The Germinator

What happens when you mix LD56, an immunosuppressed developer with Covid and a heap of perscription amphetamines?

The Germinator is a lighthearted platformer made in 72 hours for the Ludum Dare 56 jam.

You must work through 5 levels, with the sole goal of reaching the end to kill your host. Optionally you can shoot for faster runs and gold medals on each level. Can you beat my fastest times?

Thank you for playing!

Controls:

Movement:  WASD, Arrow keys or Numpad

Look around: Mouse

Menu:  Escape

Quick Reload Level: R (only when speedrunning mode is enabled

Tips:

• The game should be fully playable in the browser, cookies are required for times to be saved, however for the best experience consider the downloadable executable.
• There will be some lags initially while the shaders compile as I didn't have time to fix this, it will only happen once and then should be smooth.
• There are a number of skip / shortcuts which may be requird for gold medals.
• Speedrunning mode enables quick-reload (R), and prevents the ending screen from showing on the final level.

Asset Disclosure:

• All meshes & textures were made during the jam. The Adobe suite did a fair amount of heavy lifting.
• Sounds are CC0 from Pixabay that I had from another project (opted out of Audio rating).
• The only boilerplate code used was for scene switching and managing audio. All other code was written from scratch.
• No AI assets are used in this game.

Mini Post-Mortem:

What went well:

• Considering I have been quite unwell and it's my 2nd jam, I'm very pleased to be able to submit a game that can be played from start to finish.
• I feel like I've managed to crank out quite a bit of content for a 3D game and a solo dev.
• I can see a significant improvement in the amount of work I am able to do, and how quickly I can solve problems compared to my first game jam.

What went wrong:

• My respiratory system.
• Choosing a platformer was a huge mistake - having to hand craft every level, make them fairly unique and tune the challenge adds an enormous amount of extra work with pays very little dividends for the player. It would have been far smarter to pick a very simple, repeatable gameplay loop and polish it really well.
• I didn't allocate time very wisely - I spent several hours modelling, texturing and positioning the mouth scene, for it to be completed in about 10 seconds by the player. Not a good return on investment.