Last weekend, Michael and I participated in Ludum Dare 35! Ludum Dare is a themed game jam that occurs 3 times a year. We had 72 hours to create a game with the theme of “shapeshift.”
The theme for Ludum Dare 35 is Shapeshift. #LDJAMpic.twitter.com/R6uT8yKxTP
— Ludum Dare (@ludumdare) April 16, 2016
Ice Wizard
We tossed around several ideas and eventually settled on the game, Ice Wizard.
The trees at the frozen lake are becoming plant demons. Don thine ice skates and turneth those evil folk back into trees!
In Ice Wizard, players control a wizard on ice skates gliding across the frozen lake while dodging the bites of the plant demons. The player wins the game once all of the plant demons have been transformed back into trees. The player loses the game if a plant demon touches the wizard.
Ice Wizard
The game is challenging, but victory is achievable. Play it here!
Known Issues
- I think the hit box on the wizard should be reduced in size.
Built With
- We used the Phaser game framework to build our application. This was our first time using Phaser, and we are very impressed with framework.
- We used Bootstrap 3 for some basic layout
- I created the wizard sprite in Gimp.
- The music, sound effects and other sprites all came from Open Game Art.
- Background Music: http://opengameart.org/content/happy-arcade-tune
- Spell Sound: http://opengameart.org/content/spell-1
- Icicle Spell: http://opengameart.org/content/icicle-spell
- Freeze Spell hitting Monster: http://opengameart.org/content/crash-collision
- Demon Flower: http://opengameart.org/content/demon-flower-monster-sprite-sheet
- Winter Sprite sheet: http://opengameart.org/content/2d-lost-garden-zelda-style-tiles-winter-theme-with-additions
- Ice Lake: http://opengameart.org/node/10620
- Explosion Spritesheet: http://opengameart.org/content/explosion-sheet
- Explosion Soundeffect: http://opengameart.org/content/wgs-sound-fx-explosion-1
- Victory music: http://opengameart.org/content/level-up-sound-effects
- The frozen background is an image from Unsplash
You can view the source code for our game on GitHub.
Lessons Learned
Michael and I had fun participating in Ludum Dare and we look forward to Ludum Dare 36! We made a few mistakes we hope to avoid in Ludum Dare 36. Here are 2 lessons learned from Ludum Dare 35:
1. Participate in the warm-up weekend
Most of the time spent developing Ice Wizard was on, “how do I do [insert something here] in Phaser?” We should have spent the weekend before getting familiar with the framework.
2. Know how to create a sprite
I spent a portion of the competition studying how to create original sprites for games. Next Ludum Dare, I hope to increase my skill level so we have more flexibility for our game art.
