FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD57 → Desmos Cave Game

Desmos Cave Game

By cool-purr

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall3.307
Fun2.507
Innovation4.597
Theme3.107
Graphics2.907
Audio2.254
Mood2.807

Comments

xoreaxeax 2025-04-07 10:34

I absolutely love the idea! I was however not able to get control following your instructions. I really want to try this! Could there be anything obvious I am missing? (I have never worked with desmos)

cool-purr 2025-04-07 11:34

You could try clicking on one of the expressions before doing the key binds, there is also a button in the top right to start the ticker which makes the game move.

jcourt 2025-04-07 11:50

I was able to control it! It took me a minute to find this button - I'm guessing that's "starting the ticker" like you mentioned?

Desmos Button.PNG

Either way, I got stone for a couple levels! And I used it to get coins, and then an item! I wasn't able to see what that item did, because when I tried to leave the shop for the second time it didn't seem to work. I'm not sure if I did something wrong, but several times I had to reload the page and start over, because it just kind of became impossible to do anything. Then I'd take the same (or at least very similar) actions, and things seemed to keep working OK.

What I saw of the gameplay seemed pretty simple, I'm just really impressed that you managed to do this much with such a strange tool.

I looked through the expressions out of curiosity, and while I do not know anything about how you can use desmos for this stuff, I did find it interesting that you had to define a variable for pi, and that variables were named things like M(sub)enu

Again, I just want to emphasize that this is a very cool and impressive thing to do.

cool-purr 2025-04-07 15:08

@jcourt thank you! I'm too dumb to learn any coding languages but desmos was apparently easier. Don't use Desmos to code, its so slow.

outish 2025-04-08 10:00

This is briliant, but the real question is can you make it run doom?

cool-purr 2025-04-08 16:31

@outish I can’t :sob:

apoly 2025-04-09 07:19

It took a while to figure it out, but with hints from other reviewers I was able to run it.

That is such an interesting "engine" to use! It brings back memories of programmable calculators which were capable of some simple games as well from my youth.

deadcode 2025-04-09 07:22

Wow this caught me by surprise! Had no clue desmos was even capable of such things! Really awesome idea and got me interested what else desmos can do haha

jamesgames1000 2025-04-11 13:46

XD the game was really fun! Interesting 'game engine'

cool-purr 2025-04-11 20:16

Thanks! Its the only “game engine” i understand 🤣