Hey everyone, I'm Sam and I making a game with SDL2 and c++. Good Luck for this gamejam!

A card-based strategy game where you are the last human alive in your final stand against the zombie invasion.

Controlled by mouse

Cross-posted at my website: https://www.gbgames.com/2022/04/02/ld50-good-morning-yoga-breakfast-and-notes-ldjam-ld50/

Last night I created some concept art for what I am currently calling Disaster City:

When I went to bed, I thought of how the screen might look and what the player might do.

So this morning, despite wanting to exercise and get some breakfast first, I tried to write down some ideas, but Gizmo decided I shouldn't be too hasty getting into game development.

So I did some yoga and other light exercise, which is good because my back was bothering me earlier this week but seems fine now.

Then I made breakfast. I fried up some eggs, toasted some waffles, smeared them with peanut butter, sprinkled some cinnamon, put the eggs on top, and had a messy, drippy breakfast of game development champions.

I learned long ago that orange juice is basically full of sugar, so I no longer have a large glass and now make use of the juice glasses that I thought were ridiculously small when we got them shortly after getting married almost 10 years ago.

Finally, I pulled out my Ludum Dare t-shirt from 2011, when I went to an Ludum Dare gathering at GDC. It's fitting a little tighter around my midsection but otherwise seems to still fit.

I spent more time than I maybe should have reading through other people's posts. We're now past the first 12 hours of the compo, and my goal is to have something playable within the next 12 hours.

So, Disaster City. I think the "Delay the Inevitable" theme seems to push me to make the kinds of games I started out making, in which there is no victory condition, just a game in which you see how long you can last before you lose. I want to resist this tendency, so what's inevitable that isn't also an ending?

Or maybe it is fine for it to be an ending, and the focus is on what you do before then?

Originally, my thought was that Disaster City would constantly be hit with multiple disasters, and you have limited resources to repair and restore what's happening. Your efforts never make it 100% better, so it's more about reducing the impact rather than eliminating it. And eventually it all comes crumbling down.

But now I'm sad. What's the point?

Instead, what if there was a way to achieve victory?

I'm thinking that you are part of the city council. There is a meteor heading towards the planet, and you need to fund R&D and eventually a mission to divert it.

Unfortunately, Disaster City earned its name. You also need to deal with disasters such as monster attacks, floods, fires, etc. These disasters damage and eventually destroy homes, roads, utilities, commercial centers, entertainment options like stadiums, etc. As you lose those things, you lose people, income sources, and your capabilities to prevent and repair the damage.

So it's a balancing act. You have an ultimate big bad thing coming, but you also have the more immediate things to worry about. You need to decide when to let go of the immediate consequences to focus on the long-term without letting the short-term consequences prevent your long-term goal from being achieved. The game ends when you manage to prevent the meteor from hitting the planet, or when it hits the planet, or when your city's population disappears.

It feels overscoped at the moment.

I jotted down some notes and started trying to come up with a screen layout.

I think I still need to do some prototyping on paper to get a feel for how the game will actually work instead of hand-wavy vagueness,m but otherwise, I think this direction might work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xvsNJKt7sI

i have no idea what i am doing!

Hello! I hope its going well for everyone today :).

I have worked with this enemy guy all day ! He started as a consept this morning and have became a 3D model this afternoon, and I am now currently giving him some animations :D.

Good luck everyone! :)

I figured that this theme would attract tons of endless survival games, and decided that I wanted something different. So my game needs to have a clear end goal while still having something inevitable to delay. The inevitable thing can't be failure (since otherwise, winning would make it not inevitable) but still needs to be bad. I struggled to come up with an idea, but after finding these guidelines I got something.

My idea: you're fighting a boss. There's a curse meter that slowly fills up, and fills up faster when you're in the boss' aura of darkness. When the meter is full, it empties, and one of your special abilities is permanently weakened or disabled. If you get cursed too much, you die, but it's possible to beat the boss before that happens.

I already had a rough idea of the game I wanted to make. So although making an adventure game is typically very design first I wanted to stick with one of my traditions of getting the game playable as soon as possible. I don't feel like a game jam has really begun until I'm controlling my character walking around the screen.

So with a combination of an Art Deco asset pack and drawing over a template character, along with the countdown clock I built earlier I've got my first room up and running:

With that out of the way I needed to focus a bit on the structure and scope of the game. It needs to be simple enough to be buildable in a day (so I have another day for polish) but interesting enough for adventure game players to sink their teeth into. While I mulled that over I started my day with a very over indulgent lunch.

What I've settled on for game structure for now is a kind of escape room type setup. There's a vault door you need to open and there's three simple clues to open the door. However each of these clues is going to be obtained by solving a puzzle in another room. So that's four puzzles rooms and the inside of the vault to make.

Scope wise this is a little larger than I'm comfortable with, and depending how the day goes I may cut one of the puzzle rooms to keep this within a sensible LD scope. Let's see how the day goes.

This little earth will soon meet a terrible fate...

IT'S ON! Our little game jam hacker collective Dubious Potions is back for LD50. We're so excited. This year we split up into two groups. One VR and one 2d pixel team. We're the 2d pixel one 🎉

Meet the team: @ocwal, @failuer, @voxar, @milestone-games, @mascoll and me @javve

What are we building you may ask?

We're building a Mars rover game where the battery has a very central spot, YAY!

Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dubious_potions/

...and Twitter https://twitter.com/dubious_potions

...and check out our sister team here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/catharsis

Here is a photo from the Dubious Potions meeting we're we decided which ideas to pick.

And here is a part of the Battery Low team :innocent:

@ocwal, @failuer, @voxar and @milestone-games

The eternal problem -do you build the sprite modular and allow for different weapons without creating a bunch of sprits, or just power on and stop procrastinating...

People last year asked for a bit more insight into my process.

Here's what I've done so far: 9pm looked at the theme. Let it cook a bit while watching some TV with my wife. Chilled for a bit, slept.

Woke up, lay in bed thinking over the theme and mechanics. Saturday morning seems to be my best thinking time for this kind of thing, and if I can come up with a kernel or two that I can run with, I can spend the afternoon tinkering with them and hope one of them coalesces into a workable game. (My LD49 entry came together after discarding at least 3 basic mechanics as entirely non-functional, but I knew I wanted to do some sort of dexterity game about things not falling with readily available components)

So here's my kernel I'll be working from: "Delay the inevitable" + "LD/50" + dice -- each round, something encourages/requires you to roll an increasing number of dice. If the combined roll is >50 you lose (or the game ends).

• Try to get "press your luck" feeling in.
• Probably a solo game, both because this kernel supports that and because they're easier for people to try
• LD/50 is 15
• This means 25-30 dice are probably adequate again (Liar's Dice/Perudo has 30)

Noodling will be around making something fun, how hard I want to lean into the medical theme vs leave it as quiet inspiration/an in-joke sort of thing as people might find it uncomfortable, whether I can tie the results of rolls into the next round usefully (so it matters what you get not just whether you hit 50), whether an additional randomizer [cards] is desired or will be crufty and a board is sufficient, what the actual game is -- why am I pulling dice, what makes me want to use more, where's the tension encouraging me to pull more than I "should", what is creating inevitability (is it inevitable that I'll eventually roll over 50 or is there some other end condition the dice are pushing back?)

I'll check in again later as I progress. I might do a desk stream at some point, but as I've recently done a major move I'm not sure I can make that work this jam.

A room, a room... what sort of things will go in here? (gif on twitter )

My day 1 progress! Let's have a great day 2 everyone! (ง •̀ w •́)ง

Hi everyone, Today we are glad to present you our beautiful cast of vilains : the mighty (and glowy) radioactive skeletons :skull: and our beloved enigmatic fighter !! :radioactive:

Are you ready to confront our bad boys ??

Because Gepetto, king of the undying loop :crown: (and also our second protagonist), is more ready than ever !!

(Oh don't worry, you can only delay the inevitable... They'll always get you in the end... :skull_crossbones:)

It looks great.

Is this 'lil guy scary, or adorable?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ouc1L0s2rQ

Why, another endless survival game? Yes!

...last jam was a mess, give me a break.

So basically, there are outlets on the left and homing weapons on the right. You connect the weapons to the outlets and they start firing. Each weapon fires toward a specific kind of enemy, but the more weapons are plugged in at the same time, the worse they all perform.

What the game designers draw:

What the 3D artists make:

Going a little slower than I would like. But the progress can start to really take off now that the camera and movement are done.

Been a few hours and I have this character controller to show for it. His goal is to catch falling sandwiches...