Play The Legend of Old Man after the jump.

Play using the arrow keys (you can also jump with X or the spacebar). Type when prompted, and please excuse the terrible dictionary – it’s the best I could do during the short competition.

Here is the game – you might need to click on it to give it focus.

See original entry page for voting and more details.

Also available: complete source to this project.

The Legend of Old Man was built in Flixel, using the FlashDevelop IDE. Photoshop and GraphicsGale provided drawing tools, and Tiled was the map editor. I used a short Ruby script (included in source) in order to help compile the word list. FL Studio was used for the “music”, and I used Audacity and Increpare’s lovely bfxr for the sound effects.

Audio: 8th place

Humor: 10th place

Everything else: wayyyyy out there!

This game was definitely not innovative. Innovation was not one of my goals this time around – mostly because of the theme (“Enemies as weapons”). Another excuse I have for not being innovative was my worry that I wouldn’t manage using the Unity platform, so I decided to keep it simple.

Similarly, I did not intend to put much into graphics, and the game looks appropriately. Nothing is animated, the textures are ill-fitting and simpleminded, and basically everything is a barely-modified box or sphere. (The audio, however, came out pretty much as I hoped.)

One of the goals for this competition was to make a fun, humorous game. I went for light-hearted sounds and flavor text, instead of the heavier, mysterious atmosphere from You are me now. The feedback tells me I succeeded in making it lighter and funnier.

However, the big lesson I learned here was that “funny” does not mean “fun”. Most responses to the game were positive when it came to their initial reaction, but the controls were so bad that nobody could actually bear playing it more than one or two rounds.

(See feedback on the entry page.)

And so we arrive at my weakest point of all: control schemes. All three of my attempts at the Ludum Dare competition have resulted in badly-controlled games. This is something I should work on before the next competition.

Thanks to everyone who played my game, I hope to make something better next time.

The theme of this competition was “Enemies as Weapons”.

The physics are quite wonky, but it is “broken in a good/funny way” as one commenter says. I like that, and yes, I feel it was broken properly.

Links to download on the official submission page.

Also notable were Yoni’s first ever LD entry, and Daniel’s second.

It is called “You are me now”. You may need to click on the game to give it focus before playing. Hopefully, all instructions are given in-game.

If you get stuck, you may need to backtrack a bit.

(original LD entry) | (source) | (post-competition auto-analysis)

(intro/extro music) | (island theme music)

Review by ZOMGIndie!

Download

Get the competition version here:

• Leaving Satisfactoria – exe and source.zip (10,142 KB – Windows .exe and full source)
  • alternative download
• Leaving Satisfactoria.zip (328 KB – full source, needs pygame [see below])

Background

I wanted to break the normal “exploration” mold, where the goal is to uncover every single square on a map. The following elements were under focus:

• A conscious decision to depart from a comfortable space (leaving home)
• The one-way journey, leading your exploration far from the comfort zone
• Accepting the danger before you

The actual “exploration” probably occurs after the end of the game. You will most likely have to play a few times before reaching all points on the field, this is by design.

Tools

The entire game was built with the Pygame Python-based engine. You can get that here. Graphics were done entirely in MSpaint. Sound effects courtesy of sfxr.