Good Shapes, Bad Shapes

This weekend, I participated in Ludum Dare 46 a semiannual game jam. Matt, Zach, and I built a video game in 48 hours using Godot. I liked Godot a lot.

Zach wrote the music, Matt made the art, I wrote the code, and we all designed the game. I'm very proud of how it came out.

Don't just stand there. Play it!


The theme of the jam was "Keep it alive". We built an abstract survival game called Good Shapes, Bad Shapes, where you play a glowing circle trying to avoid a set of evil polygons. The game is dark, mostly illuminated by light emitted by the player. The player's energy fades slowly over time, so to stay alive they must collect the glowing orbs which dart erratically around the level. While scrambling after these orbs in the dark, it's really easy to run into one of these assholes:

The triangle rotates to track the player and quickly shoots at them when locked on.
The square relentlessly pursues the player by moving side to side or up and down.
The pentagon teleports repeatedly and unpredictably to locations in a ring around surrounding player.
The hexagon bounces around the map and suddenly expands when a player gets near.

All of these shapes resemble the walls of the map itself, making it hard to tell what's safe and what isn't. I think the game works well, hard as it is. I've never gotten to 60 seconds.

Author | Ben Wiener

Background in physics. Also interested in computing, robotics, hiking, woodworking, and other things.