A year ago today I submitted Soundsearcher to Ludum Dare 45. It was my first solo submission to the jam and honestly the first game I ever completed. Little did I know that it would introduce me to an entire genre of games and a community that loves them. The past year has been an amazing journey that I hope to reflect on more soon.

To celebrate this anniversary I chose to participate again with this submission to Ludum Dare 47. In the past some folks have asked me to try making a shooter, so this is what I came up with given the theme “stuck in a loop”. It’s a cosmological romp that explores the concept of eternal recurrence.

For most of its development Auraboros had an identity crisis. Its themes were more occult with mechanics involving destroying obelisks and a plague of locusts. It wasn’t until the last 24 hours that its celestial feel came into focus and its sound design blasted off toward the stars.

Here you’ll face wormholes that spew endless streams of dangerous black holes until destroyed. Its difficulty increases after each wormhole is closed, sparking battles across multiple fronts. Your objective is to improve your score at each time loop by outgunning, outmaneuvering, and outlasting your opponents.

I can’t promise future updates to Auraboros, but there are some features that I didn’t have time for during the jam. Specifically, boss battles, power-ups, and special abilities might be excellent ways to break up the waves with more diverse challenges and strategies. These might be target features for post-jam updates.

In the meantime, thanks for playing, and thanks for the good year.

P.S. Special thanks to my friend Stevie who introduced me to game development with our submission to Ludum Dare 43. They did most of the work. I made some graphics and wrote some code.