Hey everybody, really happy with all the feedback I've received on my game so far, I've just released the first update to the game with lots of bug fixes and brand new features. (Check patch notes below image)

BUG FIXES - Fixed glitch that prevented player from jumping next to a wall - Fixed rope collision bug - Fixed some level generation bugs

NEW CONTENT - New menu - 3 new soundtracks - Difficulty (Peaceful, Normal, Nightmare) - New Floor Spike enemy - Climbing Claws : Slide down walls and wall jump a short distance - Pickaxe : Break one block below the player (Upgraded pickaxe increases mining speed) - Neon Rope : Rope glows lots of cool neon colours. - Death messages - SOULS (Basically extra lives) - Improved enemy AI

TRY THE NEW UPDATE BY DOWNLOADING (NEW VERSION) ON THE ITCH.IO PAGE https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/the-plummet/

Since my game has reached 20 ratings already and I will have some spare time, I am going to rate some games in "need". If you have struggles with getting rates, feel free to send me your game directly, but otherwise I will just use the filters to do so. Please consider helping games under 20 rates aswell, there are so many amazing games!

There are still 12 days to go, so let´s enjoy the rating phase!

Hello, I want to share with you the early first level of our game Reminiscence.

The objective of this first level is to learn to the player the physic objects mechanic and the usage of lights. First, I placed a push button on the ground that the player will inevitably walk on. The light triggered changed in the final level because it was redondant with the hanging lamp.

The player will go down and understand that some blocks are pushable, and can interact with push buttons. Even if the physic mechanic is not fully used in our game, the gamelogics are here and could be used in a post-jam longer version.

The door that was blocking the player is a bit different because making a block falling on the third push button would be redondant with the fourth, so we just removed that puzzle and linked the second push button to the door.

The rest is exactly what you got in the released version :smile: There is a little stair to check if the player trully understood the stair mechanic and the fact that he can go up of in front of them. The push button triggers the hanging light, which burn its rope and falls on the tree. We want to proove that the physic is important in the game and some elements can burn and unblock the passage.

For the rest of the puzzles, I'll let you play and rate our game :wink: : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/reminiscence

Thank you to read my post, and see you in another!

If you have a puzzle game, post it in the comments, I'll play it.

We also made one, have a look if you like puzzles:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/webglhtml5-who-am-i

In this game you collect depth. It's my first 48 hour game jam, so if you have some extra time maybe check it out?

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/into-the-depth

Can you do me a favor and play my game and rate it and give me ideas for new update

I'm really happy with my game, and I got enough ratings to be scored this time!! :smile: So I'm really excited, and I would just like the thank everyone that rated, and left nice comments on my game, and I'll be updating the game after the PLAY+RATE games ends!

I'm really happy with the game I submitted, and this time I got enough ratings to be scored! :smile: So I'm really happy about that. I would just like to thank everyone that rated and left nice comments on my game, and just so everyone knows, I will be updating it with new, and improved features! :smile:

Maybe someone is interested in how others handled the GameJam so I will give a little insight on the progress of our (@zombree, @cephalo and me) game (Sticky Diagnosis) and some implementation parts I worked on that might be interesting.

The start :sleeping:

First off, we did not start when the theme was announced because at least @zombree and I are Europeans and therefore slept. When we woke up we talked about the theme and thought that digging down a hole would be the first thing that comes into mind when hearing "deeper and deeper" as a game theme. So we skipped that idea. Inspired by all the covid testing and thereby putting something into one of the holes in your head, I thought of tongue depressor idea. But because the nose is not easy to illustrate compared to the insides of a mouth, the mouth seemed like the better option.

We wanted to create a 2D/3D games, so that the objects can be illustrated quickly with no need of modelling. After the first testing we had trouble with the perspective because it did not feel like a 3D environment, so we adjusted the FOV and camera angle/position until it looked good. The problem still remained until the end though, as it is hard to know where the sticked leftovers might hit a bacteria. The perspective just makes it very hard.

These were the first drawn prototypes and well, you tell me what you see in them.

As @zombree and me both like to play Rogue-Like games we wanted to bring an aspect of that into this games as well. So the upgrade system was planned from the start. What we had as a game plan now was a tongue depressor going deeper and deeper into a mouth and some kind of upgrade system. We had no idea about any other game mechanic, maybe killing some bacteria on the way or something... ? So we started working! And we came up with everything on the fly.

The Facecam :stuckouttongueclosedeyes:

The facecam came into my mind just because I imagined it being funny to constantly have the struggling patient on your screen and it seemed fairly easy to implement. First idea was to have a split screen but that would have taken away too much screen space from the actual game.

All images for the facecam. Don't ask me why some of them have a black background, it's a Windows mistake. They are all transparent.

The photoshop file is waaay too disgusting and confusing because of the mass of layers now, so I won't show it. But in the end the different faces are multiple combinations of 3 type or eyebrow position/rotations and 5 different eye types (one of them closed). So it makes a total of 15 combinations. The tears/sweat is spawned randomly at some pre-defined locations on the face. The hand consists of 3 different images which also randomly change. The idea of the reveal which shows the patient "operating" on himself also came up while I drew the facecam because it looked like it was his hand.

The environment :tongue:

For the tongue movement we used 9 different images of the tongue and swap those images depending on the players speed. The palate is just one image which is set on repeat and gets shifted depending on the speed. We could not do that with the tongue because the tongue had outlines... In retrospect, I guess we could have used two different textures, one for the outline and one for the inside... but nevermind!

You can easily spot where the loop starts again, but it's not really that visible in the game. Between each image I basically moved everything except the outline down a little, scaled it up and added some dots on top.

The end :ok_woman:

In the end the most important part was probably implementing feedback. It is such a small, yet important part of a game, but it's needed everywhere. We mostly solved it by adding sound effects. I would consider the other parts of the game that I worked on (e.g. the menu) as not really interesting to read about, so I won't bother you with them.

If you have any questions please ask! :raising_hand: I would love to answer them

This man has a very small queue , he speaks english and russian , so if you will type something on english he will understand https://www.twitch.tv/zimennik

After a café break, our lead dev' records all of the game's excellent voice lines !

Deeper and Deepar

After playing I found so many ways of speedrunning such simple sections and completely missing the puzzle element

https://youtu.be/a1fy8FttUag

You can try on your own by playing our game

Hello guys!

Thanks to all the conquerors of Clockwork Abyss for the wonderful reviews and for the time spent in the game (yes, we know that for some of you it took an hour to complete the game).

However, we noticed that some players were experiencing freezes when playing in the browser. We decided that it would be unfair to spoil their experience with HTML5 restrictions, so we built a version for Windows. As it turned out, in addition to higher performance, the desktop version also has improved visuals due to the correct work of post-processing.

Meet the Clockwork Abyss. Shining and fast like never before!

"Cool and Funny game, I liked it!"

"It’s ready for consoles."

"Ahahahahah, this sounds are really good dude!"

"Love the humor and the art. It’s a cool game."

"I believe, this story and catchphrases have inhabited my mind for a few days. Want sequel!"

"now this is peak visuals and sound design!"

"No joke, these are some of the entries I look forward to the most during LD :D"

"This game made me laugh. The plot is fun"

"Very funny, beautiful sound effects 💜 [...] Theme interpretation obviously fantastic"

"Very few games have had me cracking up the entire time I’ve been playing! This game is fantastic"

"Voice acting is genius, dialogue is hilarious, the whole game is just ridiculous in the best way possible."

Deeper and Deepar

Me writing this :

Deeper and Deepar

One hundred games reviewed in this LD and still going strong!

If I'm not mistaken, it takes me about 10 minutes per game (probably more as I spent a lot of time playing a few games) to: play, rate and leave a comment. So it's now about 16 hours and 40 minutes. Pretty tired, but there are so many more interesting games that it's a shame to stop! Besides, it's only 2.5% of all games in this LD, so back to "work" ;)

A brief account (and thanks) of how I got in this community

Hello, everyone! I'm Pedro (@pedonho). I never thought I would be in this game industry, even though many years ago I was involved in this. I have always enjoyed being involved in creative areas and seeing how everything was done/developed and with games it was no different. Anyway, a little while ago I found myself doing this. It was something suddenly, it just happened... All of a sudden, since 4 months ago actually, I found myself programming and creating little games and I was having a lot more fun than I could ever imagine. I always hated logic and things of sort, doing the math and etc... I was always much more connected to the artistic part of anything I put myself into, but over time I became more and more interested in programming. Construct 3 also made everything more accessible and fun to learn. After some time I felt confident trying some new things, I got together with some friends and we created a game just to see how it could go: that's when "Madeline" emerged. Madeline was our first attempt making a game, a very intense experience and also a very big learning phase for all of us. And with it we learned to work as a group and decided to do Ludum Dare's 48 for the first time, but with 2 great additions to our team. If it weren't for me creating Madeline before, I would never imagine that in 3 days I would do anything like Hell Deep Is Your Love. I was very excited for this jam, it's all too recent and new to us still... But everything I have done so far in this game area amused me and gave me a feeling I had never felt before... a feeling of finding myself. Every comment, every live stream, every feedback feels like I'm finally in the right place.

My experience in Ludum Dare 48

Now, let's talk a bit about the process of programming this game. I'm going to talk about my two biggest challenges in programming Hell Deep Is Your Love... So, our first concept about the mechanics was that they would be mainly based on simply going up and down in ladders and ropes, so I tried a lot to polish the player's movement in it, although it wasn’t 100% I was somewhat proud of what I achieved with that, but obviously it has room for more adjustments. After I finished this part, I jumped to the death mechanics... Since the game has a lot of dying and functions around the idea of "repetition is learning", to get the death element right was very rough, so I thought several times about how it smoother so the player could enjoy the game. Then this solution came to me: how about zooming the player to see where he died and how? This could help him to learn from his mistake and it would not take long, and also wouldn't be the classic "game over/you're dead" annoying screen. Another thing I faced in this game jam was that some things went out of schedule (as always) in the face of all the stress, short time to handle things, and being the first time that the 5 of our team were together creating something like this. But in spite of everything... I loved the experience, learned so much from it and most of all, had loads of fun!

A little bit more about HELL deep is your love?'s future

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. Consider following us on Twitter to know more.

Oh, and of course, 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!

We at Banana4Life develop our games on Linux. Unity on Linux most of the time works fairly well, but every now and then we have some issues during the WebGL export. This time the export kept failing due to an incompatible python version on our systems.

Instead of looking into how to fix the export on our systems I started looking into ways to export the game using a containerized version of Unity. It doesn't take long to find the Game CI project and eventually Unity's official docker containers.

When using the containerized version of Unity, you still need a license file for it to start. If you are a free user of Unity, which I'm guessing is probably most of you, you can either take the file from your local installation or use the manual activation process. Try not get too confused about all the different "howto" guides for building your project with Unity's CLI, most of them are probably outdated. Stick to the official Unity documention, it covers all the options pretty well.

Building locally in container, while working perfectly fine, was suddenly not enough for me anymore and I started looking into building the export and deploying the WebGL version using Github actions. Luckily the GameCI project also built a ready made Github action that is pretty well documented: https://game.ci/docs/github/builder.

If previously blogged about how we deploy our games: here and here. So we simply create an orphaned branch for gh-pages and put the jam submissions into separate folders in there. Likely, there is an action for that as well.

So with this workflow on Github we now have a fully automated build and deployment of the WebGL version of our game within 10-15 minutes after the push to Github. This almost feels like cheating.

Hey everyone!

I've finally had the time to prepare a few improvements for my game:

Search for the Undergem

You can also check out the Post-Mortem here.

Change Log: * v1.1 * Displaying some stats at the end of the game (earned money, elapsed time, death count). * Implemented a timer in the HUD. * Slight upgrade name change for better comprehension.