Try my game, rate it and give some feedback if you want: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/deep-fall-1

and the link to your game so i can try it! (web only)

play and rate my game and give some feedback if you want: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/deep-fall-1

and post a link to your game so i can try it! (Web only)

>> PLAY HERE <<

First, we wanted to give a huge thank you to all who have played our game!

We did not expect our little jam game about a funny knight with their tiny sword to get such a big reaction, and we want to thank everyone for their kind words, their excitement, and their rage playing our game. We never would have thought we’d have gotten almost 1000 ratings-- you all are incredible!

In this post-mortem, we’d like to share some of our processes and thoughts while making the game.

The first night the team started the ideation process by noodling through a bunch of different ideas based on the theme “deeper and deeper”. We made a brainstorm doc and put down everything from a game-within-a-game, to a platform digger, to a deep space Pokemon Snap. Eventually, during dinner Rosypenguin exclaimed “Drive it deeper into its heart”! This became the inspiration for Deepest Sword. After voting on the idea, we began to flesh it out by creating some quick mock-ups and describing key gameplay moments.

Our “ideastorm” document where we put our initials by our favorite ideas.

Next was engineering. Strega put together a quick playable prototype on the dawn of the second day. He made sure the gameplay mechanics felt fun and responsive using placeholder art before creating the rest of the game structure. He also focused on making tools and shortcuts to be able to quickly test different aspects of the game making tuning and level design a lot faster and easier.

On the third day, Strega focused on designing the stages and tuning the movement mechanics. The goal of each area was to ramp up the difficulty while also focusing on a specific method of using your sword. To make the game deeper, earlier levels had to be designed in such a way that longer swords forced you to rethink the puzzles.

For the art, Rosypenguin wanted to try out LDTK to build the levels. The tiles she built for Deepest Sword were inspired by the Cavernas tileset by Adam Saltsman but given its own dragoney flair. She also picked five distinct color palettes to represent the increasing difficulty of the cavern. As for why a cute dragon for the boss? Well she likes to draw dragons, and asked herself “how can I make this dragon different?” and slapped on some eyelashes…

The sounds didn’t come in until later. Strega used JFXR to create the sound effects and Animalese.js to create the fun dialog effects. Tenlki made a fun, addicting track to use as the BGM. He had a bit of an artist block coming up with a fitting song, playing with different styles and scrapping at least 3 different tracks. He wasn’t originally happy with it, but all the feedback about the song and hearing people sing along with the track while playing changed his mind. Listen Here!

Before the last day, Strega had uploaded a build of the game to Itch.io and submitted it to the LDJam site just in case we wouldn’t have time to work on the game due to having to go back to work on Monday.

We woke up on Monday ready to start a regular work day-- and out of nowhere we saw that we were getting comments and plays already! That’s when we learned that AlphaBetaGamer posted a review of Deepest Sword overnight-- and on a pre-release build too! With the increasing number of views, Rosypenguin scrambled to take the day off work and put together final versions of the title image and ending screen (inspired by some of the... interesting comments that were coming in). Strega was able to also get in some additional polish elements such as screen transitions and VFX. And Tenlki got in the final version of the music, just before the deadline.

The weeks since had been a whirlwind. AlphaBetaGamer’s video reached over a million views, it got viral on TikTok, spawned several pieces of fanart (many NSFW ones), and built up a small but dedicated speedrun community. We are always delighted to see streamers and VTubers play and react to our game, and have jumped in and interacted a few times too!

video

We have a few plans on the horizon to add more options and support for this little game. No promises on new levels or expansions, but we’ve already listened to the fans and added in frequently requested features such as key rebinding and volume control. There’s also plans for a Steam release. Please join our Discord to share your ideas, speedruns, fanart, or just ask us questions!

I've found a few spare hours today so now we can stream more LD games! We're live here at https://www.twitch.tv/secret_juice so come and say hi!

A quick timelapse designing of the stomach in the 4th level.

gif

Due to overly positive feedback, an update is in the works to uplift the game from the prototype stage. If you haven't already, feel free to check the game out! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/yet-another-scp-087-game

Thank you to everyone who played our first 3D game this jam, and everyone who left comments letting us know what we could do better. After weeks of work we've now released a post-jam version with plenty of revisions that you can find on https://trustyshm.itch.io/tdoshd

Trusty made a pretty detailed post about all the changes, most noticeably a major graphics boost and significant improvement in enemy AI. You can find that here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/the-depths-of-science/the-depths-of-science-hd-polished-post-jam-version-now-available-on-itch-io

And of course, a gameplay trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_E6HRidpn4

For my part, I made a redesigned gun with flashlight and clips, which now is reloaded in the game.

Look at that beauty.

I also made some statues for decoration, and light fixtures throughout to make more sense of where the light is coming from in each level. You'll also find some new enemies and surprises that I don't want to spoil.

Hi all, as the title says I'm searching for games to play...

To be played a game must have less than 20 ratings or you have to win "The challenge" (see below). In both cases I'll try, rate and leave a feedback to your game.

The challenge

I'm going to try the games of the ones that wins the challenge regardless their rating amount, afterall it's a challenge... To win the challenge you have to finish our game with at least 2 molatoes alives. To prove that won the challenge just publish a screenshot on our game page with the ending text (it says the count of the molatoes alive at the end), it must be "full screen" (to avoid copying other victory images). It won't be super easy neither impossible (I won with 5 molatoes alive). If you are interested in the challenge here are some tips:

Tip1: you can select the tools using keys 1-5.

Tip2: take a quick look at the tutorial. It'll help you to understand the tools usage.

Tip3: use signs to keep them together and to direct them towards the larger gold veins.

The Keyboard Cowboys had a blast doin' this every weekend, and we sure ain't plannin' to stop now!

Come join the madness one last time at https://www.twitch.tv/coleslawski

Dear Jammers, Organizers and Enthusiasts ,

LD48 is indeed running at its end and I would want to thank all of you for the glorious edition we've had this time round. Regardless of results, this final Compo has been a blast. Well done to all and thank you all for this event ! However... It is not done just yet.

As Super Turtle Drop turned out quite popular, in- and outside of the Ludum Dare community, I've decided to just go for it. I cleared the leaderboards. The idea is that the person with the highest in game score will be recorded as the Ludum Dare Super Turtle Drop Champion for all eternity on the LD page! As I plan to release the game on mobile (post jam update offcourse), that player will also be featured in the credits (should I ever get to that stage).

Please, do enjoy yourself. There's a build for Windows, Linux and Android ready !

WARNING : WEB BUILD DOES NOT CONNECT TO LEADERBOARDS

Till then,

JavaSaurus (Super Turtle Drop creator)

I'll be streaming as much as possible for the last 72 hours remaining doing some Play + Rate. I'll be looking at games in the Danger tab or if your game need ratings post it in my chat and I'll play it! https://www.twitch.tv/devchrisap

Just tow days left to close this LDJam. Hope you had fun and that your entries are doing well.

If you have a few minutes this weekend, please play+rate+feedback The Final Frontier. A 3D faller where you need to make your way through Korals and Mines to collect peaces from previous submarines, and reach the bottom.

You can play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/the-final-frontier

Looking forward to play, rate and provide feedback to your games.

Hello, fellow jammers!

As we approach the end of play and rate, I decided to do some retrospection and identify what I did well and not so well this event, and what I can do differently in the future. Let's jump in!

The good

• The concept. I decided to avoid some of the more obvious interpretations of "Deeper and Deeper," and instead combine two more abstract ideas --- relationships that can grow deeper, and music getting lower in pitch.

• The music. I had a lot of fun on this game's composition work, and I think it came together well.

The bad

• The difficulty. The most glaring issue with my entry is how difficult it is. Especially with a story-based game, you want people to complete it, and I failed to adjust the difficulty well enough as I was rushing to create content.

• The mix. I made my music in MuseScore, and while that works well for composing, it lacks the power of a real DAW to use realistic digital instruments, fine-tune balance, and create a fuller sound. More than usual, my music this time was held back by using basic MIDI instruments.

• The legs. I forgot to draw legs on my humans. Don't look too close.

Conclusion

The intersection of music and level design was a really fun area to explore. Because the player needs to feel like they're playing the melody of the song, you create an inherent link between the complexity of the music and the difficulty of the game. In one case, the player plays the high notes in the first level and the low notes in the last level for the same music --- which forces the game design, story, and music all work hand-in-hand.

Since this is my most audio-focused entry since LD39, my goal for this event is a personal best in Audio. This means earning at least a 4.35 in order to beat my LD46 entry, Broken Threads.

Why is it called "Fade"?

Memories fade. People fade. Sounds fade. But more amusingly, the main leitmotif of my soundtrack consists of these notes in order:

You can download Fade here. Best of luck everyone, and see you again for LD49!

Nadiria is a precision sidescroller, dive to the bottom of the Nadiria trench in search of treasure!

There's only one goal - dive deeper!

Download, Play, and Rate NADIRIA here!

Hello Everyone! With LD48 coming to a close we would like to thank everyone for playing and enjoying our game, it was our first project like this and for some of us our first attempt at making a real game, we are really glad for all the positive reception and precious feedback we have received.

And if you haven't played it yet, please consider giving it a shot! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/spellunker

We have listened to and read everything you guys had to say about our game, and decided that we want to continue the development of Spellunker and release it as a full game!

While we are still setting up, we have made a Twitter account where we will be posting the progress of Spellunker Development, if you are interested, please come check it out!

https://twitter.com/eutangerine

-- Spellunker Team (@naamed, @ade, @vic, @vatx)

I would also like to give personal thanks to everyone as the artist, Spellunker was my first real time working with pixel art and animations and I was really happy to see so many people enjoy the graphics, to express my thanks I prepared an illustration featuring our game protagonist, Alia!

Hi! We'd like to tell a bit about our entry for LD48.

IDEA
Below the Tide is a game-experience where a vessel of an unknown origin explores the underwater world. The mechanics lie in moving through the suspended islands without hitting them in a search for safe landing spots. The goal is to go as deep as you can before the battery runs out. The hook of the game is in maneuvering between the obstacles while preserving as much energy as possible at the same time.

DEVELOPMENT
The gameplay development was all in Unity. Probably, the biggest chunk of the programming was in making the terrain for the never-ending underwater environment. The islands are generated in a procedural way by running the marching cubes algorithm on a signed distance field produced by 3D perlin noise. The mesh topology is generated on the fly and expands as you reach the level bounds, while the rest is being occluded for performance reasons. Using such noise as an input for level generation gives an almost unlimited freedom for controlling the shapes, density, roundness, fuzziness, blobiness etc of the islands. But it was (and is in post-mortem development) a challenge to get it work and look nice.

Below is the screenshot of the early work-in-progress, looking for a nice terrain variant.

One of the early decisions was to implement meshing to run on GPU using compute shaders, which worked out well in terms of performance (no loading screens), but unfortunately is not supported on WebGL at the moment. This resulted in the game only being available for the desktop platforms.

The shading was done using a custom-made set of shaders. The biggest problem was in making the terrain look as intended, basically, generating smooth-shaded normals on the procedural mesh. Because we had no time to polish the look of the generated islands — it would be easier to do if they were hand-made in Blender — we had to do some shading tricks to mask the imperfections of the terrain. Particularly, the psychedelic silky-smooth look of ‘charger’ islands didn’t work well with the marching cubes’ sharp normals.

WHAT WENT RIGHT
We finished the game that is playable and generally looks nice! Even though by the end of the jam the game was holding on sticks and a bubble-gum, we consider this an achievement.

WHAT WENT WRONG
There’s not much of the gameplay in Below the Tide in the Jam version. We have ideas on how to make the controls more interesting, but not sure if it’s worth pursuing.

What do you think? All feedback is very welcome!

https://youtu.be/I5-K_o1N6Is

Play + Rate:
itch.io
LD Jam entry

Hey, all! The Tech Valley Game Space community will be live-streaming ourselves playing Ludum Dare games, starting today, May 15th, from 7 - 9 PM EDT on twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace, youtube.com/c/techvalleygamespace, and picarto.tv/TechValleyGameSpace

To have your game in consideration for playing and judging, you can sign up on this form: forms.gle/kbUdacxVfnVaGrq17

As the form states, we do enforce a Code of Conduct in our live-streams. As such, we do reserve the right to cancel streaming and rating a game for any reason.

Hope to check out your games soon!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/just-down-jack

Hi! This was my first time finishing a game for a Ludum Dare Jam! I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, especially because I was able to make all of the art!

I would love some feed back on it if you’re interested in checking it out: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/the-crystal-cavern I also need one more humor rating for 20!

If you would like me to try out your game, just let me know I would be happy to!