This was my very first LD entry ever!

It was written with python + pygame. I don’t have my original compo submission version handy, these screenshots are from the slightly polished version of the game that I have available on my website. Since “Anti-Text” was one of the themes, there wasn’t a title on the title screen, nor was there the status bar on the bottom of the screen when playing the game. The final version has the same original 3 levels as the compo submission though.

All in all, I’m quite happy with the result. It’s a nice simple game that allowed me to show off some of my ‘graphics-making’ abilities. I spent the majority of my game development time doing the graphics. The first level in particular took a very long time because I digitally painted it using my wacom tablet (see the second screenshot above). Phew!

You can download the game (both win32 and python source available) and find a bit more information here:

http://fydo.net/projects/buggygame

My entry for Ludum Dare 8.5. LD 8.5 wasn’t a 48 hour compo, we only got 24 hours to make the game in, but the start time was flexible so you could choose the 24 hours of the weekend the compo was held that was best for you. I managed to use exactly 24 hours on my entry =)

Themes were Moon (actually “But even if you doubt their overwhelming findings, the Moon will never be the same to you again. Never will you raise your eyes to look at her without wondering: IS IT OR ISN’T IT AN ALIEN SPACESHIP WORLD?”, but everyone interpreted it as just “Moon”) and Anti-Textmode, no text at all in the game.

The story, which you have to guess at since there’s no text (and the readme is rather sparse), goes: You’re a rabbit, minding your own business on the moon, when one day a butterfly comes flying from somewhere. It flies straight into a crater, which happens to lead to a huge system of caves beneath the surface. Curious rabbit as you are, you follow it, and so the game begins.

When I started making this I actually intended to make one of those bullet hell shooter games, but for some reason the game evolved into this cave-flying exploration game in stead. Or, well, calling it an exploration game might be a bit of a stretch since there’s only 5 rooms in the game, not counting the exit room (which is a very quick drawing of what’s supposed to be me in my bed, getting a good night’s sleep after 24 hours straight spent coding and drawing), but it would have been if I had spent less time fooling around with the code. For such an art-heavy game you’d think most of the time was spent drawing things (all the rooms are just bitmaps, there’s no tiles), but I actually spent most of the time on code. So, the art didn’t take much time, which kinda surprised me, though of course everything being lores greyscale had something to do with that, and I did rush it a bit too. Anyway, doing the art was a lot of fun.

So anyway, you fly around in this cave system, collecting flashing ring things to open gates while avoiding monsters and projectiles and such. It’s a shame the game is so extremely short, because I really like it and think it could be a good game with some more work. Maybe I’ll get back to it sometime =)

Download: [ Windows | Linux/source code ]

Random Dungeon Exploration is the result of trying to push the Random theme as far as possible. It got random levels, random enemies, random quests (well, a little bit random!), random items, random player names, and random events. I guess it could have been even more random, but time was a limiting factor.

As for the actual gameplay, it’s fairly simple step based dungeon crawling. And a ‘town’ screen where you can shop and select dungeons. It felt pretty solid, but there were a lot of balancing issues that you’d notice once you reached some higher levels.

The game was well received, placing second in the ‘Fun’ and ‘Production’ categories, and also getting the ‘Best In Show’ UBER prize.

You can get the slightly improved post compo version, or the compo version. Both are for Windows and OpenGL.