EPTThe Circus has finally reopen after last weeks tragic "incident".
A practitioner of the fine art of surgery has saved the best parts for your eyes only.
Come witness the magnificent power of science over life and death!
![[image loading]](http://ludumdare.com/compo/wp-content/compo2//407933/31361-shot0.jpg-eq-900-500.jpg)
Two weekends ago, an eternity... We participated in Ludum Dare game jam, making a game in 72 hours, with a small group of friends.
Saturday morning, we all go up early to discover the theme. "Entire game on one screen". We started to put ideas on paper, each of us producing one concept every 15 minutes.
After 3 rounds, we had 9 ideas and we picked our top 3 favorites and finally we selected Victorian Circus, a game where you combine different animals to create hybrid creatures for your Circus show, a simple pitch without any game mechanics.
Other ideas were more solid on the game mechanics but much less so on the opportunity to have fun with the art style and any random crazyness.
The close second idea was a game were you directed a news paper company and had to set the front page, balance between ads for revenue, news for the headline and the deadline for publishing.
The third idea in our favorite was a game idea called "Enemy of reason". You are the pastor of your neighborhood and you have to raise faith, convert that into money, invest in the community and you had fanatic special powers, like anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-vaccination etc, depending on your skills,
the population would evolve differently, like if you were anti-contraceptionist, you would have a higher birth rate... But of course the goal was ultimately personal benefit.
![[image loading]](http://ludumdare.com/compo/wp-content/compo2//407933/31361-shot1.jpg-eq-900-500.jpg)
Anyway back to the idea we selected.
Victorian Circus, we decided to go for a frankenstein style of machine that would raise animals back to life, a treadmill (Dreadmill), on which they would perform their trick was selected after a long day of design panic. No design for simple Circus tricks seemed to make a game interesting enough. We didn't want to go into some weird fighting or RPG kind of mechanics so we settles to keep it simple.
Day 2 went into animating everything, we had 11 animal parts (5 rear, 6 front) which created 30 possible combinations. We settled for 2 animations for the jam, Run and Jump, this would be increased to Run, Jump, Dash, Fall, Idle...
Day 3 went to panic mode, we still hadn't started the game mechanics themselves.. Very bad but yeah, so we just put something, even more simple, reducing the type of obstacle... The game was clearly not going to be complete, but we wanted to provide a taste of combining those animals.
Our animation were not importing correctly and many other little things were starting to disturb our progress... In the end, we just put 2 ugly button and the simple control scheme known from Robot Unicorn Attack. Z to jump, X to dash. Writing the instruction into our credits panel.
![[image loading]](http://ludumdare.com/compo/wp-content/compo2//407933/31361-shot2.jpg-eq-900-500.jpg)
Our version was way too hard, so testers got only to discover like 3-5 animal parts from all 11.
The updated version you can play on the other hand, is way too easy, no challenge, boring but at least you can try different animals and the animations are somewhat working but the music is not!!
Jam result after 72 hours (Music working, many other things not):
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/62277442/vcweb/Webplayer.html
We posted a version after 2 additional day of development and you can try it here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/62277442/VictorianCircus/VC_Monday/wp2/wp2.html
We are now at the second week after the Jam, we have progressed well enough that we think we will be able to release this before xmas as a Alpha/Beta whatever, for Windows 8/Windows Phone 8.
If it does somewhat well then we might go through the trouble and get an Apple dev account :D
TLDR = Team Liquid Don't Read
Available animals
+ Show Spoiler +
Rear part:
Rhino
Zebra
Giraffe
Gorilla
Tiger
Front Part:
Rhino
Zebra
Gorilla
Giraffe
Toucan
Clown (CREEEEPY^2)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/rbfC1aK.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/EUGsWpB.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/od9Y5CN.jpg)
