Cupcake Collector

co-authored: @frank-gevaerts
Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.46
Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.50
Innovation★★★★★★★★★★2.52
Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.57
Humor★★★★★★★★★★3.38
Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.60

Welcome to Cupcake Collector!


A sugary adventure where one brave (and weaponless) crusader faces their sweetest challenge yet… literally!

You’ve been sent on a mission of confection perfection: to collect every cupcake and prove your worth in the Great Pastry Trials!

Sounds easy as pie, right?

Well, there’s a catch — a sticky one.

The local candy-flinging spiders have decided you look like the perfect test subject for their “flavor experiments.” Their aim? Surprisingly good. Their weapon of choice? Gobs of gooey candy that’ll leave you slower than molasses on a winter morning. Get hit, and you’ll be stuck faster than icing on a hot bun. Yuck!

So grab your courage (and maybe a napkin), and prepare to dodge, dash, and delicately devour your way through increasingly chaotic levels filled with cupcakes, keys, and creepy-crawly confectioners. You’ll need both keys to unlock the exit — and your full collection of cupcakes to pass the ultimate taste test.

With each new level, the stakes get higher and the sugar rush gets stronger. Can you stay light on your feet, or will you end up in a sticky situation?

Get ready to prove once and for all:

You don’t need a sword when you’ve got a sweet tooth!

About the Game


Cupcake Collector is a sweet little platformer where your goal is simple — collect cupcakes to pass your final trial! Unfortunately, a bunch of mischievous spiders didn’t get the memo and have decided to pelt you with sticky candy instead.

Each level challenges you to snag every cupcake, grab two magical keys, and make it to the exit — all while avoiding an ever-growing storm of sugary projectiles. The more you progress, the more enemies you’ll face, and the trickier it becomes to stay un-gooed.

Getting hit isn’t the end, but it sure isn’t pretty! Timing, precision, and a little bit of frosting-fueled bravery will be your best friends here.

What starts as a cute confection soon becomes a sticky situation... can you stay cool under sugar fire and prove you’re the ultimate Cupcake Collector?

A Note on our Game Assets


Originally, our team included a dedicated graphics and sound wizard, but real life had other plans! When they had to step away before being able to complete any part of their usual supreme wizardry, the two of us carried on — frosting-smeared but determined — to finish the game.

As a result, most of the visuals and audio come from carefully selected third-party assets under appropriate licenses, with the exception of two dev-recorded voice lines you’ll hear in-game. We focused our remaining time on level design, gameplay polish, and making sure the whole experience still felt cohesive and fun.

These assets are:

Kenney's Platformer Art Candy and Kenney's Platformer Art Extended Enemies

Platformer Vector Assets by Pumpkin2D

10 Retro RPG Menu Sounds by leohpaz

Cute & silly rpg music pack by chajamakesmusic

Controls


Keyboard and Mouse

* WAD for movement
* Shift to dash
* Space jumps (in case you prefer that instead of W)

Controller Support!


Yes, we have controller support!
Tested on Windows 11 with a wired Xbox controller.

Heads up: If your operating system detects another device (like a joystick, steering wheel, or even certain USB devices) as a controller before your actual gamepad, it can cause some in-game controls to stop working properly.

The fix:
Unplug any other device your OS might be misidentifying as a controller, then plug in your game controller. This should restore full functionality.

* Left stick - Character movement
* A button - Jump

Words from the Dev Team


Fgeva - Programmer


I'm quite happy with what we achieved. Of course I'd have preferred to present a 100% home-built effort, but since that wasn't really possible this time, I'm happy there is such a vibrant community of artists and musicians who are willing to let people use their work under very free license terms, so many thanks to them! I think once we got into the new adjusted rhythm and had selected one of Kenney's very nice tile sets (not to disparage the sound people, but we chose graphics first), we did manage to produce a reasonably polished game that's at least as good as our last effort.

Balimaar - Programmer


I had a very productive first day — once again enjoying the rare joy of time zones working for me instead of against me! It meant I could work a solid 12-hour stretch, hand things off to my teammate for their 12 hours, and we’d both still get some decent sleep in between.

While I caught some rest after that first push, our audio and graphics guru unfortunately had to step away due to unforeseen circumstances. We completely understood, but it left just the two of us to pick up the frosting bag and keep the project on track. So, fgeva and I quickly switched gears, finding creative ways to fill the gaps with the tools and assets we had available.

Then, toward the end of my second shift… disaster struck. Godot suddenly decided that every single scene depended on scenes it claimed didn’t exist — even though they were right there! Clicking “Fix Dependencies” did absolutely nothing (thanks, Godot). Thankfully, fgeva swooped in with some text-file surgery magic after I’d exhausted every possible fix, saving around 12 hours of work in the process. Seriously, MVP moment right there.

From that point on, it was smooth sailing — or as smooth as level design can ever be when you’re still learning it on the fly! Despite this probably being my most stressful Ludum Dare to date, I’m genuinely proud of what we pulled together under pressure.

Here’s to learning, laughing, and leveling up — bring on Ludum Dare 59!
Tags: #2d
Genres: platformer
Tools: Godot

Comments35

BalimaarTheBassFish
BalimaarTheBassFishauthor6 Oct 2025, 23:14
@noobman64 thanks for playing and for your insight!

we did use export to manage changing levels ```@export var next_scene: PackedScene

func move_on() -> void:
get_node("/root/Main").end_level(next_scene)```

In the editor, the door held the information for the next level so we didnt switch a lot in code as such but its definitely something to look at in more detail and see if we can avoid these issues.
She Wrote
She Wrote6 Oct 2025, 23:25
The gameplay works really well overall. I like the tricky way the enemies’ projectiles move — it gives a unique challenge to the platformer. And cupcakes are so desirable that it adds to the reward of collecting them. I also like how you can jump infinitely in the later levels; it adds variety. Well done!
BalimaarTheBassFish
BalimaarTheBassFishauthor7 Oct 2025, 00:58
@she-wrote Thanks a bunch! 💕 fgeva cooked up those tricky projectile arcs! Glad you enjoyed them! I’m curious if the infinite jumps you mentioned happened just in the “flappy bird” level or beyond (if the former thats intended, if the latter we have an issue)?

And how did the level layouts feel overall?
She Wrote
She Wrote7 Oct 2025, 05:35
@balimaarthebassfish It was only on the Flappy Bird level, so it was as intended! The level layout felt great — the cupcake placement encourages you to explore and face the challenge instead of skipping everything by jumping. The secret passages are well placed, and the cupcakes can be in such charming spots, sometimes even spelling funny words! You guys did a great job!
Frank Gevaerts
Frank Gevaerts7 Oct 2025, 10:27
@noobman64 thanks for playing! Yes, that sounds exactly like the issue we had. Once you figure out how, not *too* hard to fix (just manually remove two lines from the scene file to break the bad reference), but it definitely had impact, especially on Balimaar's morale.

@she-wrote thanks for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed it, we were fairly happy with the levels, but it always takes someone new to *really* know if it worked!
BalimaarTheBassFish
BalimaarTheBassFishauthor7 Oct 2025, 10:33
Yep it was definitely a low point in the game jam for me :D especially when I tried to fix it multiple times but it just wouldnt work. again @frank-gevaerts thank you so much for that MVP save.
LRDJJ
LRDJJ7 Oct 2025, 11:16
Nice work! You guys cooked up a solid game in a short time !
F2_7 Oct 2025, 11:21
This was a lot of fun to play! I loved the hidden cupcakes in the clouds, and the secret paths behind walls. It gave me pleasant flashbacks to games like Commander Keen, Jazz Jackrabbit and Zool (candy themed game).

The controls were easy to understand, the graphics were awesome (I really love the candy theme). Great job!

I also submitted a platformer game. Feel free to try it out, if you want. :)
LDJam user 282870
LDJam user 2828707 Oct 2025, 14:22
You did a really nice job with the game. Godot makes platformers really easy to build. There is a way to use a global scene manager that has a level id like 'Level1' and then a preload for the level:

extends Node

var SM_CurrentLevel = 1

var SM_LevelScenes = {
"Level1": preload("res://Level1.tscn"),
"Level2": preload("res://Level2.tscn"),
"Level3": preload("res://Level3.tscn"),
"Level4": preload("res://Level2.tscn"),
"Level5": preload("res://Level1.tscn"),
"Level6": preload("res://main.tscn"),
"Level7": preload("res://Level1.tscn"),
"Level8": preload("res://Level2.tscn"),
"Level9": preload("res://Level3.tscn"),
"Level10": preload("res://Level3.tscn"),
}

Then in the code where you load the next scene:

func ProcessNextLevel() -> void:
var Level = "Level" + str(SceneManager.SM_CurrentLevel)
get_tree().change_scene_to_packed(SceneManager.SM_LevelScenes[Level])
SceneManager.SM_CurrentLevel += 1

if SceneManager.SM_CurrentLevel > 10:
get_tree().quit()

It worked like a champ
tiwe_me_ruu7 Oct 2025, 18:32
It's a fun, simple game, the graphics and animation are beautiful, the character movements are smooth, the enemies look cute, haha, even too cute... It would be great to play a full version of the game with more levels someday!
KayF1n
KayF1n8 Oct 2025, 15:02
This was a lot of fun! thank you
INCD021
INCD0218 Oct 2025, 17:55
I loved the triple jumping 😃 And who doesn't like cupcakes! Great entry 👍
The only thing that threw me off was the controls, which I found very floaty. :cake:
Frank Gevaerts
Frank Gevaerts8 Oct 2025, 20:02
Thanks for playing, @incd021! I think it's the bubble helmet, those always make things floaty!

(seriously though, it was floatier earlier, and toning it down more felt like it would probably require adjusting level design, and at some point doing too much just felt risky...)
LDJam user 2801898 Oct 2025, 20:46
At first the controls felt a bit weird due to the floatiness but then I started liking it and the movement felt really unique! It was really fun, I especially liked the infinite jump level. Also the dash felt really sleek, I just loved to dash around everywhere. Great work!
Frank Gevaerts
Frank Gevaerts8 Oct 2025, 21:03
Thanks for playing @kazuren! Once we had the idea for the infinite jump level we just *had* to do it!
Eugenik
Eugenik9 Oct 2025, 04:01
Amazing game! Good job, guys!.
BangKerpow
BangKerpow9 Oct 2025, 12:20
yum cup cake. The controls are well done, which like like 90% of a good platformer (level design is the other 90%). The dash looks sick as hell. The jumpy level was a cool break from the standard platforming. Great job!
okEly11 Oct 2025, 18:47
Good luck in making next games guys
milq
milq11 Oct 2025, 18:54
I finished the game! I absolutely love the triple jumps and that level where you can just jump as much as you want, ha, ha! I’m a big fan of platformers and this one really clicked with me. At first it took me a bit to get used to the controls, but later I really appreciated the character’s speed and how many jumps you can pull off. The level design is good and, for me, the difficulty felt just right. My sincere congratulations, I had a blast playing it. What an awesome entry. Great game!
commanderstitch
commanderstitch12 Oct 2025, 03:24
Got 115 of the cupcakes. Reminded me of alot of games that have bouncing left and right movement. I just had to barely tap the left and right the motion for movement felt very high. took forever to figure out I had multiple jumps in there.

xD

the cake was a lie (for me)
BlackCat508
BlackCat50812 Oct 2025, 05:43
pretty fun platformer! I like collecting cupcakes
Frank Gevaerts
Frank Gevaerts12 Oct 2025, 09:26
Thanks for playing, @commanderstitch and @blackcat508!

Maybe the first level should have had some proper multi-jump introduction. The help text before you start mentions it ("Thanks to your bubble helmet, you can even jump a few times when you're already in the air!") but who reads when there's a game to play? :)
Jiri Hysek
Jiri Hysek12 Oct 2025, 16:47
Surely a new record! But I missed a few cupcakes so there is still a chance to beat me :) @commanderstitch claims he got 115 cupcakes but without a screenshot it's no more than empty claim! :D

It was sweet game, although sometimes a bit sticky! I like flappy birding around a level, also triple-jump felt like an error at the first time but when I learned it's on purpos, it was fun!
cassowary
cassowary13 Oct 2025, 02:27
Nice! I collected 145 cupcakes. I enjoyed it. Some nice creative level design here. I feel like the controls could have been tuned a little bit better -- it felt like the movement was a little fast and the friction was a bit too low, especially when the character was in the air it was a little hard to jump into things accurately. Aside from that, nice work! I especially appreciated that you included a few extra hidden secrets in the levels.
Frank Gevaerts
Frank Gevaerts13 Oct 2025, 19:47
Thanks for playing, @cassowary. 145 is a very good score!

One thing I've learned is that movement tuning is hard!
PhilStrahl
PhilStrahl26 Oct 2025, 21:43
Very good job, I especially loved the unrestricted jumping! For your reference, here's my archived stream 😊🦄

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