Just started learning pixel art during the jam to make this game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/the-unfathomable

If you look at it from a distance and/or squint your eyes, it's not so bad I think :-D

Hope you liked it @sarah ! - I made this one screaming cuz, y'know.

I'm currently looking for a vector file or high resolution transparent image of the Ludum Dare Logo to use in my social media coverage of Ludum Dare.

So far from what I found online that's high quality is just the old logo but I would like to use the modern one that's shown on this site.

Old Ludum Dare Logo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LudumDareLogo.png

Thanks for sharing any links or leads to where I can get what I'm looking for!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/deep-dive-drive-2000

A truly otherwordly experience inside your own head, the game is just a cause for something bigger and deeper (and for some hilarious screenshots from the dialogues). It’s definitely a game for you if you like trippy, weird and experimental games! And last but not least: it’s super easy, as it’s a game-experience, so no frustation about the hard gameplay involved!

Also don’t forget to leave your game link in the comment here so I can play your game as well :3

Out NOW!

What changed?

• Fixed the slingshot!
• Introduced bullet lines
• Fixed "Far Lands" floating point errors when descending too far
• Added a screenshot feature
• Main- and PauseMenu controllable with GamePad
• Improved difficulty curve
• Removed a debug line that prevented two already existing maps from showing up
• Made enemies spawn a minimum distance from the player (and each other)
• Added a grenade cooking indicator when firing
• Added aerial friction

New Controls

| Action | Keyboard | Mouse | GamePad (PlayStation / XBox) | :---: | :---: | :---: | :---: | Take Screenshot | Print | - | Back / Share | Main Menu - Start Game | - | Click the Button | A / Cross | Main Menu - Settings | - |Click the Button | X / Square | Main Menu - End Game | - | Click the Button | Y / Triangle | Pause Menu - Continue | - | Click the Button | A / Cross | Pause Menu - Back to Main Menu | - | Click the Button | X / Square | Pause Menu - End Game | - | Click the Button | Y / Triangle

What are our future plans?

• Two new weapons
  • Chaingun
  • Sniper rifle
• A new enemy type
  • Skullface - A flying enemy throwing fireballs and exploding when getting too close.
• Some new Arenas
  • Making more use of Launch Pads and Portals

Get our game here!

Tadpoles are easy to catch at the surface

But a terrible foe lurks in the depths

Play my game Loach Dive!

Some ruthless non-robots left behind all kinds of junk - go deeper and deeper to help Junk.E clean the ocean!

Check out our game for Ludum Dare#48, and let us know what you think!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/junk-e

Being our first Ludum Dare, we are really proud of our game and all the feedback we have gotten so far.

Thank you!

Hello! I'm looking into streaming myself play a couple of ludum dare games tomorrow, Friday at 7 pm EST. Since it looks like a couple of you have some Twitch setup working, I was curious if there were any free and/or open source chat bots I could use to automatically queue suggestions into a list or spreadsheet. I could, of course, just use a Google form and use a common "!command -> post link to form" method, but a queueing method with less steps would be nice.

Want to experience the battle between slimes and war machines in your leisure time? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mK64EE1rkn4&t=1s come to https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/infinite-slime and check it out!!! infinite slime BN-L.png

Hey guys and ladies! Just wanted to know what you think of these:

1. How cool would it be if you could create a group-account, that would be active for only one jam, where different users can join, so they all get rated together and could also test more games as a group together, than alone. And they could also maybe have a digital chatroom on this site, so its easier for them to cooperate. And they could give their team a name and stuff.
2. Imagine fake game pages, where those who only give bad votings or write a quick comment about a game, that isn't even playable could get busted.Or just generally improving the feedback systhem, so you could even rate the quality of the feedback given under your game, so the writers could get a karma boost.

I know, that surely some of these ideas are currently worked on, and I also think that this community is so nice, that such a strong police isn't even necessary. But i only wanted to get my thoughts out there and hear your opinion on them. Also, does anyone know the best way of giving this kind of improvement-feedback? I don't want to bother poor Mike Kasprzak with all my silly ideas XD

Anyone else interested to actually see other people play their game? I want to get more insight into difficulty curve of my game, seeing as many people's play sessions as possible is the best way to do that!

So, if anyone's interested: I'll send you a video of me playing your game if you do the same for me! Commentary not required, but you're welcome to include it if you want.

My game is here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/drilbert

It was my first ranked Game Jam

It's been a year, I am starting to be more serious with my game designer goals so this time and a special LD # 48 seemed like a great opportunity.

Designers have various priorities with their games. In my case my top concern lately is the mechanics. My goal is to make enjoyable, interesting puzzles and I think that at the center of it is, or should be an interesting set of mechanics. Once you have the interesting mechanics, even building the levels is pretty fun to do.

Had to deal with the theme

On Friday the theme was announced: "Deeper and Deeper" . This was, in fact, one of my least favorite themes from the voting :/ Mostly because all it makes me think of is digging. And when I think digging, the first mental image I get is digging Super Mario Bros 2 - style:

I tried and I tried and this is where I kept defaulting towards. Maybe we can add rocks? Then it would be something like platforming sokoban. Except that this has been done quite a bit. It was getting late so I started coding.

Using puzzlescript

I am not good at making game graphics or sound or music. I know some code, but not video game code... I do have access to a secret weapon: puzzlescript. With Puzzlescript it's completely possible to make a game , including sprites and audio all from its editor and without having to be very good at either of them. It's puzzlescript, everything is 5x5, so your sprites don't need that much detail.

Most importantly, it helps me implement new mechanics quickly and play with them using the editor. Figure out if they work out...

Finding the interesting thing

How about, instead of just moving the rocks , you are throwing them? And they roll. This is when I've decided to post my first preview image.

But the main mechanic is supposed to be digging. It sounds weird that digging doesn't do much, then? What I was missing was a way to have chain reactions. That's where this idea came from, what if, after digging some earth, adjacent earth would fall down?

That's what's cool about puzzel script, you can prototype these things quickly and see how they fare when you are trying to design levels from them. I was able to notice that something still lacked. Digging is destructive. I even added a mechanic that makes rocks destroy earth when they hit it. It was so destructive that levels had a tendency to go to one direction and there was never a need for backtracking.

Added a paint of coat

But time was moving on so I also had to make the game look and feel better. My goal in the second day was to focus on that sort of stuff and make levels. Even though I wasn't really completely happy with the mechanics, still missing something...

Puzzlescript only lets you have 5x5 sprites. But there are ways to avoid making the game's looks be too simplistic. One of the first things I do is add borders to walls, combining multiple wall sprites into the same object. This gives them more of a body. Another thing that's really important is the color scheme. For this stuff I use a special tool called gPick, it lets you find colors and generate color variations.

It's subtle but the walls aren't of a solid color, there are some variations there, same with the sand. Gpick is also useful for finding shades.

And a shiny mechanical cherry on top

I was supposed to build more levels but I kept having issues with the directionality of the design. I was starting to shuffle teleportation ideas. If there was a way to return to an area after destroying some sprites and falling down, then there would hopefully be more flexibility in levels. But the problem was how to add teleportation without making it too hard to code (and draw) and also without making the game sci-fi, because it's supposed to be about digging.

I settled for this gem idea. In games about digging in dungeons there's usually treasure. It's odd that the game didn't have treasure. But what if... MAGIC GEMS.

Gems expand on the second mechanic, picking things. And they also combine with the other things, they are affected by gravity, so they expand on the falling-ground mechanic. And once I had those gems, the level ideas became more exciting. It was already late in the compo, so this addition only affected 3 new levels, but it was so much fun to build them.

Please check my game out, it's in need of ratings!

If you like puzzle games where the mechanics are the priority, even above graphics and other things. Using an engine that's built for these sort of thinky game, because it has an undo button and a level skip. Then give my game a try.

• Play the game at itch.io
• Give the honest rate at the game's page

I'll play your games, just comment here, also play my game

Your hands are ready... But are you?

Come play Masseuse You Loose and find out!

The Keyboard Cowboys :pointright: :cowboy: :pointright:

There are so many LD48 games, I've been enjoying the discovery method of playing and reviewing the games of everyone who reviews and comments on my own game. So I'm doing it again! A link to Mandahlia is below, it is a very short and pleasant experience-- check it out if you like the look, and leave a comment, and I will review your game in turn. I always try to leave some constructive criticism as well.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/mandahlia#/comment-676080

LDJammers! I'm off work and ready to play some LDJam games tonight.

Comment with a link to yours and I will give it a spin.

My team and I created a Humor-Filled Spy game, if you are looking for something awesome to play!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/deep-cover-1

is a puzzle game, where you have to use your kitten Matryoshkas to open gate and arrive at your destination. A beautiful and lively journey awaits you !!!

The day before the jam began, my lead artist (@radonkalmer) sat me down and said we needed to scope down on art this time. She didn't want me to work her or our other artist to the bone again.

Now, as the Project Lead, do I have an interest in keeping my artists happy? Hmm, let's see what Voyager 1 would look like if I drew it:

OK, not bad. Only took me five minutes. I'm pretty proud, not gonna lie.

Let's see what one of my artists can do:

Oh.

So I want to tell a moving, emotional narrative, but I can only squeeze so much content from my artists while acknowledging that they are humans who need to eat, sleep, and go to the sauna. (My artists are Finnish.)

What's a Project Lead to do? If you can't tell by the wordiness of this blog post so far, I turned to writing. Typically, the best way for a video game to set mood and atmosphere is with visuals and audio. Unless we're doing a purely text-based game, people expect a video game to take advantage of the "video" part of "video game." I'm blessed with talented artists and a talented composer, so I can lean on them for maximum value. But my artists were tired this time around, and my composer was participating in a virtual convention on the same weekend. Who else can churn out content? Me. Typetypetype. Writing words.

I asked my programmer (@sheldonzs) for a simple text parser. The last time we did a text-heavy game (Ludum Dare 44, Maeko's Memories, a visual novel: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/maekos-memories), I made the mistake of not asking for one. My programmer created a super cool engine using Unity's Inspector, where you could just slot in the speaker's name, the image, the dialogue, any other commands (display choices, play audio, etc.), and move on. But the engine was buggy and difficult to write in. Worse, it meant that everything in the story had to be done twice: once when it was written, and once again when it was pasted into the engine. Never during a game jam had I wished so hard for someone with the skills of a Data Entry Intern. My wishes went unanswered, and I ended up spending more time pasting writing into an engine than getting writing done, leading us to only implement 40% of the planned story at submission time.

So my programmer wrote a parser from scratch. Because why would we use something like renpy when we could just force him to lose sleep too? Look, we're all masochists here. Some of us are just more willing to admit it.

Here's what the text looked like before parsing:

Here's what the text looked like after parsing:

For a parser created in less than 48 hours, it was more than serviceable. My programmer even threw in some code to tell me when I was missing colons at the ends of labels. There were a few functionalities missing, though. * Advanced Conditional Logic. I could tell the game to go Story Branch A if X was true and to go to Story Branch B if Y was true. But we didn't have time to implement anything more complex, like go to Story Branch C if X and Y are true, but not Z. Or Go to Story Branch D if X, Y, OR Z are true. If I wanted to do anything complex like that, I had to stitch a bunch of If statements together or just give up and write something easier that wouldn't require any complex logic. After the jam, my programmer asked whether we should consider just writing the story in a C# script so we could take advantage of the advanced logic already baked into C# with && and ||. Once I realized I could word wrap in Visual Studio, I couldn't see any reason why not. Adding \ in front of every quotation mark would be annoying, but less annoying than trying to replicate complex logic with nothing more than if/else. Of course, it helps that I already know basic C#. What am I missing? Is there some reason not to do this? * Keywords reused in the story. If a paragraph began with "if," the parser automatically interpreted it as an if statement, even if it was just meant to be part of the story. I thought this was fine, but then I learned AFTER THE GAME JAM WAS OVER that my programmer had made key words non-case-sensitive, so that if I forgot how to capitalize, the code would still run. Thanks, programmer. I knoW how to Capitalize, so please stop worrying about me ever introducing any user erroR. For our next parser, we'll probably just make the keyword "/if" so there's no chance it ever shows up in the story. Right? * Difficulty Editing. There were so many story section labels that a word processor like MS Word wouldn't recognize that if I ran spellcheck, I would spend most of the time mindlessly hitting "Ignore all." For this game jam, I decided to just hope that the editorial part of my brain was still working on two hours of sleep. Fortunately it seems this strategy was acceptable, because my playtester only found three or four typos in a 13,000-word game. (Or are there more typos but my playtester was too tired to catch them? We'll never know! Wait, we'll know when people give us feedback.) But is there a way around this? Could the parser be programmed to strip away all key words and labels and produce a text file on which we run spellcheck? My programmer also pitched the idea of a parser that would parse a spreadsheet instead of a text file, so all the labels and key words and such would be in different columns, and you could just spellcheck the columns with story. Is this a better approach for the next jam? We don't know yet.

Did anyone else use or create a text parser? Let us know in the comments how you dumped your blocks of text into your game.

And if you're up for reading another block of text like the one above, check out our submission page here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/bucket-a-space-odyssey

Happy rating!

Our queue is empty so if you'd like some feedback or just want to hang out and talk about games stop on by!

https://www.twitch.tv/vaguelydampgames

And while you're at go check out Ski Trip. You're eyes and you're ears won't regret it!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/ski-trip

Or built?