Ludum Dare 26 - Minty Relaxation

I heard about Ludum Dare a long time ago when I was in high school, around the time Minecraft came out. I had always intended to participate, but I always found it difficult to, having little time and finding the site confusing.

With time running out last month to work on Tempus, I decided to buy myself more time to work on it by participating in Ludum Dare. I ended up teaming up with my friend Chris since we both wanted to check out Flixel. We both had heard great things about it and wanted to look into it.

We ultimately decided to make an infinite runner where you played as this glob that could get pieces of other things in the game (which we ended up calling "trash") stuck to it as it rolled on. Basically, it was like Katamari Damacy. As you got bigger, you got faster, but it was also harder for you to avoid the hazards on the map like spikes and bombs. We felt it fit with the minimalist theme of Ludum Dare since the game would require pressing only one button to jump and would be monochromatic. We found this game hilarious because the player would need to carefully manage their weight. If they even got a little too heavy and therefore too fast, they would lose quickly.

We started programming and found ActionScript to be difficult to work with for a lot of reasons that I can only half-remember now. Thankfully, Flixel, considered apart from the difficulties we had with ActionScript, was pretty awesome. Whenever we had an idea, it could be coded extremely quickly and be up and running in the game within minutes. Despite the ability to prototype rapidly, most of our time was spent learning Actionscript and Flixel. For the first 48 hours we spent our time implementing the mechanics for our original idea.

We kept developing our game, but it wasn't a lot of fun yet. In addition, the trash mechanic was proving to be a little difficult to implement and was a little buggy. I was spending some time just idly playing the game when I thought that maybe trying to hit the edges would be more fun. Then, someone who was with us that wasn't working with us suggested that we should make it so that the platforms would fall when you ground pounded them. Our game at that moment, Sunday evening, suddenly transformed from extremely boring to actually kind of fun. It was surprising how satisfying just ground pounding the platforms was and It started to become a lot easier to work on the game. We got excited again.

We ended up getting rid of the trash mechanic completely (I still feel bad about asking Chris to take out all of the trash code, since he spent a lot of time working on it), and spent the rest of the event making the gameplay more juicy. Almost everything we added at this point was to make the ground pounding feel more satisfying and the core game mechanic of hitting the edges more obvious. We added beams of light that would shoot up from the ground if you hit the edges, sound effects for scoring points and hitting the ground, and added scenery items that would get destroyed or shaken when the player ground pounded.

There's a reason why the game is named Minty Relaxation and I probably won't go into it because the idea behind it was never implemented. We do intend to implement it in the future should we develop this game further and finish it up for the web and mobile.

We finished in time and submitted our game to the site. We decided to use Chris' account to post the game, which you can see here, but I'm a little upset that Ludum Dare has poor support for games made by teams as I would like to have the game on my Ludum Dare profile as well. Anyway, go check out the game! It's a lot of fun. As of this blog post, my high score is 56. Can you beat it?