Chill vibes and deep reflections

https://youtu.be/xFxJM3Y9g7o

Also available on soundcloud with the ending removed for better looping!

Made for the COMPO memories.io

An abstract game about life and memories, and how they make us who we are.

Hi there !

Thank you so much for all the feedback and good vibes ! It really means a lot to us.

We tried out best to improve the game as much as possible during the week (Mostly fighting against lightmap going on strike), and we managed to improve our feedbacks quite a bit. Tell us what you think !

If you havent tried our game yet, here it is : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/l1-s0n

Have fun !

​

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/ld48-dearchild

Welcome ! DearChild (Ludum Dare 48 Theme: Deeper and deeper) is built in plain HTML5/JavaScript with a framework I am developping.

Overview :

• it's more of a narrative experience than a game and I enjoyed working on it !
• use the ARROW RIGHT key to move
• I couldn't take more than 24 hours to work on this project

This was my third Game Jam, so I hope you'll like this game. Thank you for your support.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/ld48-dearchild

Hello friends. If you like hard infinite runner games, I guess that you could appreciate mine - Tunnel48. It's my compo for the 48th LudumDare session. I incorporate inside this project a cool leaderboard on-line so as to record your best score. Try it if you dare. Rate my project, leave a comment and I will test your own game. I wish you the best. Have a nice week-end. Bye ++

Et pour les français, bonne fête du travail :)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/tunnel48

Explore deep space and save survivors of catastrophe! We fixed some minor issues and game should work as intended now! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/outerstellar

We weren't quite able to deliver the scope of design that we'd envisioned with Freg, Fregg and Freggy - so I wanted to do a short post explaining some of the intended mechanics.

The Path Ahead, the tiles displayed on the right side of the screen was intended to be an abstraction of your adventurers choosing their path whilst out on adventure. We wanted to have a mechanic where you earn cards and can play them to alter your path. This was to tie in with the lantern / darkness mechanic, as you'd only be able to see N tiles ahead based on your lantern strength. We had ideas such as:

• highly dangerous cards that you'd want to detour around to avoid, giving you a reason to play any environment card
• playing a card of environment type X next to another tile of environment type would end up upgrading that environment. This would spawn more difficult enemies / mini bosses that would drop special items.
• a card that modified the environment, for example a "curse" card that would change woods into the "cursed woods" which make for a wider variety of environments.
• the ability to place cards anywhere on the path ahead that is currently lit, instead of the one position that we currently allow.

In our jam game, we had to really simplify things due to scope. We ended up making it so that you'd get a quest to go and kill N enemies in X environment, and that would lure out the boss of that environment. That worked well for our scope, but also it meant that the environment card mechanic was really basic. Essentially the only use of them was to: - if you are on the quest to kill enemies in swamp, you can play the swamp card to visit there. - you may want to play some easy environments in order to kill enemies and fish for some good cards.

A side effect of this meant that the unwanted environment cards end up playing an additional role: clogging up your hand. It does sort of add an interesting mechanic to the game, where you need to manage your hand (since your oldest card will be lost when you reach your hand limit, and you can't rearrange your hand). You have the choice between delaying your route to the area you're trying to get to to (by playing undesired environment cards), or risk have them bloat your hand and leave you burning away combat cards you were trying to hold on to.

I think it'd add a whole extra depth to the game if we had the time to implement the environment system we'd planned, though certainly it would add to the complexity of the game too. Thanks for reading 🎷🐸 🥁🐸 🎸🐸

Hey! You! Yeah you, you're the captain now!

Want a quick game to play, rate, and move on? Don't want to install anything?

Look no further than https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/deep-space-journey

Here is what current critics say:

You are a powered robot with low fuel, you need to avoid and destroy obstacles in order to land safely at the end of the cavern. Good luck https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/falling-bot

You are a powered robot with low fuel, you need to avoid and destroy obstacles in order to land safely at the end of the cavern. Good luck https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/falling-bot

I went all out and spent 48 hours coding how flies would behave, to give you this unique roguelike experience. Guide a group of flies maneuvering in pure manure... (hold your breath if it smells to bad).

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/lord-of-the-flies

I am super tired and can't think of anything interesting right now, so here is the basic pitch. You are in a submarine delving deeper into a pitch black cave searching for the lost submarine "Icarus. * You can only see what the sonar is making out. * Can you navigate the depths and uncover the secret behind the "Icarus's" disappearance?

If you are intrigued, you can play "The Icarus" here. Available for Windows and Web.

Or check out the page here.

Depth of Memory has reached 20 ratings!! Thank you guys for playing and leaving feedback, I really appreciate it and love reading the comments! I just released some bug fixes last night, so if you were having trouble with the controls in the web version or you accidentally launched yourself out of the room (lol), this version should be better!

If you haven't played it, it's a 3D puzzle/escape room-esque game where you play as a detective solving the disappearance of a scientist by exploring his lab and recovering memories from the objects within it! Dive deeper and deeper into Dr. Brenner's memories to crack the case! :)

Play it here if you're interested! : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/depth-of-memory

https://youtu.be/7fQ9eSeoEHA

If you liked the trailer, you can download and experience the game yourself :)

And also after playing the game, consider rating us and giving feedbacks. See ya all!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/falling-memories

Looks like today I can finally keep my head above my shoulders and not doze off, so it's finally time for the post-mortem of Deep-fry Deeper, @ladycerberus and yours truly's entry for this edition.

You can play it and rate it at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/deep-fry-deeper

Joining, coming up with the idea

@ladycerberus is both a good friend and a talented UI/UX artist, and for some time the possibility of making a jam game together had been brought up in the past. Unfortunately, compo-fixation on one hand (more on this later), real-life commitments on the other and irrational fear sprinkles would usually get in the way.

This time, thankfully, both of us were willing to engage and I'd also taken Monday off work, theoretically in order to rest from the compo(#LOLNO), but also accounting for the possibility of joining as a team.

Once we learned about the theme, we finally agreed to participate and on Saturday morning we gathered over Discord and started brainstorming.

We began with the more obvious takes on the theme in order to get them out of the way as quickly as possible unless we thought of something amazing. A steady flow of new ideas became more and more interesting (A matrioshka boss rush still feels appealing to me :thinking:), and eventually we came up with the magical word(s): Deep-fried.

Cooking Mama was our main inspiration when it came to mechanics, and it was an obvious fit for the idea, so we went for it. Then, regarding the recipes our minds began to wander and think about the grossest food or the most insane things we could just dump in a pot full of burning oil, to add a twist to the plot and potentially the mechanics.

Here's a small spoilerish sneak peak of how we imagined the game might progress towards:

After doing some super-serious R&D while also laughing our asses off, we finally had an idea for a game!

What went well

• Teamwork! This has been the first ludum dare I've done as part of a team (and my second game jam with a team in total, if I count one I did at my previous job). I've always preferred participating alone, even if I was curious as to what engaging as a team would be like, because of:

  • A strange sense of self-pride and the drive to prove that I can make a good game by myself covering all areas, not just code.
  • Pathological insecurities delivered in two flavours: First, the thought "What if I don't like what they do or they drag me down?", and the second and more important, is "What if THEY don't like what I do or I drag THEM down?" However, I'm happy to say that I was proved WRONG. Communication was great, we complemented each other nicely (I think) and we had a lot of fun. I'd also like to add that, considering the amazing job @ladycerberus did with the visuals of the game PLUS the fact that she is also a mom PLUS the fact that she was a bit ill during the weekend, she's a fucking superhero :bow: :bow: :bow:

• Passion. A cool side benefit of being part of a team was that we hyped each other. We really liked the idea and were really stoked about the potential of the game, so even if not everything turned out as we would have liked, we remained highly motivated all across the duration and then some.

• Exciting game concept. As proof, these days I can't take a walk around Barcelona without looking (or smelling!) at bars, fast food restaurants or pretty much anywhere and come up with new ideas. Looking at the (insane) number of ratings we've received and the generally positive comments, it looks like it's not just us who enjoyed it. Thank you all! :heart: :heart: :heart:

• Making the right call to settle for the churros recipe. By Sunday morning we'd both started to feel like maaaybe the 6 original recipes were too much (We had implemented 2 steps and -maybe the third one? I can't remember now- of the first recipe). We started to think that perhaps we could still show off the main vision by making three, but we also started polishing what we had. By Monday morning we were already taking for granted that we'd only do the churros. This drastic scope reduction, while painful, helped us submit a well-rounded game rather than a bunch of unfinished mechanics.

• Polish. An obvious consequence of the previous point is that by cutting scope to one recipe we could focus on improving what we had, so we worked hard to enhance the UI and game feel. There are still some small areas for improvement, but the reception in this area has been overwhelmingly positive as well (I'm still gladly surprised at people appreciating the sound effects since I feared that they could feel like placeholders...except the splat, the splat sfx is just great :sunglasses: )

• Extra computer available for builds. WebGL is the main platform I target so I can show it to people for playtest during development and because it's usually more convenient to play during the rating phase. However, building for it is usually slow af compared to standalone versions and it basically locks me away from Unity for a while. Last month I got myself a second hand Macbook pro laptop, so I could use it to make not just Web builds, but also target and test Mac and Linux versions easily. Win, win!

What went wrong

• Drastically reduced scope. By cutting down on the recipes we'd brainstormed the game turned out to be way shorter (obviously), but it also lacked the absurdity of the original vision. We tried to address the length issue by adding randomness and increasing the difficulty of the current minigames, and we achieved it without making it unmanageable, but the trick still does feel cheap. The end result is still good in its own way (Who would have guessed that churros would be so popular? :smile:, which is great, but we also regret a bit not having managed to do at least a couple more recipes for the main submission.
• Lack of a proper, thorough planning stage at the beginningx We were so excited about the game that we rushed to implementing fast. We did have a Trello board, but since we were in constant contact we didn't really bother too much with it. Perhaps if we'd focused on properly defining the tasks at the beginning we could have spotted that we were aiming for the moon.
• Minor, but annoying, technical hiccupsx Nothing you wouldn't expect from a Ludum Dare using Unity, and considering that I decided to use the latest alpha version it all went relatively smooth, but still those issues cost us two-three hours of work.
• Becoming familiar with new tools To achieve the pixel art look without actually doing pixel art and to implement the oily VFX ladycerberus tried a couple of tools by Kronbits and CodeManu. The results were really good, but being a completely new tool she had to spend some time learning how they worked.
• No time for music or integrating the remaining SFX (there were two or three, I believe, but I was forced to submit a bit before the deadline).
• Code? What code? I focused on speed, and the code works, but the amount of copy paste is embarrassing :expressionless:. Refactoring is my top priority if we keep working on the project.
• Post-jam exhaustion This time I tried not to miss a lot of sleep, but my sleep habits are usually crap anyway, so even despite the day off, the compounded effects of last week, the weekend and this week just wrecked me up until now.
• Too worried to experiment. When I created the project I was thinking about properly using Unity's new Input System and, more importantly, learning about their new and shiny visual scripting tool. Regarding the input, in the end I didn't really need to use anything new because the IXXXPointerXXX interfaces worked well enough with the minimal setup, so this was fine. With visual scripting I started to feel the anxiety of not touching code, not knowing how to do things or having to hack a lot to make it work as I wanted it to be, so in the end I came back to usual scripts. I'm still curious about it, but I guess I'll just have to try it on my free time.
• Embarrassing secret: I DON'T LIKE CHURROS, now they'll haunt me for life! :sob:

Next steps (?)

We're super proud of the work we've done and the great reception players have shown so far.

People have asked for more recipes and minigames. We have ideas for several more, too, and we're still enthusiastic about the concept, so we'd certainly like to continue. This said, past me has expressed similar wishes in the past for other games and then life got in the way, so I want to remain grounded. At the same time, looking at last weekend I'm inclined to believe that we can keep encouraging each other to keep expanding the game a bit more, as much as work and family obligations allow us.

As always, if you've managed to read this far thank you! (and sorry! :sweat_smile: )

I know the whole seagull/shark music game thing is such a played-out trope, but I beg you to indulge me.

The songsharks have been singing too high again! It's up to you to convince them to sing deeper (and deeper). Rearrange the sharks' placement, and therefore their pitch, in this MIDI-meets-Mario-Maker platformer!

Reasons to play my weird shark game: - Write your own music! Until you realize there's only one correct solution to each level, which means you must delete your stupid music and figure out what music the dev wants you to write. - Solve puzzles while mythical creatures scream at you! - Play a whopping 3 levels! According to scientific studies, that's only 21 less than Super Mario Bros! Gaming sure has come a long way... - Immerse yourself in songshark lore. Become the songseagull. Roleplay by making squawking noises and eating discarded food while you play. - Idk, I guess the sharks are pretty cute??

Play "Sing Deeper, Songsharks!!!"

Will be playing and rating your games at our Twitch and Youtube channels today (April 30th) starting at 7 PM EST, and going until at least 9 PM EST. If you want to submit your game, we have a submission form here: https://forms.gle/y1S6rWWFHX7P7vCh6

Looking forward to all of your entries!

If you have any great recommendations for platformers from LD48 (either your own or someone else's) leave a comment below!

I'll either update this post or make a new post later on with a list of them and what's cool about each one.

To kick things off, Below The Ocean by Ismael Rodriguez is really amazing. It's Celeste-inspired but introduces a lot of fresh-feeling mechanics, has a great aesthetic, and the difficulty curve feels challenging but fair. The physics feel perhaps a little floaty, but that's because it's set underwater and I'm really impressed by how great the movement feels given that.

Feedback so far for my LD48 compo entry "Ore Hoarder" has been very positive, and I am hoping to get more eyes on it.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/ore-hoarder

Check it out, if you are interested. If you reply to this post or comment on my game, I will be sure to review your game as well.

Ore Hoarder was less ambitious than my LD46 entry, but I think it was still pretty ambitious for a 48-hour game, and I am happy with what I accomplished in that time. There's a bunch of polish that I wish I had time for, but you know how these game jams go.

In the end, I think the game has a fun and addictive core game loop that creates some tense moments as you race back to the surface while running out of fuel. I've been wondering if the stakes are just a bit too high with the game forcing you to completely restart on death, but those stakes are also the cause of such tense moments, so I don't think I can make the game much more forgiving without losing one of the biggest things that make it exciting. And in its current state the game can be short enough that restarting isn't a huge deal anyway.

The art turned out less garbage than it usually does for me. A lot of the ideas I had for "animating" the bot just worked perfectly the first attempt, so I lucked out.

• The drills are just static wedge-shaped sprites that I add a random 1-2 pixel shake to as you are drilling, and the effect gets the job done.
• Same with the tread. It's a static sprite that I shake more the faster you are moving.
• The flame, again, uses a single static sprite. I render 2 of them on top of each other: one red for the outer part of the flame, and a smaller yellow one for the inner part of the flame. I randomly scale both of them in the x and y direction every frame, and the result is a convincing flickering flame effect.
• Moving the drills in and out is done on a curve, and the effect is pretty satisfying. I use the same curve for moving the flame in and out.

A lot of people have commented that they actually liked the art style here, so I guess these things worked.

Challenges

The biggest challenge for me this LD was the "sliding window" tile system I created: basically, the only tiles that actually exist in the game world at any given moment are the ones within view of the camera. I had to do this because each tile is a physical object in the game's physics world, and having too many of them active at one time will grind the framerate to a halt.

It took me 3 attempts to get something I was satisfied with.

My first idea was one that would be the quickest to implement, but was definitely going to be the slowest: I would store all of the existing tiles in one list, and every time we change rows/columns I would check to see which tiles exist in the list that are no longer needed and delete them, and then look at all of the tiles that need to exist but don't, and create them. This results in loops that grow exponentially with the number of tiles added, and I had to iterate through everything at least twice. I didn't think the impact would be nearly as bad as it was. The result was that on my beefy gaming PC I was only averaging 45-60 FPS, down from thousands. If I didn't fix it the majority of my players would be experiencing completely unplayable framerates.

The first attempt was a disaster, but it wasn't unexpected. I knew I was taking a risk by implementing my worst idea first, just because it would be extremely quick to code. But it was really quick to code and I didn't lose all that much time in the attempt.

For my second attempt, efficiency was my main focus: when we shift the view, we should check the fewest number of tiles possible, and we should only check them once. For example, if we shift our view left, we create the tiles in the column to the left of our view, and we delete the tiles in our right-most column. It sounded easy enough, but there was a fatal flaw in my plan: it was currently around 9:00 AM EST after working on the game through the night for around 7-8 hours straight (plus another 3-4 hours of designing the game in my head while playing X4 after the theme was announced), and it had been over 24 hours since the last time I had slept.

In my sleep-deprived state I'm sure I made some questionable choices about how I implemented it, and the end result was something that was overly complicated to read and debug (but man was it fast; I was getting 2-3k FPS, compared to 45 FPS with the first implementation). I thought it was working until I noticed some quirks with the shifting, and occasional straggler tiles not being properly deleted as a result of a race condition when moving diagonally too quickly. I proceeded to slam my head against my keyboard for about 2 hours straight trying to debug it, and all the while my focus and abilities were continuously degrading over time due to lack of sleep. Eventually I decided there was no way I was going to find the bug in my current state and resigned to taking a short nap, hoping I would at least wake up with some ideas about how to find the issue.

I woke up 3 hours later feeling pretty well rested, all things considered, and spent maybe 20-30 minutes trying to track down the issue before deciding to just burn the whole thing down and start from scratch. So I deleted all of my tile-creation code, and moved on to attempt #3.

My last idea would sacrifice some speed in exchange for code that was much more readable and easier to debug. I organized the data into layers which held a row of tiles, and whenever we shifted I would figure out which layers need to have tiles in the world, and then those layers would delete any tiles that don't need to be there and add any ones that are missing. I could have used some of my ideas from the previous attempt to limit the number of tiles that the layers are looking at when we shift, but that would mean added complexity that might not even be necessary as long as the simple implementation is fast enough to get the job done.

And it was. Sure, I was no longer getting the blazing fast 2-3k FPS that came with my second implementation, but I was settling around 800-900 FPS which was more than enough.

And so the hardest part of my project was finally finished and working. I'd estimate that hurdle ate up around 5-7 of my precious few hours, which is about 5x longer than I expected it to take. Though that's a very rough estimate, as my memory of the whole thing is a bit blurry now.

I dedicated about an hour to attempting to get particles working, but for some reason either I couldn't get them to spawn or they weren't visible where they were being spawned. After the tile system I was wary about falling into another time-sucking black hole, so I decided to cut my losses and leave out the particle effects in favor of focusing on more important things, like gameplay features. It's a real shame, because the game would look much, much nicer with particle effects.

I spent a long time tweaking the death effect. On death I break the robot into chunks and attempt to send them all shooting off in different directions, but there was a lot of physics engine weirdness going on and I am not really happy with the result. And without a particle effect explosion the whole thing is much less exciting than it should be.

The black checkerboard background is just a room background that is automatically tiled, but the brown checkerboard background is actually made of tiles that are created wherever there is a gap. At first I was just going to leave the black background there showing you where the holes are, but once I decided I was adding heat damage I really needed that background to turn red as the temperature rises. I'm glad I took the time to implement it because it looks way better than it did before, but I got held up by a stupid bug that resulted in duplicate tiles being created and the framerate dropping significantly. I didn't realize it at the time, but I actually solved the issue with the duplicate background tiles without actually solving the layer creation bug that caused it. I covered up a symptom without treating the cause. Whoops.

What's missing?

There are a lot of areas of the game where I wish I had spent more time.

Sound. I spent an hour during the early morning of the final day using Bfxr to randomly generate sound effect after sound effect, saving any that I thought might come in handy. But the few sounds that made it into the game were only added in the final hour before the end of the compo, because I realized there were some things that just needed audio feedback. For example: selling your cargo, or taking fall damage. These things could easily be missed if the player isn't staring at the UI when they happen, which would cause confusion.

The UI. It's pretty self-evident, but I really just didn't get to prettying up the UI. What made it into the final game is just a slightly-improved version of what I was using for debugging purposes during development.

The title screen. If the title screen looks like absolute garbage, it's because I added it in the final 15 minutes of the compo. It's a real shame, because the title screen is the first thing the player sees. In my head I imagined a screen with an endlessly scrolling ground, and an AI controlled bot that would continuously be digging down as the camera descends, attempting to always stay in view. I liked this idea so much that I have already implemented it in a version of the game that won't be made public until the results of the compo are announced because I don't want to risk influencing the rating. It's neat. I hope some of you will come back later to check it out.

Conclusion

All right, well that was way too many words, and I'm sure nobody is even going to make it this far. Despite the many things I wish were improved before the end of the deadline, I am happy with the result. Judging from the feedback so far, I am cautiously optimistic that this game will outperform my entry from LD46. Fingers crossed.

You guys are awesome! Thanks for all the great feedback so far, we're thrilled that you guys enjoy our game!

We dont have any official social media set up yet, but if you'd like to see our LD48 entry Where's my dynoMITE? expanded into a more fleshed out, full title, just let us know how to notify you if/when we set up some proper publicity outlets, and we'll be sure to drop you a line! (and I promise we wont spam you :) )

Click here for the - Where's my dynoMITE -expanded- Interest Form!

And of course, if you haven't played it yet, you should totally CHECK IT OUT HERE!!

Cheers, and great submissions out there, you guys! This has been an awesome first game jam for us!

Join Phileas Fogg and his trusted friend Passepartout, on their journey to the center of the Earth. Who knows what you will find down there... Trust me; you're in for a surprise.

Check our game out here.