While I am spending more time concentrating on Jarheads this year, I'm still taking time out to participate in the official Ludum Dare 72-hour jams with Gredgie.

The theme this time was "Beneath the Surface", and I was fairly confident about it to begin with as I had a number of interesting ideas. Only, when we got around to discussing them on Saturday morning it became clear that they were all too ambitious.

So in the end, we made a shoot-em-up.

It's a wapped side-scrolling shooter that takes place both above and below water (thus shoehorning in the theme). The game is rendered at 320x180 pixels and upscaled using point clamping for that nearest-neighbour effect.

The game makes use of a Monogame engine that I produced specifically for use in LD jams, but which I have not yet blogged about. You can find it on Github.

While I'm fairly certain we won't reach the dizzying heights of the LD top-ten this time, I'm still happy that we made a good-looking, fun to play and well-polished game for our fourth outing as a jam team.

Tools Used

• Monogame / XNA
• Visual Studio 2012
• Tiled
• Photoshop CS6
• ASEprite
• Audition CS6

Clockwatching

72 hours, with 6 hours sleep a night.

Downloads

These are post-Ludum Dare enhanced versions. For the original Jam entry, see the Ludum Dare entry page!

Windows. If it doesn't run, you may need to install OpenAL.

• Aeronautical - Windows .zip

Linux. This has been tested on Linux Mint 14 (Cinnamon), you may need to install libSDL-mixer (sudo apt install libsdl-mixer1.2). If still no joy, run from a terminal (mono Aeronautical.exe) and copy/paste the output into a comment below.

• Aeronautical - Linux .tar.gz

Mac. Yep, I now have my very own Mac Mini to knock out OSX ports with! This has been tested working on Mavericks:

• Aeronautical - Mac .zip