The theme of the latest Ludum Dare challenge was ‘escape’ - a little pedestrian given some of the previous competitions. With only 48 hours in which to make a game, ‘escape’ still worked its strange magic, though, and there were some fascinating – and often extremely polished – entries. Let’s take a look at a few of them.
Glissaria
Lee Miller
Lee Miller’s entry is a clever blend of RPG, tower defence and gem-matching game. The idea is to scour the puzzly resource screen, playing a five-stone version of Bejeweled, in order to load up on lumber and other kinds of material and treasure to be employed when you fight off waves of invaders on the game’s map screen. There are a smart range of turrets, and they all have sockets allowing you to add gemstones that change their behaviours. Better yet, you can set each weapon’s priority when it comes to targeting, and even deck out a little hero unit who will roam around the battlefield smacking foes and levelling up.
The version I’ve linked to isn’t actually the bare-bones competition entry, incidentally, but Glissaria 2.0, which Miller’s been tinkering with over the past few weeks. Not entirely fair of me, perhaps, but it has a much better tutorial.
Bomber Planet
Adam Saltsman
Adam “Atomic” Saltsman offers a rather downbeat sci-fi take on the first Legend Of Zelda adventure with this lonely and lovely maze exploration game. There are bombs to plant and a character to gently level-up as you wander around a barren planet looking for the spacepad to take you home, and while the Zelda DNA is very obvious throughout, some interesting changes have been made along the way. The biggest one is that the game’s screens don’t reset after you leave, meaning monsters can roam from one area to the next, and you can hear your bombs going off in the distance if you plant one and run away. Saltsman created the Flixel framework that powered Bomber Planet, incidentally, so it’s little surprise that he knows what he’s doing with it. That said, it’s still astonishing that a game with this much self-assurance was made in 48 hours.
Maze Escape
Artem Gurevich
Another maze but a completely different feeling, with Artem Gurevich’s Ludlum Dare debut. This is a maze game with a time limit, in essence, as you race to the exit while pursued by a scarlet thread of lava. The controls can be a little unforgiving on corners, but the end result, for all its abstractness, is a real survival horror - and the stark presentation is quietly stylish.
Escaparrazi
Felipe Budinich
In the same month Madonna shows off a feature film that she made just to show us proles how tiring it can be if you’re rich and famous, we also get Escaparazzi, a hilariously weird Snake variant in which your jelly-baby sleb has to evade a growing crowd of photographers while they collect money for a cab. A visual and aural treat, it’s also a pleasantly challenging arcade experience. Maybe Budinich can get an endorsement from the Material Girl herself.