First look at shooting. Restricted aim on a horizontal axis to make level design later much easier with the restriction.
Shooting now reduces the size of your light.
Ludum Dare 46 was on the weekend of April 17th to April 20th, 2020. I decided to take part because honestly why not there is absolutely nothing going on right now.
So on Friday, it started the beginning of a couple of long days.
The themed was revealed at 9 PM Friday “Keep it alive”. It didn’t take long to figure out what I wanted to make. I have had the idea in the back of my head for a very long time about a game where everything you do drains your light source. Then there would be cheeky ways to recover it.
Megaman 2 wasn’t a game I grew up with (Megaman X was) but after playing it there is a beauty to it. How elegantly simple it is. It has always inspired me to make a jump n shoot game.
So I just took Megaman 2 and this light mechanic idea and smudged them together, good enough.
A demonstration showing a prototype enemy.
Shooting enemies is a good way to stay healthy. Especially if everything you do walking/jumping/shooting drains your health.
First pass on visuals. It looks a little bit to much like a game I previously made (PUMP).
Tossed in some art to see how it looked
Zoomed in the camera and added some JUICE (Screen shake and freeze frames). Decided to go with this square resolution of 320x320. I liked the retro feel of it and thought maybe some interesting level designs could come from it.
3 enemies types should be enough for some levels. A patrol, crawler and bouncer.
This looked much better for the time being.
There was a lot of communication challenges in this game. This was one of my solutions to show how you’re absorbing enemies’ energy. I thought it looked cool too :)!
Connor made some SFX and we plugged them in. We added an effect that changed the pitched according to how much light you have. It made for a pretty sweet effect.
The games name was going to be “SNUFF” but… After Connor so pleasantly informed me what else that word is used for… Yeah snuff was a bad name. Candles melt. So the new name is MELT.
An actual title screen. THAT HAS A NARRATIVE. I was really proud of how this looked even though I just scribbled it in.
with infinite health
with health
I'm glad there was another day to this jam. Truthfully if there wasn't the game would've had a major flaw in its design.
I had changed the enemies so that they had infinite health. I thought this was a good idea because then the player would always have a resource of health and it would have helped the player get stuck less often.
Essentially I was just trying to make the game easier.
This kind of defeated the whole purpose of the game.
The meaningful choice of the game was to know when to shoot, and when not to shoot (as shooting is this give and take. Shoot for a 1/3 of your health. Receive 2/3's back )
You should not shoot if you're at full health.
You should shoot if you're low health.
Enemies with infinite health, you will shoot them no matter what, as it doesn't matter. This will just keep your health full the entire time.
The game needs this kind of back and forth relationship. The stress of running low on health, then the relief of gaining it all back.
plus enemies dying feel nice.
3 days later and here it is, MELT.
A game about a candle bringing light in a world of darkness.
I’m quite proud of this project and I am also thankful for twitter. I had posted gifs along the way and it seemed that people were pretty interested in the project. The way people were responding to the game helped me an incredible amount to stay motivated and try my hardest to make something great.
Huge shout out to Connor Grail. The fricken audio turned out so sweet. https://twitter.com/ConnorGrail
Thank you for reading, thank you for your support, have fun.
-Matt
https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/753071 <- Play it here