A job that is debatably well done

Well I didn’t think I could pull it off this time with how busy I’ve been lately, but I managed to make a Ludum Dare game for the jam. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s a really hard and fast-paced hack ‘n’ slash called Reaper, where you fight creepers that can replicate similar copies of themselves, and drop health and power-ups.

Its release was down to the wire, with less than an hour before the deadline before I submitted it. And it was a rough start. Creepers were so buggy, they wouldn’t even replicate themselves at all like they were supposed to. I had also just grabbed the code for displaying score from another game, but I forgot to code pretty much everything else for it. And a lot of power-ups weren’t working correctly or at all.

Version 1.0.2 fixes all the major bugs I could find. Also, since 1.0.2, your high score is saved after a game over, but it’s not displayed anywhere so I still need to add that. I had just run out of time and couldn’t get to it.

Honestly, though, I really like this game. It was the perfect chance for me to put together some vague ideas that have been bouncing around my brain for years, and it’s also just really fun for me. It’s ridiculously hard. I really don’t try to make super hard games all the time, it just kinda happens. It was even harder at first because the player’s invincibility frames didn’t work, and I had to fix that. If anybody wants an easy mode, I could make one.

This was also a chance for me to make a remix of a theme that I’ve been wanting to develop further. Way back when I made Spaceblast, I wrote a song called Robot Alien Invasion, and it was one of those songs that was accidentally actually pretty good. It’s perfect for Reaper’s theme, but it only had one verse, just repeating itself throughout the song, and while I think that does work for it, it still wasn’t a complete song. I’m amazed that I managed to make what I feel is a big improvement in just a weekend.

Other than displaying high scores, Reaper is pretty much done. Now with Pixel Day less than two weeks away, I better get cracking on my next game because I just can’t help myself. This idea is just too good.