Ludum Dare #47 jam entry: Gravity Blade

So another year and another Ludum Dare!

I've been a part of Ludum Dare now for ten years -- my first jam was in 2010, Ludum Dare #17.  The theme was Islands and I made a simple game where you were a vengeful god, and you rained volcanic fire down upon the gods of other islands.  It was simple, not very fun, and quite unfinished.  Unbeknownst to me, this would remain my streak for almost all future entries in Ludum Dare!

I do other game jams besides LD, but I consider LD to be my "old faithful" that I return to at least once a year.  I might have spent a few years without finished submissions but I've usually at least tried to at least submit something, even if it was just a glorified tech demo.

So this brings me to Ludum Dare #47 -- Theme: Stuck in a loop.  I decided to team up with a friend of mine who also has professional gamedev experience and has entered a few jams of his own.  So we split the tasks as such:  He would work on the graphics and the design/layouts, and I would do the code and sound effects.

And so our entry Gravity Blade was born.  You can play it on Itch.io right now in your browser, or download the desktop version.  (Current, Windows only, though I intend to provide a Linux build when I can.)

Gravity Blade takes a lot of liberty with the theme.  My friend and I discussed various shooter based mechanics around "stuck in a loop" but we wanted to avoid the common tropes:  No actual loops (like circular levels) or time-travel bits.  Let's take the theme and incorporate it into the heart of the game itself;  Hence the ship, Gravity Blade.

The loop is in the ship itself:  As my friend explains in the introduction:

“Eliminate enemy forces who have forcibly mined away your planet’s energy crystals to use against you! Using Gravity Blade’s powerful Graviton Generator, fire particle beams, capture enemies and siphon their power using a Graviton Snare, and charge up energy to release captured enemies in a wide barrage of junk with the Graviton Launcher!"

The heart of the ship is a gravity generator, and you use your second fire to "suck" enemies into the generator.  This powers up your ship, but you can also choose to release the debris of the enemies in a powerful charge-attack.  This mechanic, we felt, was interesting in that it forced the player to balance caution against maximizing firepower.  Do you stick with a powered up main gun, or aggressively use your debris launcher and hope you can power up before you need it again?

We had a lot of ideas to explore this further, but as usual for me, we ran out of the time!  We were barely able to finish a fully complete game (with game over, lives, a boss, so on) before the deadline hit.  But neither of us were very upset by this:  I'm in the process of moving and my friend was on-call during the weekend.  So we felt we did our best and that the game is solid enough on its own.  It's shorter and less fleshed out than we desired but that's okay!  We had fun!

And to me, that's what game jams are about and it's why I keep entering them.  It's fun to make a new game, take a break from existing projects and try out something new.

Will we ever do anything more with Gravity Blade?  Who knows!   I'm still working on my main project (Legend of Kalevala) but my friend has shown interest in continuing with our game in the future.  And that's what so cool about jams:   Even if you end up with just a tech demo, you will have something you can build off of at a future time.

So I would like to thank PoV and the other organizers and volunteers for Ludum Dare for yet another successful, fun event.

I will likely be taking a break from entering jams for a while but I do hope to see others continue to do what we all love:  To make games.

I would also like to thank the tireless contributions of the Godot developers, as Gravity Blade wouldn't be possible without the Godot game engine.

Peace and love,