tailed Heroine as she tries to navigate her way all the way to, and through, the Sadistic Music Factory!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/twin-tails-jetpack
Miku's Minion Madness is now live! Take the role of Hastune Miku and fight the forces of evil in this laned round-based minion fighter! Become a powerful summoner and defeat all enemies to take down their base, but be careful! The forces of darkness are coming for your base, too!
Check it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/$396587/
In Miku's Minion Madness, playable at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/$396587/, you can summon a lot of adorable creatures in your quest to defeat the forces of darkness! Behold, Mipaca, the fire-breathing purple alpaca!
So powerful that using her card only summons a single unit (*for just 3 Miku Points!), this slow-moving unit will mow down her foes with her area effect fire breath attack! Support her with faster melee units or bigger tanky units, and watch her destroy the enemy ranks!
In this Creature Spotlight for Miku’s Minion Madness, we gaze upon the majesty that is Hamttek. For 4 Miku Points, playing a Hamttek card summons two hulking tank units, with a whopping 30 health!
Hamttek is an excellent support unit for your other summoned creatures, such as Mipaka!
Play Miku's Minion Madness and leave a comment and review! We'll go play your game, too!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/$396587/,
Spotlighting Eon, the mystical birb unit! Costing 3 Miku Points, you can summon an army of Eons! Lightning fast and able to lead enemies away from your base and other units, the Eons will guide your minions to victory!
Play Miku's Minion Madness here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness
Leave a comment that you played and we'll come play and rate your game, too!
The ultimate powerhouse of Miku's Minion Madness, the Miku Automaton, costing a whopping 10 Miku Points, tears up the battlefield with 39 Health and Attack!
Save up for her, because once she's on the map, all enemies will tremble!
Play Miku's Minion Madness (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness) and leave a review! We'll review yours, too!
Woecat is both one of the fastest units in Miku's Minion Madness and he's the highest single target damage per Miku Point spent!
Utilize his speed to catch up to your tankier units, and watch him slay enemy boss units with ease!
Play Miku's Minion Madness here - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness - leave a comment and a review, and we'll come play yours, too!
Agent Lemon, for the cost of 5 Miku Points, appears on the battlefield solo - and mercs enemies with his high damage ranged attack. Send him behind Hamttek, and behold how cool he is!
Agent Lemon was one of our first creatures drawn, and went through some of the most iteration as we honed in our card art. Some minions are based off of our team, and this one is poco - our engineer.
Play Here! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness
Geescht is a tough one to spotlight, but we're going to do them all! Geescht is our ghost, and was supposed to have special behavior, where it would phase past other enemies, making it have a different strategy involved. Unfortunately, we were unable to get that mechanic in place by the end of the jam, so Geescht ended up being a bit weaker than we would have liked.
Play Miku's Minion Madness here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness
Gnarp, the simple fae... or is she? For just 1 Miku Point, you can summon an army of Gnarps - low health and low damage, but they provide a horde to distract your foes!
Play here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness
Based off of the ultimate meme, Tako-Luka, Tako is a cheap blog unit that comes in a small pack! Useful for both swarming enemies on the attack or providing a distraction for more powerful units like Mipaca or Agent Lemon, and cheap enough to be played in a pinch!
Tako is one of the first cards drawn by our artist, Miku, and went through a decent amount of style iteration before we landed on her final form.
Play here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness
This is our last individual creature spotlight, and I have to be honest, I was saving the best for last! Each minion is based off of a VOCALOID, one of our team members, or a close friend. This one is actually our dog!
Sir Paws can defend or attack - he's a low cost unit that summons a pack of attack hounds! He has pretty high speed as well, so he's a solid all-arounder.
Play Miku's Minion Madness here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness
Also, dog tax:
Hello! I'm Misa, from https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness and I've been making games professionally since 2008. I've worked for Sony, Wizards of the Coast, and Cryptic Studios.
I'm going to be live on Twitch for a bit and I'm happy to stream your game! Pop on and let me know if you have a game you'd like me to play!
https://www.twitch.tv/misaravensoul
Hi, Misa here, one of the developers on Miku's Minion Madness (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness), and I wanted to talk about the making of the game! This one will be a bit long, so we'll split it into multiple posts. This one is the Before the Jam edition.
2 Days Before the Jam
@poco0317 and my fiancée @miku had decided months before this point that we would participate, but with the looming weekend, no ideas, and all of us facing general exhaustion, we were just going to see where it would go. Maybe we’d get a shell of a project out, or maybe we would just be one of the unfinished entries. We were ready to face any possibility. We had also recruited our friend @jason-woerner, who like myself and @miku, has extensive experience in the gaming industry. After thinking about it, Miku decided we simply couldn’t waste the talents of this team!
It only took a moment for our team lead to go from "Should we do this?" to "We should do this!" Miku took point and in 30 minutes, wrote up a card rogue-like adventure. We decided to head into the weekend with this general plan, but otherwise we had no specific ideas until the theme would be revealed.
1 Day Before the Jam
We were all feeling a bit of anxiety the day before - we had a solid base idea, although it was a pretty large scope, if we included everything we'd like to achieve. We decided to downscale it further after the theme came out. We knew we wanted some elements of playing cards, inspired by Slay the Spire and games of that genre. We were constantly chatting - the jam was soon, but we had no idea how the project would go.
Miku reached out to @emiri, our producer friend (check him out here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1f-lKIatUwQBLzHuf98s0g) and asked:
Miku sent him the proposal and showed him the rules of Ludum Dare. He was in, and even though we didn’t know anything else at the time, we knew that the music would be a banger. Miku spent some extra time researching previous game jam entries that were card games, to make sure we were all on the same page as to what made people want to play these games to completion.
When the countdown timer hit 0, our team excitedly hit refresh, only to be met with a syntaxerror. Oops! Refreshing again, we finally found that it was the Tiny Creatures theme. With so many thoughts racing through our minds, we started our meeting about 15 minutes past the theme reveal. We were ready to discuss how we would interpret this theme. The game has only just begun.
The Meeting
After exchanging the usual pleasantries, we headed right into it with a Discord Whiteboard. Although the controls weren’t perfect, we found a way to make it work. We simply needed a place to quickly write down ideas and iterate. We began discussing how our game proposal would work into this, how to interpret the tiny creatures, further ideas, and most importantly: how do we down scope our game so it would be completable in a weekend?
An important reminder to designers everywhere: It’s fun to design in a vacuum, but the most important part of this process was to design with the capabilities of our team. None of our designs, even if it was the most elegant, would mean anything if it wasn’t going to get implemented. After an hour of discussion, refining and cutting ideas, we ended up with four buckets to organize our ideas: - Confirmed Ideas – These ideas are priority #1 on implementation - Stretch – We will get to these ideas if we have enough time after the jam - Idea Pool – Extra ideas that we could add or not add. - Rejected – We simply did not pursue these ideas further.
Discord’s Whiteboard feature was helpful in allowing us to move ideas around, as well as providing some sketching tools so that we could have a bare bones idea of what the game would eventually look like. Using the feature to move ideas around, we were able to tighten the list of what we must do. We got an estimation from our engineer as to when each feature would be complete, and we started to march towards our goal.
We knew we wanted to make an accessible game, playable on mobile and browser, so with that in mind, we got ready for the first 24 hours!
Part 1 located here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness/$406164
Misa here again, from Miku's Minion Madness (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness) with another behind the scenes dev blog!
The First 24 Hours
Our engineer @poco0317 would be the one to start the major implementation. His goal was to get the base game up and running by the end of the night.
For @miku, she opted to contribute with the art. When we homed in on the idea that this would be a game that has a big focus on the cards, she felt eager to take on this challenge. Even though she is professional a game designer by trade, she also had just gone off a fresh streak of drawing Hatsune Miku every day for a year. Drawing little creatures like this shouldn’t be hard! Or so she thought…
She honestly had some difficulty with the initial iteration of the cards - we had no idea what size it should be, nor what the creatures should be based off to make them tiny. Should we think of these cards as basic playing cards, or something more elegant like the cards of Magic: the Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh?
We simply needed to move forward, and as our engineer shared the first draft of the battlefield, Miku shared with us the first draft of our most basic minion.
If you’ve ever been a fan of VOCALOID, this drawing was based off the derivative of Megurine Luka known as Tako Luka. Long story short, the tiny creatures theme made us think of mascots! This would also be our first placeholder card. Miku made sure to keep in mind that this is a card game, so we need a lot of cards, so all the cards must be relatively simple while also being visibly distinct in the UI.
And that's what gave birth to Miku doodling us all as mascots, starting with poco's t-posing Agent Lemon, and then my Mipaka.
We knew we wanted to make the game work on mobile, but did we want to go portrait, or landscape? We opted to go portrait, and @jason-woerner would start to work on some effects in the engine so that we could have an indicator of when units would attack.
Eventually, we were able to get the UI in a state that looked like it made sense. We took major inspiration from games like Clash Royale for how we would place our cards and UI elements. Our base UI used a lot of Godot progress meters, but we knew we wanted more diegetic UI, so those would just be placeholders for the prototype. Although our final implementation of it for the jam was not perfect, we wanted to make it feel more organic when you play the game.
We started to consider how the UI would display information to players, thinking about three specific elements: attack, health, and speed. These elements were used to inspire some of the mascot art, as well. At the same time, poco was working on optimizing the game code so it could support a lot of entities at once. Behold, the Miku Army!
Our game was finally coming together, but we needed more cards. Miku was hard at work, mocking up art for the rest of the cards, based on folks working with us on a Miku RPG and the rest of our dev team.
We were cookin' with gas, but... we were also all exhausted, so it was time to turn in. You'll have to come check back later for the next Behind the Scenes!
Part 1 located here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness/$406164
Part 2 located here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness/behind-the-scenes-of-mikus-minion-madness-the-first-24-hours
Guess who's back with a brand new invention? Or rather, a devlog! Misa again from Miku’s Minion Madness (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness) to talk about...
The Second Day
After reviewing the creatures with @miku, who at that point had gotten the flow of creature creation, we realized we needed a bigger card size to really display the creatures. I did some research, and we investigated phone resolutions, and opted for a 720x1280 resolution, or a 9:16 aspect ratio that's common on most modern smartphones - certainly, most people who play games would have a phone with a similar aspect ratio to that, right?
The creatures also were able to start attacking each other at this point, along with early versions of @jason-woerner’s and animation FX. While we were all worried about scope creep, our project was creeping forward with the working title of “Mini Mascot Madness”. Our working features were: - Cards can spawn a creature on the field with stats like flavor details, health, attack, and speed. (we plan to display this information more prominently in a post jam build.) - Cards are displayed in the 5 slots. - Creatures can attack other creatures, comparing statistics. - Creatures can move forwards objectives and attack them. - Each side has its own health pool.
We needed some more depth in our current implementation, and this is when we started thinking about how we would manage the player’s resources. There were multiple different methods being tossed around, and we didn’t really settle on anything in specific at this time as @miku continued to work on getting the UI in a better state.
With 7 sketches cooking and 5 colored to an acceptable level, we added some further elements on the field to represent the player and enemy’s health.
During this time, engineering and design were working together to figure out more details like: how will enemies spawn? How will we define enemies and enemy waves? How will the creatures attack each other? We also have some bugs at this point where the creatures would simply ignore each other and march forward onto the objective and problems with certain types of AoE attacks. We decided at that point to complete the game in the jam limit, we’ll just need to worry about the AoEs in a later iteration.
At this point, we needed to refine our design and determine what this game would eventually become. We needed: - The title screen - Distinct Game rounds - Enemy and wave definitions
Along with a small list of stretch goals, we continued working. One of the biggest challenges we had with this interface was to provide the proper display space for the game. This involved juxtaposing hand drawn card art with tiny little pixel dots. We could have considered increasing the fidelity of the creatures at this point, but we opted for a simpler style due for the sake of time, as well as representing the tiny creatures theme a bit more prominently.
How the heck were we going to tie these two jarring opposing elements together well? Find out next time on Dragonb.. I mean, Miku's Minion Madness Behind the Scenes!
I still have another devlog to post, but we noticed today we're nearly at 100 ratings, and we just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has been playing, leaving comments, and rating our game.
The first game jam we did, we barely got a game out, it was black and white, and it barely had any substance beyond the story. I was the engineer for that one and I am... well, not an engineer! @miku did the design, and @kooh did the art. We barely made the 20 ratings, but we did it. That game was called Derps & Dergs.
Then we did Twintails Jetpack, for the Unstable Ludum-Dare. @miku and I worked with some friends, and managed to get 39 ratings (a perfect Miku number, but not a perfect Game Jam number.) We actually continued that game and made Twintails Jetpack 2, which was a ton of fun to work on.
But this time! Oh my god! We're nearly at 100? We're so happy you all have been playing our game! @miku drew this to share with everyone.
Part 1: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness/$406164
Part 2: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness/behind-the-scenes-of-mikus-minion-madness-the-first-24-hours
Part 3: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness/behind-the-scenes-of-mikus-minion-madness-the-second-day
Misa here, back with the final development blog (maybe we'll do one more for the judging phase...) for Miku's Minion Madness (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness) to discuss...
* The Final Countdown *
The last day! In a perfect environment, we would’ve had a lot more concepted. But for a weekend environment, one of Godot’s biggest strengths is being able to sketch out your interface in real time using its various drawing features.
We had a dwindling time and quite a few things to complete!
@miku focused on the art and UI, she needed to complete a title illustration as well as dressing up the general UI so that it’s decent enough to convey the purpose of the game. She also had some additional feedback from our industry friends regarding the UI, and that was helpful in making sure that all the elements look unified.
@poco continued to work on the features that we would need to have for a fully playable game. We created a method to spawn creatures and advance through rounds, completing after 3 rounds. We also wanted to make sure that different creatures could use different types of attacks, although due to some bugs we had on the back end, we had to abandon ranged creature AoEs.
In a later iteration, we plan to enable more of these capabilities on different creatures, as well as convey more information about the creatures.
@jason-woerner took lead on balancing the creatures with the wave spawning system that we had made, and balanced how players would advance through the three rounds we would have for the demo.
@emiri started to work on the music and sound effects in the last 24 hours as everything was taking shape. Our thought on the UI was that we would make it look somewhat arcade like, which inspired the whimsical track that you hear when you play the game.
With all these things going, all these elements would need to be blended into the game that we would submit to Ludum Dare 56.
As avid Hatsune Miku fans, we've always enjoyed making fan projects that feature her. Hatsune Miku is a character created by Crypton Future Media, a company based out of Sapporo that works with voice synthesizers. Hatsune Miku is a unique character in the sense that she is molded by the community that creates with her. She's a perfect fusion of creativity and technology, and so bit like elements and Hatsune Miku mix together naturally.
With this, our creative vision fell together as Miku summoning pixels to fight against an unknown force. In later iterations, the portraits of the mysterious character that you fight will perhaps show different characters that Miku would be competing against.
The UI was still under heavy consideration, but we knew now what was needed to support it now. We moved the heart elements, made the cards look more card-like, made the colors more Miku-like, added some surrounding textures, added more information to them, and added supporting illustrations for each side. Using Godot’s various Rect Nodes, and taking some feedback from early testers, we finally had a version of the game close to what you see currently live.
With all our elements set up, we needed to polish up the game’s look and feel. As Jason put in some time to do last minute iteration, we continued to refine the UI by adding more elements on the screen to make each section pop out. As we were running very low on time, some of the last art touches in the game were extremely last minute (such as the specific look of the cards as well as how the health and attack portions worked on the card.)
We’d also play the game a lot during this time and sent it out to our friends to test out the balance of the game. Our main goal was to make sure that anyone playing the game could make it through the experience. An hour before the jam, we also needed a logo that would look nice for the title screen and captivate attention.
Although @miku would make the mock title first, we were able to recruit @kooh to help come up with the final title. The concept would be that it would be Miku’s Minion Madness, with the minion text being at a smaller size to showcase that we’re a game with tiny creatures!
The time was approaching quickly, and although we would’ve liked to put a lot more customization into fonts and how various UI elements would display, we simply needed to get a version that was good enough to upload. We tested it several times on our PCs and a few times on our phones, and before we knew it, it was time for our submission pages. We quickly worked on fixing final bugs, which involved some AI acting aberrant and modifying a few UI elements to make it look much better, but then it was onto the judging period.
We hope you enjoyed reading our devlogs as much as we enjoyed working on the game and writing them.
Also, remember.... If you want to follow @miku on socials, then just always be miku.miku.ing!
