I'm now live on Twitch for the next few hours to play your Ludum Dare games! I'm happy to give constructive feedback or just have fun with it. I’ll also be rating every game I play (but not while I'm live). If you want me to play your game, type !submit url/of/your/game in the Twitch chat.

If you submitted your game to me during a previous stream and I didn't get the chance to play it, just let me know you're here in the chat and I'll give your game priority.

If you miss today's stream, I'll be doing more streams throughout the rating period- see the About section on my Twitch page for the next date and time. I hope to see you there!

First off, if you haven't played Downward Frog, you should give it a go! If you want. Up to you. It's pretty short. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/downward-frog ...if you don't, that's alright. it's cool. no problem. you'll just be missing out on THIS:

And if you have, thank you for trying it! I really appreciate all the feedback and am so happy people seem to be having fun. 's all I can ask for. Thank you! :heart:

Anyway! I wanted to write a bit about the game's development and why the game is sooo slooooooooow.

Jammin'

As I'm sure was the case for many people, this jam started with several hours of struggling to put together a good idea. I ended up falling asleep Friday night with a vague idea of where I wanted to take the theme. It involved you swimming after your toy frog that you'd accidentally dropped into the pool drain. Same general concept as the final game, except you'd be able to swim in any direction and have to surface for air regularly. I liked the concept, but the gameplay seemed repetitive. Come Saturday morning, I kept brainstorming while starting to work on the weird fish art...

(the rest of them were out to lunch so i couldn't get a signature... sorry...)

By Saturday night, I'd finished most of the animations. ...but I still hadn't decided on what to do with the gameplay... My mom came in and presented me with a bunch of name ideas. All of them were centered around the frog. (One of them was "Downward Frog"!) The frog wasn't playable, but she thought it was. Poor communication on my part, the way I'd explained the concept wasn't super clear. That got me thinking though, "Why don't you play as the frog?"

(Shoutout to my parents for being really cool and joining in on the creative side of game stuff every now and then!)

Even when you're working alone, it's so, so helpful to get others involved whenever possible!

I went to bed that night with much to consider, and by Sunday morning, I had my game. You are the frog, you sink slowly, you dodge with bubbles. Cut, print. Ship it. As the deadline neared though, it was clear that if this was to be a Compo submission, it would be lacking. No sound, music, or logo to speak of... very little polish or visual flair... after some deliberation, I asked my mom what she thought. She said, in essence,

"In a day, in a week, will your decision make you happy? If you wrap up now, will you be okay with the work you did?"

I decided to go for the Jam instead.

Of course, Monday ended up being a cursed day. Cat vet appointment, car troubles, bleh. When I finally got home, I rushed to create the sound effects and music, threw everything together, and submitted the game! ...juuust as it seemed like my computer was about to give out on me. As the game was uploading, my mouse pointer started flickering and a green line appeared on my monitor. Talk about stressful. It's fine now, I guess. Who knew technology could be moody?

It all worked out though! I'm happy I took the extra time to make the game the best it could be. It was absolutely worth taking it slow. Did it still involve rushing things a bit at the end? Yes. I get that there's some heavy-handed irony in writing a post about taking it slow during a game jam of all things, but hear me out! Of course deadlines exist. Things need to happen at some point. Given the chance though, it's worth taking the time to get things right.

Slow Fallin'

Downward Frog is a slow game. Incredibly slow. Glacial, even. There's some intent behind that, but it also just happened that way. Something that struck me at the end of development was the way this game straddles the line between peaceful and melancholic. The way you just slip into the pool, the lackadaisical drifting out of harm's way... it's... tranquil. There's no rush. No need to hurry. It's just you, some strange fish, and a really deep tunnel.

What's at the bottom? Doesn't matter. How quickly can you get there? Not important.

What is important? Keeping yourself alive and well. Making sure you're stocked up on bubbles in case something comes up.

I'm sure you could derive some meaning from that...

Well anyway, thank you for reading all this. And hey, if you submitted a game, congratulations! Try not to worry about the rating you get, the most important parts are learning and having fun (and playing games, of course!). Making a game in a weekend is a sure way to do just that.

Thank you for your time! You could follow me on Twitter if you want. I don't post too much.

'til next time, stay froggy!

-GogglesKitty

So I've made a portal 2 like game with my team in 72 hours, but it had many issues. I am now working on fixing them, but until I can highlight what am I doing

New console design and font

I've been rocking the default qASIC console, since I didn't want to dedicate much time for it, but now as I need to look at it more, I've changed it a bit. I've also changed the font from roboto to roboto mono, which looks a lot better in my opinion

Platforms

In the jam version the player was going mad on those things. I've actually implemented a system to move with the platform, but the player was still bouncing. Today I've managed to fix that so now you have a smooth experience riding your way to victory

Better AI

This is one of the other things I still need to implement. The AI was simple. Just chase the player and if you hit something discharge. This was easily exploitable. The new AI will activate if the player will be in a specific range in front of it and then it will try chasing him, but if there will be a wall, the AI will just follow a simple path, until either it will be able to kill the player, or it will run out of paths

The infamous level 4 rework

Level 4 is one of the most broken levels in the entire game. It's confusing and most players solve it by exploiting the AI or just give up. The original premise was to have a text in every level with the name of it and level 4 would say "Behind you", but that never happened. Also the platform in front was supposed to be a way of escaping the fragments, while you also had to watch out from your back and activate a wall, but as of yet I haven't seen a single person do it that way. With the new AI this could be easily solved, but until then at least we have this nice looking screenshot

Electric beam

Finally the last thing that wasn't implemented during the game jam, because our graphic designer was asleep and he also broke our project. The laser will hopefully be getting it's own texture and not a simple square gradient. The sound effect has been tweaked and now you cannot just hold it through walls.

Ending

In my game there is a good ending and a bad ending. On the first release the good ending didn't work at all, so later I fixed that in the "fixed" version, but it still didn't work. I still don't know why, but now every time you complete a level the current count gets logged to console. Also now everything gets reset when you die and I've added ending tolerance, so you no longer have to 100% everything

The future

In this past week I focused more on finishing my devlog, so now I will probably make a post jam version soon. I really like this game and finally with some experience the code is actually usable. Hopefully I will be adding some new levels too (I have 2 planned). Sadly I only have trouble with the voice acting, since I don't know anybody that could do it, while the tts doesn't sound that intimidating. I've fought about doing it on my own, but you gotta remember that I have a very Polish accent that is also somehow Russian, Italian, Indian and British at the same time. I will probably finish another update to my silly prototype and most likely revisit this thing. Stay tuned I guess

https://youtu.be/IxWLi2X3D2w

Also play the game now

Post Jam

• fix some bugs
• gamepad support
• add sounds
• balance difficult

Play my game Deep space

We streamed our discussion about Ludum Dare and some of the things we learned this year if you want to check it out.

https://youtu.be/6OBr7Lq5Dl0

Hey everyone! I hope you're having a wonderful day! Have you had the chance to play my game "Don't Splat the Bat" yet? If not, please check it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/dont-splat-the-bat

I'm planning to work on a mobile release, because I've already had quite a bit of good feedback from people who have played it so far. There's a web build, so nothing to download, and if you check it out and have any suggestions for improvements, please leave a comment.

Of course, if you want me to check out your game, link it in the comments and I'll check it out as well!

Thanks for all the feedback so far and best of luck with the Jam ratings! :smile:

Hey guys! We from HELL deep is your love? Dev Team are just so grateful for all the feedbacks we received and are still receiving!

Thanks to YOU we are now able to release this downloadable post-jam version of the game. We addressed to a lot of issues that Ludum Dare's community has pointed out to us, here's a list:

• Increased autoscroll speed
• The screen waits for player inputs to start scrolling
• The player now has to be entirely out of screen borders to die
• Music doesn't restart after death (maybe the most required fix on our game hahah)
• Player's physics is more precise
• Reviewed hitboxes of the enemies
• Moving platforms redesign
• Tutorial section
• Recolor of ropes and ladders
• Balanced overall difficulty
• Fixed minor errors in level design
• New End Screen

We hope all of you who played our game before consider trying it again in this new version. But if you haven't yet, please check it out!

Our game jam version (the web version), made in 72 hours from scratch, is still available for you to play and rate us in our Ludum Dare submission page. Feedbacks are still much appreciated!

The last thing is that we're glad to announce we decided to take this project further and make it into a full developed game to be released on Steam. We love that you guys are interested in knowing Baphe and Elizabeth's love story, and we want to give you this entire experience.

So, to keep updated also consider following us on Twitter.

AGAIN, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE SUPPORT AND FEEDBACK!

When you making a game about hacking, you obviously need some sort of unrealistic visualization of the process. That's just a given. For our game, Egress, we wrote a shader program using Godot's native shading language that would display an cyclical-bar-visualizer-thingamajig:

The first step in the process was figuring out how to display the circle as individual bars that could be animated and scaled independently. This was done by getting the angle of a given UV coordinate with respect to the centre of the circle: vec2 xy = UV - 0.5; float angle = (atan(xy.y / xy.x)); Then, this angle was sorted into a section of the circle with a span equal to PI / number_of_bars float section = angle - mod(angle, 3.14159 / float(bars)); Now that we have the section it falls into, we can then use this to generate a random value unique to that section by using a random function (thanks Stack Overflow!): ``` uniform float seed; // Can be used to seed the random number generation

// https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4200224/random-noise-functions-for-glsl float rand(float value) { return fract(sin(dot(vec2(value, seed), vec2(12.9898,78.233))) * 43758.5453); } ```

Using this function, we can generate a random height for each bar and have that height also fluctuate using the same random value: float radius = min_length + rand(section) * (max_length - min_length); radius += pulsate_strength * sin(rand(section) * 6.282 + TIME * pulsate_speed);

The last piece of the puzzle is using this radius for rendering the object. This is done by determining if the UV coordinate lies within a circle of that radius, using the implicit function of a circle: if (pow(xy.x, 2) + pow(xy.y, 2) < pow(radius, 2) && pow(xy.x, 2) + pow(xy.y, 2) > pow(inner_radius, 2)) { COLOR = vec4(1.0); } else { COLOR = vec4(0.0); } As the output colour is white, we can then modulate the resulting texture to be whatever colour we want!

The Complete Code

``` shadertype canvasitem;

uniform float innerradius : hintrange(0, 0.5); uniform float minlength : hintrange(0, 0.5) = 0.2; uniform float maxlength : hintrange(0, 0.5) = 0.5; uniform int bars : hintrange(2, 256); uniform float seed; uniform float rotationspeed; uniform float pulsatespeed; uniform float pulsatestrength;

// https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4200224/random-noise-functions-for-glsl float rand(float value) { return fract(sin(dot(vec2(value, seed), vec2(12.9898,78.233))) * 43758.5453); }

vec2 rotate(vec2 uv, float rotation) { vec2 rotated; rotated.x = uv.x * cos(rotation) - uv.y * sin(rotation); rotated.y = uv.x * sin(rotation) + uv.y * cos(rotation); return rotated; }

void fragment() { vec2 xy = rotate(UV - 0.5, TIME * rotation_speed);

float angle = (atan(xy.y / xy.x));
float section = angle - mod(angle, 3.14159 / float(bars));
float radius = min_length + rand(section) * (max_length - min_length);
radius += pulsate_strength * sin(rand(section) * 6.282 + TIME * pulsate_speed);
if (pow(xy.x, 2) + pow(xy.y, 2) < pow(radius, 2) &&
        pow(xy.x, 2) + pow(xy.y, 2) > pow(inner_radius, 2)) {
    COLOR = vec4(1.0);
} else {
    COLOR = vec4(0.0);
}

} ``` If you haven't checked out our game yet, we would love for you to give a shot and give some feedback!

It can be played in your browser here: https://lunatic-games.itch.io/egress

Tall Tales, now available for OSX!

• Explore a colourful village!
• Help the residents!
• Cause all manner of trouble!
• Lie about it, and get deeper and deeper into trouble!

Play the game!

LD page for Captain Zapdash

Cubital is a small Youtuber that mostly does Binding of Isaac content, as well as videos on Oftalmogarden, my main game project. Today, he released a video on Captain Zapdash, it's so cool to watch someone discover and have fun with the game!

* Come check it out right here:* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pqonnUDteA

He's also showing gameplay from an older game of mine, Hellslinger, which was my entry for the GMTK Game Jam 2020.

Don't forget to check out the rest of Cubital's Youtube channel, he's super chill and entertaining!

* And if you have some more time, please go play and rate Captain Zapdash * :smile:

Removed

Hello everyone! I'm Michael and I have been doing the coffee fueled doodling for Glyphs of Madness, a roguelight spellcasting battler for Ludum Dare 48. Here I wanted to share some of our visuals and give a bit of insight into what went into our visuals.

Heroine

Our protagonist was actually one of the last additions to the game. Originally we played with the idea of having a simple character selection and differentiating them on a manageable level with certain character traits

In the end we had to scrap the concept due to time constraints and instead chose one main figure for this jam.

I decided pretty early on that I wanted something masked as I love them from a purely aesthetic point of view along with the mystique they can add to a character.

Monsters

A small menagerie of different lovable abominations. Given a deeper exploration of this subject I’d love to take the scripture and glyph aspect of the theme a lot further since there is a lot to play around with.

As it stands the actual decision was made after we started with the concept of “somewhat creepy but still colorful lovecraftian entities” to battle. Still quite happy with what we came up with given the short timeframe and the lack of iteration that this brings.

The Glyphs

When working with mystical symbols it is important to keep readability in mind. While they can be a great opportunity to do world building, this isn’t of course the focus during a 48 hour jam.

Mainly wanted something that can be done quickly with a hand drawn aesthetic to it and that has good readability on most resolutions.

Environments

Arguably the section where I wish I had more time to invest in or to have locked in the book-theme earlier. From a purely aesthetic standpoint they should strike the balance of being interesting enough and evoke the desired mood without overpowering the characters.

To this end backgrounds are being done without any outlines to compliment flat shaded characters with lots of lighting and gradients in the background.

That's it! It was a lot of fun and although things of course went not quite as planned (but when do they ever) I'm quite proud of what we achieved during this short amount of time.

Thank you for reading! I hope your experience was as pleasant and inspiring as ours. If anything caught your eye please feel free to check out our game and let us know what you think.

Glyphs of Madness

Cheers!

-- Michael

Hey everyone! I just went live at http://www.twitch.tv/iron_leonem I'm going to be reviewing some more of your submissions from LD48! Tune in for some in depth dissections, game design discussions, and fun chats! I hope to see you guys there- links for submitting your game and the current queue are in the stream panels.

Hi all! A little update from the duo behind Phantas-Matcha: first of all, thank you everyone who has taken the time to try out our game so far, it means a lot to us!

We have been made aware of an issue with the audio, where the automatic text display sound would be distracting or downright annoying - we found a way of lowering the volume, so it should not be an issue anymore. Let us know your thoughts!

We are also looking into fixing the MacOS version or posting more specific instructions that will make the game work on those devices.

Once again, thank you everyone who has visited Mari and Selina's unusual tea shop - it is still open for business should you want to go and have a look!

I found more bugs thanks to feedback of the good people who already tested my game and had to suffer the bad balancing. ;) One of the bugs was way too much water consumption of leafs, which resultet in terrible balancing of ressources. I am sorry for all of you who tested my game in this state. I imagine it was not much fun at all.

Since then I took more time to playtest myself. Still having a hard time trying to balance out everything, but I think I am getting there. I separated the game into two versions. The ld-version is just the bugfixes and therefore better balanced, but still far from perfect. The balancing I did on top of that will be published on a separate link.

You can find the new cleaned up versions here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/metree

I will go and test some more of your games now! Have a good time.

https://www.twitch.tv/bighugejake

So close in getting 20 ratings! Help me out in becoming better Economy Game dev :cow2:

If you leave comment with honest feedback, I will be able to leave a feedback to your game as well!

check out MilCo. here :cow:

Don't forget to rate more games with less than 20 Ratings!! Happy Rating!

I had a lot of kind and constructive feedback on my first Ludum Dare entry. I had so much fun creating this game that I want to continue to develop it.

Here some of the things I can do to improve quickly my game: - Reworking the difficulty curves to add more challenge - Let Ron wake up (he deserves it :smile:) - Let just one button for taking down the inconvenience and catching the bad dreams - Change the brightness according to the time it is - Adding bonus or malus if the sleep meter is high - Adding furniture (Ron has just a bed)

If you have not try my game, you can do it from this page : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/deep-sleep-the-sandman

Feedbacks are much appreciated!!!

I hope I give you news soon :fingers_crossed:

I'm highlighting 3 "Hellevator" games that really stood out to me.

Chess Hellevator by @boxedmeatrevolution

Press all the elevator buttons on each level as you defeat pawns before they turn into queens. This is a great puzzle game with chess movement. Incredibly addicting, and a really fun boss level!

Hellevator by @baconn00

Keep your generator running, and draw symbols on the wall to fight off demons. 2 mini-games combined into one makes this a surprisingly difficult challenge. I played it several times, but couldn't quite beat it.

Hellevator Operator by @arcticmattekar and @for-science

Shuttle souls from one level of the underworld to the next. This one starts off slow, but picks up in pace and difficulty a few levels in. The sound design and physics give an incredibly satisfying feeling of weight.

And while you're at it, check out my game as well! I play, rate, and comment on everyone who comments on my game or posts, so stop by and say hi!

Hey everyone!

Just in case you are wandering around here, we just made some cool changes to our jam game! Feel free to share your thoughts and feedbacks with us (: We currently have the game in WebGL!

Version 1.2 coming out soon!

Check a look: Deep Breath

Another version of the link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/deep-breath-1