Right after the Ludum Dare 34's game jam, the RCG crew got ourselves involved with another jam! This is the first year, still relatively unknown and exclusive to LibGDX developers, the LibGDX Jam spans out for exactly one month, from December 18th, 2015 to January 18th, 2016. For its first year, the theme is “Life in Space”, and our entry, Planetary Planter, is still much unfinished but looks quirky and fun and is available to play on the web and APK-readied for Android devices.
The LibGDX Jam’s time-frame is very relaxed with a month to develop, but to be honest, not much of our game was done until the last week of the deadline because half of the given time were conflicted with year-end holidays. Plus, we were both kind of burnt from a weekend of Ludum Dare and wanted to relax a little before jumping onto another project. Regardless, we pulled through and got ourselves an arcade-y space-shooter that we will polish up and release on the iOS and Android’s Play Store in the coming weeks.
You can check out our Dev Log entry, where Barry talked about the process and the technology used.
**Post Update: February 4, 2016** The results are in for our Roaring Cat Games unfinished LibGDX jam's entry, Planetary Planter! So, LibGDX Jam rating system is very similar to what Ludum Dare has, just with less criterias as seen below. Keep in mind that the ranking is based off of 83 total entries. Barry and I are very happy with the results, especially when we submitted somewhat of an unfinished game. It's unfinished because there is no end and you can't die, on top of the enemies' shooting mechanics being very repetitive with no unique pattern, which is a crucial game design aspect with these types of games. Rest assure, though, we're working on finishing it up and will have it ready with a boss battle and making it more fun (hopefully) to present at the Louisville Arcade Expo! We are designing it for mobile touch devices and will be releasing it for free of play. We can't wait to polish it up to show it off to the public!
Criteria Rank Score
Theme #23 3.667
Innovation #27 3.259
Graphics #34 3.296
Overall #48 2.852
Fun #61 2.333
Audio #75 1.333
