COWBOY COOTS
An action-adventure rhythm game built for the Ludwig Game Jam 2023, winning 1st Place Visuals out of 250 entries as a 2-person team. Coots gets trapped in an alternate Wild West dimension after some museum mischief goes sideways — players dodge and weave through a three-stage onslaught of encounters to reunite with Ludwig. Fast-paced top-down action with a Reflex time-slowdown mechanic, pixel art visuals, and a full original soundtrack.
Corvin Erdos: programming, game design, QA · Benjamin Brown: art, UI, sound, music, concept, scripting · Ellis Brown: additional music
// KEY_RESPONSIBILITIES
Sole programmer on the project in UE5. Built the WASD movement system, the Reflex mechanic — a time-slowdown ability triggered by spacebar for precision dodging — and the three-stage encounter loop. Also handled QA across the full build, catching edge cases under the jam's compressed timeline.
Designed the encounter structure and difficulty curve across the three stages, and shaped the rhythm-action gameplay loop alongside the art and music direction from the team.
// SCREENSHOT_LOG
