Splendid Adventures on a Sunday Afternoon
The theme of Ludum Dare 41 was “Combine two incompatible genres”. I absolutely loved this theme, and we had a lot of fun brainstorming! Together with larkinia, Mai, rohieb, and Winnie, we set out to make a crossover between a platformer, a text adventure, and a children’s book. Graphics, music, and code was created by us in 72 hours.
You play the web version on the Ludum Dare website.
Development
We used SVG as a level format. This was an awesome idea, because it gives you a lot of expressiveness, and a convenient editing environment with layers, locking, unlimited data attributes. The browser also does the rendering for us, and everything scales nicely.
It was also a horrible idea, because elements can be arbitrarily nested, with transformations stacked on top of each other, and path objects don’t have a coordinate at all. We ended up using getBoundingClientRect() to fetch object positions from the browser. Then, we remember the original object positions, wrap each of them in an SVG group with a specific translation, and update that translation from the physics engine. Took us a day to get it right, but I’m happy how it turned out! :)
Recordings
Jupi covered the game in her ongoing mission to play ALL THE indie games:
Joshua did a long playthrough with fun commentary!
Randomise User also tried the game, after the ratings were out! “You decide… to DIE!”
And Coconut Mouse played it without commentary:
Comments
What a way to do the theme! I would have never thought on doing this! Kudos to you guys! Beautiful pictures, the atmosphere and the multiple routes really make it feel like a complete game. I now really want to see more of these types of games in the future! –SaberOfSong
So for the entire game, I played with a childlike smile on my face. –legavroche
Really nice, very soothing. I was hooked and tried all the pathes. I had a very good time, thank you :). –Kevar
Results
To our astonishment, we made the 2nd place in the Overall category, and 3rd place in Fun and Mood! I still can’t believe it. 2nd place is damn close to 1st place! :O
Comments?
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