We need 5 more vote please :)

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

We need 5 vote more ;)

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

Its time to save some games!! I'm rating #ludumdare #ludumdare48 #gamejam games that need 1 or 2 ratings! If your game need ratings (or not) post it on my chat and I'll play it! https://twitch.tv/devchrisap

We are bonded with the games. We put our blood , sweat and tears in over a weekend to make these games. We want to see these games grow up into a fully fleshed out games, ready to reach the masses.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/deeper-into-the-mind The Game.

...as the days progress through the countdown timer, our problem child needs a lot of nurturing and coddling. We look down and see that it is not where it should be for release.

So...we plan to add those features that the reviewers pointed out, enemy feedback, better contrast in the dark levels, player health indicator and several others.

Thank you so much for playing and for the constructive community reviews.

(~~Everyone loved these tentacles so we decided to make them harder~~ one of the bugs we managed to iron out before the initial release.)

We've hit the 40 rating milestone, which is more than any of us expected. While for me and @vic this Ludum wasn't our first, our previous title gained some interest in participation by our friends and we got together to create this project (especially since neither @ade or @vatx has done any game jams before this). (Few of the planned outfit designs for the player character.Final version can be found on our artist's thank you post.)

And what a rollercoaster that was. From learning new tools, to finding a bug in the game engine compiler, I'm certainly sure it was very educational round of Ludum for everyone. Enough to inspire us to push forward with the project and see if we can take it even further.

While you can still find the game and play/rate here, we've decided for now take a step back and spend some time to figure and fine-tune a more extended gameplay loop and other bits and pieces. We'll be posting updates about the game project on our team's new twitter account.

(One of the monsters that didn't make it in yet.)

Once again, thank you everyone who took time to play and leave feedback, it'll carry us far on making this game into full release one day.

WE CONTINUE WORKING ON GAMES !!

NEW GAME(one week): https://youtu.be/3B31HBZpc3Q PLAY GAME AND RATE: https://itch.io/jam/this-is-argentina/rate/1043259

SUBMISSION LUDUMDARE 48: https://youtu.be/SFWNk4Y-hZ8 PLAY GAME AND RATE: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/hole-down

Go play it, it's amazing for a 2 day effort!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/abyssal-lab

Hey guys! We're here live at https://www.twitch.tv/secret_juice to stream more LD games one last time before the rating period ends. I hope you guys decide to come out!

Come drop you danger zone games in my chat!
(20 ratings or less only PLS)

https://www.twitch.tv/itsboats

Our entry: Bioluminescence. In the deep ocean, the only light source is bioluminescence. Chase the bioluminescent jellyfish around the screen to uncover the hidden fish!

This time round, I worked on another project, but I managed to create this game in the last 4 hours before the deadline.

The game uses a kind of flocking / Boids algorithm. The jellyfish move away from the mouse, but they also keep a minimum distance from each other, and move towards a certain point. The result is something quite pretty and organic looking!

>>> Play Bioluminescence <<<

So it's ~24 hours till results.

I wish we had a bit more ratings, we got 49 so far.

Our programmer @brutor decided that we'll finish this game one way or another.

I've decide what we gonna do if we have some good placement.

Depends on placement we are going to: - lower than 1001: just finish the game somehow sometime. - 201..1000: finish the game in a year or so and sell it on steam for a low price (1-3$) - 21..200: finish the game in a year or so and make it as good as possible, find one more programmer and an artist, sell the game on steam for a medium price (3-7$) - 1..20: look for a publisher/investor and work on our game fulltime.

And what's your plan?

And if you still didn't see and rate our game, you are welcome! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/death-cult

What went right

• I was surprised people liked MION's character design so much! (little tidbit: her hat's feather changes! It is a heart for her lives, a broken heart when she is hit, and an exclamation mark when she dies!)
• The animations worked as well! I am so glad that my intuition with frame timing has not faltered with a transfer to game design!
• The sound is exactly what I like to work on. They were the style and feeling I've wanted to do for so long. I am so happy I pulled through.
• The Dash was satisfying and was keyframed well! I hope those who talked about it, talked about it when we added the extra i-frames to it! I thought it gave more freedom to an already unfair game.
• The Attack was also satisfying to hit and see the animation go! The lights and sound helped a lot to make it pop!
• No-one mentioned the i-frames being unfair nor the movement being too slow so that's a plus! Or maybe that was also part of the difficulty problem. Either way, I hope the extra invincibility at the beginning and end of the get hit animation and the end of the dash helped!

What to focus more on

• Explaining the game better (in game & browser descriptions): Goal, Obstacles, and how to overcome and achieve.
• Images for Clarity: Have graphics for controls and images to show off as previews
• Controls should feel intuitive: maybe this is b/c of the above^ point but I feel like we could do better and maybe make more actions to do!
• Make sure the HUD is the perfect size and it is big enough to see without giving the player a disadvantage! Possible transparency could work!
• Balance focus between the theme and the game you want to make: we had a lot of trouble trying to fit in the theme. tbh, it slowed us down and we should have just went straight into gameplay ideas rather than the theme of them.

What went wrong (+ what to work on)

• The light mechanic (having it spotlight the player & clover ball) had no purpose and hindered the player more than offer a challenge. Removing it or making it more intuitive to discovery would make it more useful.
• The attack system (moving the ball by pulse attack left click) was almost executed well! But due to the ball not being able to rebound and us not explaining how the ball can kill the enemies (the ball has to be bounced at an enemy)
• Overall Difficulty: while we worked and worked, we did not playtest enough and the game came out super hard and unfair in the end. I like to think of it something like Super Mario Maker: if you cannot beat it yourself, you can't upload it!
• Camera Distance: the camera distance/angle must match the gameplay you are going for! Ours did not match and the camera was too close for the player to react fast enough!
• Enemy Balancing: The blue ball is basically a non-threat compared to the red ball's fast speed and high stealth. It is an assassin stacked against the player. There should be less of a difficulty difference between the enemies in the same level. Ramping up difficulty as the player progresses can also be a better fix.
• Due to us revamping the gameplay mechanics back and forth, it left the gameplay in the end feel far from fleshed out. Deciding on a basic idea for the game (goal, controls, and how to achieve the goal) would make it much easier on testing and coding.
• The Dash's charges: Heads: they turned out to be an afterthought as it was first thought that the player would be collecting the heads (as MION FOREVER was a puzzle game) but the heads later became just pickup charges for Mion to use to dash. The idea turned out to be a hindrance as the dash felt too good! Maybe it would have been best to just let yall dash!

We currently have no plans to continue working on MION FOREVER however, we love to see all the feedback as we will definitely continue to design games! :D

THANK YOU ALL FOR PLAYING OUR GAME <3

Links

Game Jam Page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/mion-forever

Itch: https://polkoii.itch.io/mion-forever

Newgrounds: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/791388

SOUNDTRACK: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1OFXjTpl97jwCtsW8TR3sPf0HgiQbmHP

Credits

Programming: @royalcookiex @joshthestriker

Art & Sound: @polkoii

Have you played Descending ? https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/descending

After a huge load of valuable feedback screaming about how the game is mostly dark breaking completely user experience, we've been working on new lighting props of many hights to spread a lot of lights across the level, however, through some procedural wobbling, make these lights randomly oscilates between colors, ranges, intensities and randomize it's own sprite being used for light's flare / cookie! Monique Moon (https://www.instagram.com/moniq.moon/) designed all the props art for modularity and multiple layers of stacking!

As the final result of our effort, the "wobbling lights" creates many patterns of light and shadows constantly, and the props generates an awesome composition almost without perceivable repetitive patterns!

It has been a ton of fun rating games and getting comments. This second LudumDare was a real adventure. Me and my team went through and created something we could be way more proud of than our first go around. Not to mention we met someone new and they created an awesome sound track for our decent game. We didn't deserve the boost, but it was a welcome surprise. I hope you had fun with us @belgianwizard.

From the beginning I had a few ideas that we might go with and after talking it over we agreed on an idea and got to work. My 3D skills are still pretty new so I didn't feel ready to jump right in and make my own assets. Instead I looked for some decent ones through a variety of market places, finally I landed on the space pack from Synty. It had everything we absolutely needed letting me get started on the IK rigging and environment construction right away. I still have a lot to learn on both fronts, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Next time I think I'll focus on the environment first and then turn to the character after. Sinking a lot of time into figuring out IK rigging better ate up a lot of time. Instead I wish I focused on the finer details of the environment like where we wanted our turrets and how we wanted our bullets to look.

The pandemic certainly had a lot of effects this year, most of them not so convenient. We saw this full force when @dandala88 ended up getting his second shot half way through the JAM taking him out of commission for at least half a day. This put a damper on things, but we pushed forward. Like a real trooper he pushed through and kept working until he had to give in and take a rest. After the effects wore off he came back with his efforts redoubled.

He jumped back in fixing issues and pushing til the launch! Then on top of that coming back at it and updating so people could play in browser was awesome.

@dankfudge from the beginning pushed his ideas through to functionality at a breakneck speed. He was able to get the basic functionality working for our turrets and bullets.

We really appreciated everyone that came in and rated our game, and anyone that decides to here in the last few hours. I wish I could add more details, but I'm about out of space. I'll keep thinking on this and add details in another post later.

We would like to thank everyone who took the time to play our game "BUBBLY". We are very happy with the comments and criticisms and, for sure, we will be better in the next LUDUM DARE. See you soon!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFhiX_Wrh8s

And if you haven't played BUBBLY yet, just go there and have fun.

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

There is still time to leave your name in our world ranking!

Thanks everyone for your support, feedback and rates.

Hope you had fun with my little game, and if you haven't I appreciate if you can give it a chance here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/the-final-frontier

Thanks for your time!

Ideas

As always in the LD, I jotted down a few ideas I had after seeing the theme. Like pretty much everyone I think my first ideas revolved around digging:

• A roguelite sort of like Spelunky, a sort of sidescroller with RPG elements that took place underground.
• An underground colony sim. colony sims are one of my favorite genres, and I've always wanted to make one for the LD.

In the end, I abandoned idea #1 as it seemed too obvious, and an underground strategy game was too similar to my previous entry Underminers Inc.

My third idea was some kind of space game involving a cloud... or asteroid field... or something. Originally I imagined a FTL-like real-time with pause type game, but in the end I decided it wouldn't be all that fun. From there it was a simple matter of paring down my ideas (my original idea had jump points and other complex stuff).

Development

What Went Well

I'm fairly happy with how the gameplay turned out. The different ways the enemies interact is interesting (in my opinion, anyway).

In the past I've used all sorts of strategies for generating music for my LD games. In every game prior to LD47 I used the result of a music generator. In LD47 I directly composed the music on my keyboard. For this LD, I used a combination of generated music using Abundant Music and custom made segments in LMMS, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I think I'll do this again next time.

Babylon.js graphics worked out quite well, with few surprises, although it certainly helped that I'd used it in LD47. I did notice that performance in Chrome was much better than Firefox. I'm not completely sure why. In the past it's seemed like they're pretty comparable.

What Didn't Go Well

I probably should have been a little more careful in testing. In the end I fixed most of the critical bugs, but some I mostly found through chance: * Due to the collision issues mentioned below, shots would simply damage the nearest hostile object when they hit anything. This led to a funny bug where the shots could hit eachother, damaging the boss. This made the boss pretty easy to beat. * There was a bug where old ships from your previous lives would hang around, and when you pressed "fire missile" these "ghost ships" would all launch as well, causing a huge storm of missiles. This was caused by me not disconnecting the input callbacks when a player ship was destroyed. * There was a bug where the boss would despawn if you ran away immediately, causing an instant win.

Babylon.js is primarily a graphics library so its physics support can be a little iffy. The collision callback system is a bit hard to use, so I had to add some hacks that sort of caused one of the bugs I mention below.

It also supports collision filtering, but I wasn't able to get it to work properly. In the end I simply adopted a very simple approach where shots would always spawn outside things to prevent the possibility of self-collision, and couldn't collide with other shots.

Finally, there's a bug where imported glTF files don't have their transformations applied correctly. In the end the fix here was pretty easy: I just applied the transformations in Blender.

I spent quite awhile tuning the difficulty, but this is always hard to do in a solo event like this. For me, this is basically how the difficulty levels work:

• Easy - So trivial I can beat it without having to dodge.
• Medium - Trivial as long as I remember to dodge.
• Hard - Hard enough that I have to stay on my toes, but I can beat it on the first try.
• Impossible - I can beat it but only after a bunch of tries.

However, it sounds like this is one of those cases where I got sort of good at it due to hours of testing, so the difficulties are too high. I'll just have to remember this for next time.

Conclusion

That's about it for Cloud 57. Play it here.

Instead of adding new features to GA GAME ME, I've just been tweaking the animations to make player more squishy. I love it :)

For reference, this is the old jump animation

I also felt like the player needed a proper death animation, and it is maybe the best animation I have ever created:

You can't play that version yet -- I figured I'd wait until the rating period ends before updating it, seeing as that will happen so soon!

Results come out in less than a day, so good luck to everyone! :grin:

Only 15 hours left in this awesome game jam. Thanks all for voting and playing our game. We had a blast and I hope y'all did as well. We have played so many wonderful and surprising games and will definitely be back next time. Thanks a lot @LD48 for organizing this.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/deeper-geddon

To celebrate we made a new trailer for our game. Here it is!