the game

skillector is a simple top down shooter.

fend off waves of enemies with your skills - you can acquire new skills by spending money in the shop.

weapons include a sword, a pistol, a machine gun. you can get passive skills such as permanent atk/dev buffs, or temporary auras to get an extra boost.

play on itch.io

here’s some very late game gameplay (prior to some balance adjustments)

the making

this game was made for Ludum Dare 58, of which the theme was collector.

it was built with Godot 4.5, with a team consisting of myself and my friend NoahAmp.

as with every jam, the final game is 10% of what we wanted to do, but we think what we’ve made is a solid and fun gameplay loop.

the initial goal we set out for was a roguelike type of game, but with the time constraint of the jam and a job, we settled on an endless game.

here, i’ll mostly talk about the final version of the game, how it differs from the initial plan (if it does), and some fun facts

the base gameplay

what we settled on for the base gameplay is what you can see above:

  • one player, waves of enemies
  • you have skills (offensive, defensive, passive) you can use to fight them
  • wave system (endless waves), with a shop in between each wave

final score is calculated based on the amount of cleared waves, as well as how many coins you had left. (this is one of the aspects of “collector” we wanted to have - hoard coins for a better score, or spend them for more efficient dispatching)

the extra stuff we didn’t have the time for

  • boss waves: waves with less enemies overall, but a strong one to fend off.
  • random starting skill: we simply didn’t have enough skills to make it worth it.
  • upgrade tokens: skills would have been upgraded with tokens rather than coins as it is now.

the extra stuff we did have the time for

polish! lots of polish. turns out polishing is actually really fun!

i spent more time than i probably should have on the design and animations of the UI and HUD.

it’s not much, but combined together? all these lil bits of animations come together to help a ton in gameplay:

  • wave animation
  • hud sliding in and out between waves
  • damage indicators
  • hit particles (fun fact: they used the placeholder “?” sprite)
  • HP up/down animations

some of these were more useful than others, clearly, but i think they all help putting together the feel of it.

one of the last minute additions, yet most important i think, was the health bar on the enemies. it reused one of my debug visuals since there was no better way to have it, but it worked out fairly well! better than nothing to know how badly injured your enemies are.

oh and due to how things were built, the player also got a health bar. neat!

the end

i wish i had more to say about it, but silly me decided to wait two full months to write anything. oh well.

i love making games for jams. it might not be the best game, or the most polished game, but for every one of these i have a blast making it. and so, i’ll keep making games for jams whenever i have the opportunity.

who knows, maybe i’ll make a full game out of one of these? i wouldn’t count on it, though. i won’t let that stop me, either.

be on the lookout for more jam games.