Underforest

An unfinished game for LD34. The music and tileset weren't made by me:

• The DawnLike tileset is by DragonDePlatino
• The music comes from Purple Planet

WASD to move, Arrows to shoot. Not balanced, not even finishable. But have fun blasting plants and collecting treasure.

Development Notes:

This was made during the 72 hour 'jam' event for Ludum Dare 34, but probably made in about 30 hours or so of actual development time. I started with a completely different idea but ended up not being able to start the jam until 24 hours in, so I had to downsize. From there I thought I'd just make something straightforward - reasonably simple mechanics. I liked the idea of a plant growing through a dungeon, so you'd open a door and plant tendrils would burst out of it, and you'd have to deal with that.

I never even got to implement doors :)

So as it stands there's a lot less here than I wanted. I'd have liked to be able to balance this with wands that need time to cool down, character based abilities like AOE stomps, freezes, invulnerability dashes, and things like that. The trees which grow were meant to act a bit like towers, and shoot back at you. There were also meant to be monsters roaming around. Collecting gems was meant to allow you to upgrade your weapons, for damage, rate of fire, cooldown time, etc. There were supposed to be barrels you could explode to clear rooms, and mushrooms which would restore health and grant other temporary buffs/abilities, but if the plants ate them, the plants would become stronger, faster, etc.

Performance is also an issue - it was partly an experiment developing some tech for 2d normal mapping, lighting, and shadows (the shadows got cut pretty early). There was unfortunately no time for performance optimisation here.

So at the moment it's just shoot shoot until the plants overwhelm you or the framerate drops so far that the game is unplayable! Oh well :)