Hi all again! Thanks for watching the first video, here is another video where I play 15 more random games for time saving. Enjoy watching.

🎥 Video: https://youtu.be/abuSq4xR-qU

P.S. If you like any game and wanna try them yourself, I have add links all of them in the video description.

| | | | :---: | :---: | | | | | Lasing | Aligns |

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Rating Page Please also leave yours so we can review and comment! We would love to see your work!

Hi Everyone,

I know it's a bit late but really would like to share our game with you. We made two games for this jam LASING and ALIGNS (a Demo to show the artstyle) and from the names you can read they all came from SIGNAL - so the two games are intercorrelated. The games talks about the same story & background, which by design it's like one game is sending a signal to another. It talks about the space and existentialism.

Like this idea? Come and play to Find this out. We are really looking forward to your suggestions and feedbacks. Please also leave a comment here if you want me to play your game and we will also rate yours.

Thank you,

Meltina & UFEN

Before anything else, I need to say THANK YOU for everyone that played our game, you are all amazing! ❤️
Oh and share the link of your game in the comments, we for sure wanna play more and more games!

Now let's about quality of life updates that are coming:

Timer

- For those who really enjoy the pressure or speerunning the game! We encourage everyone to try to get their best times. Make sure to share your result with us!

Timer Toggle

- Not a fan of that timer going up and giving you free anxiety? Just press 1 button and boom, goes away. For those who will leave it on, pausing the game also pauses the timer. Toggling it on and off doesn't reset it!

Respawn

- Did you mess up your speedrun attempt or got stuck on the web somewhere? You can just press your safety restart to go back from the beggining or just press R (for those speedrunners out there).

Last Patch

• Web Version
• Saw Collider Adjusted to be Smaller
• Audio Crackling Fixed
• Asset Layering Fixed

What's next?

• Death Count
• Hitbox Improvements

Play our game:

Wi-Fix It

My dev log on itch.io where I talk a little bit about how this is my first game jam experience and some of the issues we had, is the first dev log I've ever written! If you would like to read it, here it is: https://shanzgamestudios.itch.io/small-among-storms/devlog/1497219/my-first-ludem-dare-small-among-storms And if you would like to follow along with what happens to Small Among Storms, or any future games that we make, follow me there on itch.io and also on my instagram that is linked in my Ludum Dare profile!

If you haven't played our game yet: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/small-among-storms

a lot of people liked the game’s art style, so I decided to show a bit of how it evolved! :)

day 1 morning: day 1 evening: day 2 morning: day 2 evening:

Play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/follow-the-signal

Here's ours. :grimacing:

In TellyBuddy, you have to rotate a TV around and interact with it at different angles to solve puzzles.

The thing is...The TellyBuddy actually doesn't rotate AT ALL. We move the camera AROUND it instead (to avoid a lot of complicated quaternion math shenanigans involving Gimbal Lock).

So how do we make it look like the TellyBuddy is rotating in front of a 2D background?

Easy!

Just make the background a sprite and make sure that it is always oriented DIRECTLY behind the TellyBuddy, no matter what direction that the camera is pointing! :laughing:

There is almost DEFINITELY a better way to do this, but when you have mere hours to get the game out the door and submit, sometimes you gotta pull out the JANK moves. :sunglasses:

Have you had to resort to desperate measures to make the deadline? We'd love to hear your stories, so we feel less silly about ours. :sweat_smile:

Hey Jammers, it's Glarble here. Did you know I've only got 70 credits left until I can afford my dream home on Terra? My job is super hard, but I reckon I should have enough by the time my contract is up.

huh?... Hmmmm... Oh, no Glarble's job isn't hard. All he has to do Is match the signal of a planet and find what resources it has. He's been doing it for years so he obviously knows how to do his job... Although... I did find this on his desk the other day.

Go play Glarble's Journey to Home-Ownership now to see how the story ends (there's more than one ending!)

Glarble's Journey to Home-Ownership

The resources/lights randomise every time so you won't get bored tryna find all the endings!👽

We made some changes to the cover image to make it more noticable. This is good practice for promoting your games.

Hey!

We made an incremental game with ahm... signal based mechanic that increments itself in a pretty natural way. It's not that long (we all need time to play others game, yeah). You may find it nice :)

Play here



We are strong, but the bugs were stronger

So when you play our game, please consider that it's...

Send yours in the comments!

Yeah, we got a little sidetracked from 'signal' theme into 'connecting point A to point B', a-a-and our game happened. Anyway, what is it about?

You are an ancient evil lord, who just woke up in his cave and now wants to conquer nearby kingdom of gnomes. The problem - you are trapped deep underground.

Now you need to dig tunnels, find your imp's altars, eat delicious magma and enslave gnomes who got lost in this caves.

The game is a full roguelike experience: build your deck of tetris-like pieces with unique special effects, gain passives to survive longer and be stronger, gather gold, spend it in the shop, repeat.

Complete all 7 procedurally generated increasingly hard levels to get to the surface. Maybe not in the first try. Maybe not in the second. But someday Lord Malleus will rise for sure!

Just recently before the start of the jam, I played Tiny Kingdom. For the most part, I relied on it as my reference (you should always know your reference, by the way) I was faced with the task of a game designer - to change everything that I didn't like, leaving everything that I highly appreciated.

The first game designer task was to expand the game's capabilities: When I played Tiny Kingdom, the first thing I thought was, "Hey, it would be cool if I gave more opportunities to expand the territory in my game." That's when I came up with the idea of connecting TV towers and expanding the boundaries instead of starting from a single island. But how should I balance this? It's simple - each previous tower loses its signal strength, making the so-called "exploration" of field maps limited. But I still need to balance this, right? Absolutely, and it's easy. For each Tower card, you get a signal recovery card, which means you won't be able to keep all the towers in a strong signal, but you'll always have control over which tower you want to continue expanding around. By the way, the further you place a tower from the previous one, the more cards you get. This gives you a good boost in the number of cards, but it can become a serious problem when combining territories for object combinations.

The next task of game design is to add speed of perception for the player. What does this mean? Each card in tiny kingdom is a set of TEXT INFORMATION, and as someone who perceives most things as "familiar symbols," it was important for me to implement these symbols for the player. Each card has its own unique icon, so once you get used to the process and understand what each card provides, everything starts to be read at the highest speed based solely on the card icons. This added more intuitiveness and eliminated the slowdown in the game. Therefore, the visual part has become one of the most attractive aspects of my game, as I see it.

I spent a lot of time on the game's feel and polish. I appreciate your games if they're small but have a high level of polish, so I've done my best to make even the cursor movement on the parallax-effect screen enjoyable. Adding more feedback, such as hovering over cards and smoke particles from buildings, has greatly enhanced my gaming experience. In any case, you can see from the development screenshot that most of the content has not made it into the game.

To be honest, I'm excited to expand the content in my game after receiving so many positive comments and feedback. Currently, I'm facing significant issues with indexing on itch.io, which means my game cannot be promoted or displayed to other players unless they click on a link. I believe that the support of itch.io will help me address these challenges and enable me to add new content to enhance the quality and size of my game. Now I see a lot of problems, such as the lack of a tutorial, incorrect indicators for building bonuses, and everything else that shows my shortcomings as a game designer, but thanks to your feedback, I can keep moving forward and improve the game! Thank you for your ratings! And keep these tips in mind.

@ghpxi, thank you for being my inspiration!

PLAY IN BROWSER

LD PAGE

• Animals make a mating call
• You manage a dating app
• Simple card game
• Animals with unique abilities and mating call sounds!
• many dices! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/mating-call

We just surpassed 30 votes! The Dark Spots in Space is a narrative-heavy, voice-acted, audio-design focused game about decrypting a spaceship's black box.

1. Listen to corrupted audio files in the Black Box tab
2. Enter missing words to integrate and listen to the reconstructed full audio clip
3. Enter any word within transcripts in the search box to acquire new clips
4. Fill in the Obituary in the Life Reconstruction tab of our main character

We'd love for you to play it! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/the-dark-spots-in-space

LD: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/scp-warehouse

I’m still recovering from the sleepless nights spent developing this game. This was only my second time taking part in an event like this, and I’m definitely not someone who stands out because of extraordinary skills. But for me, this game jam was something truly special.

Ever since I was a kid, I dreamed of making games and building worlds. I’ve been working in gamedev for two years now, and for the first time, I finally became the creator of a world of my own.

At this jam, I worked as a level designer and a bit of a level artist as well. I also got the chance to work on lighting and even create a system for its optimization. It was an AMAZING experience. You sit there in Unreal Engine, staring at an empty space on the screen — and then, step by step, that emptiness turns into a location prototype, a level design, lighting, and sound. And just a few hours later, you’re already running through a place that you imagined and built yourself. I honestly don’t have enough words to describe how excited and happy that made me feel.

I want to express my sincere gratitude to the organizers and to my team (@cptdrusha, @dejavu, @ochpochpunk, @motooch, @xp-3d, @fallenqwe) — without them, I would never have had such an incredible experience.

I also want to say how much I admire every participant. You are amazing. Please keep creating and bringing joy to people through your projects.

Be sure to try our game and leave your comments. Every single comment makes me happy!

Now looking back on this with clarity I just feel upset with myself, it ended up being a very lopsided project.

I got way too absorbed in the visual department and let it get all the attention to the point where the gameplay end up barely fleshed out, there isn't even a complete gameplay loop. I hope we can fix it with an update but it's a rough start

Hot bucket of bees just dropped! Check out our speedy lil' guys and their sweet (as honey) patch notes.

v0.1.3 - We've heard your feedback loud and clear and bees now go fast. Really fast. Faster in all kinds of ways! Player sBeed +33%, NPBees sBeed +100%, gather sBeed +100%. Disabled the queues on flowers, because everybody loves more bees doing more bee things. Now with more bees!

Be a fast bee dancing with other fast bees!

We thought about the name for a long time. But then we read a comment and realized: That's IT!!!

Thx @mrchip

Play here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/goobers

Here’s a small curiosity about our game that we didn’t fully get to develop in time for the jam, but we still wanted to sneak in as a little secret for players.

We originally designed a feature for a later level that is already technically functional, but didn’t make it into the final progression. Instead, we decided to include it as an optional detail in Level 2.

There’s a ghost hidden in the scene… but you can’t see it under normal conditions.

The only way to reveal it is by tuning the TV incorrectly — when the screen is distorted or “out of sync,” the ghost suddenly appears. It’s like the static is pulling back a layer of reality.

TV tunned

TV mistunned

It’s a small detail, but one we really enjoyed experimenting with. Maybe in a future version, we’ll expand this idea further.

You can check it here!

Would you have liked this mechanic to be more central to the gameplay? Would you be interested in playing a more complete version of this game after the jam voting period?

Would have loved to make more art but in the end I had to prioritize sound, as it was missing completely.

Give it a try! Can you beat the Compo Version or will you use the Patched version that gives you more retries and hp early on

Our team exped some trbls with Unity for a 2 days and eventually we fixed all

Yeah we know that LD means that game must be created in 3 days but... we tried

AND HELL YEAH TODAY BUILD!!!

what added?

crosshair

moving platform is reworked

tutorial on first room

old memory things behind PC

I made 2 version for my LD 59 game, what do you think 1 or 2?

Hello everyone I wanted to write a post, because against the background of jam, Itch very often began to fall and, in general, it was more buggy

Is there no game in the list of games?

Try searching for the game by its full name in the search bar. If it is not there, your game is not indexed. You can find out about indexing here

https://itch.io/docs/creators/getting-indexed

It's been a few days, and there's still no game

In this case, you need to write to support on this issue, it is better to write in the first half of the week. This problem happened very often with new accounts on Itch, but now it has happened to me...

Thank you so much to everyone who's played While You Were Here and left such kind words. Reading the feedback has been the best part of the jam honestly.

The positive feedback has me completely sold on keeping this project alive. I'm working on more levels, better hint design (a running theme in my comments 🥲), and general polish based on what people have shared.

This community is amazing :heart:

What's one thing you'd keep working on from your own jam game? Drop a link, I'd love to play!

Play it here

https://youtu.be/AJdEqssNZ-U?si=N2CxchJLc4AtfO0e

A useful presentation for creating a good gamefeel in a game. All my games basically adhere to these rules and change them a bit

Escape into the mystery. Your broadcast starts now: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/save-our-souls

I’ve been doing Ludum Dare for over 10 years, and this is the first time a project feels like it could go beyond the jam - maybe even become a Steam game.

What do you think - worth pursuing?

If you can, try it and tell me honestly: is this something bigger, or just a solid jam game?

Link https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/high-rollers

this is my game https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/switchboard-operator

Developing a project for LD59 "Ray of Hope" - was my first time working on Unity. I wanted to make an atmospheric 3D game with puzzles... but 80% of what I planned didn't work out. Why?

Half the development time was spent negotiating with the engine itself. It baked the lights, then re-baked them, and ultimately the scene only baked the lights once... After which, I abandoned the baked lighting. Below is an example of "How the lighting could have worked if the engine had continued to handle it as intended." But even this didn't solve all the problems... Light was falling through solid walls in the rooms, making it difficult to adjust the lighting parameters, especially after adding volumetric fog (to create beautiful divine rays). Fortunately, the chosen pixelated style will allow me to save time on models and textures - and still create an atmospheric image. I tried using the current renderer (URP) hoping to ensure full compatibility with all platforms, but when creating the game for the web, I got a transparent landscape. Trying to fix it resulted in a pink forest... Ultimately, I couldn't fix the browser build, so I compiled the game for Windows. It's good that it's Unity; this type of build assembles very quickly (in 7 seconds). Fighting with the engine took a lot of time... out of the planned 8 puzzles, only 1 was implemented... from the extended list of world connections, only a few mechanics were implemented... This experience made me realize that if I use Unity for the next LD, it will only be with the standard built-in renderer.

Game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/ray-of-hope

I don't know how you feel but it's weird one to see a theme which really doesn't initially wake any interest (you may even downvoted...). But as normal you take it as a challenge and start brainstorming until something comes up. I think this phase took from me and my brother 2-3h which is not too bad after all (we didn't pre-brainstorm ideas for themes like some seemed to have done).

After this phase it is not too bad anymore. It is a lot of work, but some excitement is starting to reveal itself. Best moments are those 1 billion small decisions you have to do on the way. Here it is important to be curious and challenge the design if it could be even enhanced (maybe even take some shortcuts...). We rather re-iterate at this point than focus on the amount of content. Finally is time for release and relief.

BUT like in a real world it is not yet over! It is time to play some games and I have to say there are so many good games which you can play and rate for FREE! Then you cross some fingers and toes and hope to get some reviews too. Then you wait for the final scores. And wait. And wait. Then comes the closure via final scores.

What a nice place to be part of!

You can still PLAY Too Many Goblins!

It does contain spoilers, though.

https://youtu.be/TQFwGSM_7ZI

It's always the case with games with unexpected twists; it's hard to know how best to present them. On the one hand, I want to intrigue, but on the other, I don't want to spoil the experience.

What do you think: is it better to leave out spoilers or just hint at them to keep things interesting?

LD link

Itch link

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/holy-light

Making demo now, I guess release this is 1-2 weeks 😬 Steam (There is old screens): https://store.steampowered.com/app/4247100/Exone_Rift/

How it looked in preview jam 😬:

My game from this jam (Compo): https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/neural-error

I found this feature in Unity during a jam and decided to use it

The animator slider controls smooth transitions between emotions one parameter handles the whole blend of states

Game link

Hi! I'm Yarcha, the game designer project https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/drumnice

At Ludum Dare 59, we decided to try something unusual: to merge a rhythm game with a dungeon crawler.

The result: - spells are cast through rhythm - between fights, you visit a shop and choose stronger spells - enemies are rock walruses that don’t forgive mistakes

This is our first time working with rhythm mechanics, but it already feels like something that could grow into much more.

Give it a try - and tell us where it hurts.

Fun fact: besides game dev, my other job is bartender/barista/chef/waiter. Last night I was on a quiet night shift—super slow, barely any guests, and honestly, a bit boring. But luckily, our web build on itch.io works great on mobile! To my surprise, it runs super smoothly—and I'd even say Radioblet feels like it was made for mobile, since it's basically a cozy incremental idle time-killer.

So come join in—play on the go, during your commute, or even at work (like I did! 😉). https://dwangdev.itch.io/radioblet

And if you enjoy it, please drop us a rating! 🙏 https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/radioblet

Thanks so much in advance, everyone!

Main boss in my game

Play GIMME TV 👉 https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/gimme-tv

I added signal waves!

Linux build.

LD Page

(Yep, that's him...)

https://ldj.am/$424583

I don't really have a proper way to start talking about my own game, so I think I'll try by telling you a rather morbid anecdote.

One of the very first dreams I recall ever having was of a kid disobeying their parent calling them back home. The kid instead runs off of the playground onto a crosswalk, only to be hit by a car.

And when I was a stupid little toddler, I was an uncontrollable ball of energy with a sense of adventure and a drive for exploration, I often tried running off from my mum who was reasonably afraid I'd get run over by a car or something...

...and that nearly happened once. But then I wouldn't be making this game - with a death scene involving being hit by a car - and writing about it two decades later now, would I?

...did you notice a pattern here?

So, yeah. Lonely Crossway is basically my artistic interpretation of that exact nightmare, except there's no knowing if there even IS the other side of the road, and you can actually play it now, if you'd want! From what I'm hearing, people who tried it seem to like this mess!

LD Page: https://ldj.am/$429572

itch.io: https://polyvishap.itch.io/ld59-lonely-crossway

!> Although, it's not just the possible reckless driver you will have to worry about...

How did this came to be?

I'll admit, I've had an idea for a similar project for a long time, but since I've been working on a bigger project I didn't know when I'll be able to work on that NOR did I know what it would have looked like - but sometimes, even into my young adulthood, I still feel that temptation to cross the road right as the signal is about to turn red... so instead of doing that in real life (cos I know that could end up getting me killed or give me permanent injuries), I thought turning that into a game sounded like a much better idea in my opinion.

But I ended up getting around to it when I learned that Ludum Dare 64 would be the last scheduled game jam - mind you, I never participated in L.D., but always wanted to! - and, initially planning on joining a later jam, but not doing so, cos I dunno when life would get in a way again, I joined this party instead, albeit fashionably later for the "Compo" part of it. Plus, I didn't want to lose a chance I already had! ~~Hesitation and procrastination can be punishing sometimes...~~

Also, by a huge coincidence, the theme was literally "Signal", so... I just had to make this idea PLAYABLE, okay???

Side-note: This is also my first time in 10 years joining another game jam!... which would make LD59 my second ever game jam I've been to, but... I am happy it's that. I don't know if I wanna share any specific details on that last thing, but I am proud to say that... yeah, I've definitely sharpened up my skills by a whole lot and got better with my game development tool choices... but I still kept a bad habit of rushing things when it's not necessary, cos I ended up rushing this right as the Submission Hour was closing down... not realizing that it was for the Compo submissions specifically -- the Jam itself was still ongoing for two more days-- in the retrospective, I am either stupid, or was too tired to notice the wording or understand what did Compo even mean--

I made this game in 12 hours. What the fuck.

~~did I mention this is my first Ludum Dare?~~

~~...and that I was finishing the game while pulling an all-nighter?~~

Right, so the next part of this post will mostly be technical nerd yapping bullshit, and it WILL spoil a bunch of stuff for you (not that it's got any story stuff), so, before you continue reading further, I'd suggest playing the game for yourself first!

It's one of those things that are best played for yourself in order to see what this mess is all about, because... how else am I supposed to talk about it?

So, yeah. You go play the game if you haven't already.

This post will wait.

The Making of this mess of a Thingamajigama.

Here's a bit of a fun fact here: I am typically a C#-nut, but this time I decided I wanted to code this game entirely in GDScript instead! Yes. It's a Godot game. I know, no need for applause or jeers, I am just a regular person like you - I put my pants on one nipple at a time and wipe my arse when I take an explosive shite.

To break my habit of doing complex things -- or, rather, to make sure I don't take too long -- I decided I wanted to make this game more simple to work with, and more importantly: simple to figure out and play!

And I did that by essentially... * ...integrating a relatively simple concept I am sure everyone knows by now, including their mums and grandpas, which is crossing the road when the pedestrian traffic lights are active! * ...and giving a universal control scheme anyone can easily memorize and work with, regardless of keyboard layouts. (which primarily consists of the arrow, Spacebar, and Shift keys.)

And I believe I did that relatively well enough that a lengthy tutorial isn't necessary; a small text popup refreshing you on the controls is enough to get you up to speed.

I mean, I dunno if you need a tutorial on how to cross the road... like, how else would you be safely getting to work? Or college? I mean, yeah, sure, you can drive there. But you'd either have to learn to get a driver's license or... still walk cos you'd be disembarking vehicles a lot anyway.

• ...but I also decided to make it into an "Endless Runner" type of a thing... although I purposefully have given the player more control over their blank avatar.
  • Yes, that means I made the level "infinite";
  • No, I don't think it counts as a "rogue-lite";
  • No, this is not an auto-runner either.

Building the Crossway...

The crosswalk is built out of four long (but relatively small) "chunks" - and if you're not familiar with world generation stuff ~~(I am not super familiar with it too, truth be told, and I am not gonna pretend like I am well-versed in that area either)~~, they're basically manageable pieces of a map that gets randomly generated! And I built them out of... * ...these three assembly parts that I have modeled out by hand! * ...at least one sidewalk (if you can call it that) "checkpoint" trigger. * ...and a traffic light (optional).

...and rather than bothering to do perlin noise... seed... stuff, I just have a chunk be randomly picked out of an array with minimum and maximum ranges being determined by the player score. (You may have definitely noticed that the distance between traffic lights have been getting... longer after your 5th or 10th!)

And you know how I casually mentioned chunks being manageable? The "checkpoints" basically do just that when the player leaves them: pushing all present chunks along the player back, asks the game round manager to check if there's any chunks out of distance (and if they are - the chunks get unloaded), while a new chunk is spawned in front of the player... so, that way, the game keeps about a maximum of five (5) chunks present in the game scene! And I think that's just neat, as simple as this specific system is.

So, you also may have noticed that there's a chance you'll be very far away from the next and last traffic light... and it gets harder to tell when its risky to make a mad dash for it. What exactly do you do here?!

Well... I got some... news.

...it's not just you - it IS getting louder here!!!

Are you familiar with the term - "Chekhov's Gun"? It is described to be a narrative principle emphasizing that every element in a story be necessary, while irrelevant elements should be removed.

!> Let's just say that this icon... is not really for show.

!> You probably might have missed THEM, but some of you may have already noticed THEM showing up out of the fog, charging towards YOU at a rapid pace. So, when THEY do that - THEY only do so when the traffic lights emit a "GO" signal. Otherwise, THEY would slowly creep up on you while you're not looking back.

!> So, if it's red - you and this mysterious character play a dangerous game of "Red Light and Green Light", while you yourself are waiting for an actual green light. When it's green - it's now a game of Tag. THEY are it.

!> But how, pray tell, do you tell when THEY show up? ...oh, it's only a matter of time after you already decide you wanna try see if there even IS another side to get across to.

So, that's all the technical crap I wanted to share! With how it all turned out, all within a span of 12 hours, mind you, I am... pretty happy with how this turned out...? But don't get me wrong, I still rushed it, so there's still some things that didn't make the final cut.

In Memoriam (what ideas were lost...)

* Alternative Traffic Light with a Crosswalk Button. I was going to include a second variant of traffic lights with a crosswalk button that could have helped speed up the waiting time, and I was also going to include a spam punishment which would make you wait twice as long next time the STOP signal is emitted, but... I gotta be real, I ended up forgetting about it and not implementing it, but honestly I think that was for the best, because after I first exported the game, I noticed a really annoying graphical bug where the base traffic light sprite isn't showing up (while it DID show up in the Debug playtest session within the engine)... so, it could have made it harder to tell what kind of a traffic light it is - or, rather, you wouldn't know there would be TYPES of traffic lights! ...so, really, that OpenGL specific bug relating to shaded sprites is a bit of a blessing in disguise as much as it is pissing me off. I could have just chosen to keep using the Forward+ renderer to remedy that, but I know there have been instances of Godot games not launching for some people, often because they haven't made sure their graphics card drivers are up to date to support the Vulkan graphics library or that... their graphics card even supports or has Vulkan support enabled at all... or that they don't know you can actually do that... plus, I also wanted to see if I could also do... * The (entirely 1:1) Web Version. Yeahhh, this was... actually pretty close to being an actual 1:1 thing, but... HOO BOY, the audio was SUPER FUCKING SCOFFED, and none of the real-time effects were working. I have not been able to figure out what to do about it, so, if it means saving you the trouble of going through ear piercing traffic light signal noises (I know they're not supposed to be THAT loud in-game!!!), I had to make the traffic lights stop making noises... which admittedly might make the game a little harder for some. Or challenging? Either way, as of April 28th 2026, an actual web version exists... but not the kind that I've been wanting to have, so... I still recommend that you play the desktop builds for the intended experience. * Footsteps, actual main menu, an option to toggle Fullscreen... yeah, I didn't get to add that after I decided I was gonna wrap up development on the game in a heat of a rush moment. So, I just said "fuck it, maybe next time. lol".

Now, I could potentially re-add all those in a post-jam version of the game, but I will be frank with you - I don't know WHEN it is gonna happen, and IF I will ever feel like making something like that, but... never saying never in this case, although I'm usually wrapped up with another bigger thing... again - never saying never!

So uh... yeah! That's Lonely Crossway!

Really hope you liked the game, I hope you found this... somewhat interesting to read... and... yeah! I'll be off to my own devices while also checking out other game jam games on here!

See ya!

Play it now in your browser! 👇 https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/turning-signal

2 Buttons. 10 Levels. 1 Very Clumsy Robot. 🤖

You are the QA inspector. Your only tools?

🔴 RED = Turn

🟢 GREEN = Interact

Guide our “ultimate” AI through 10 mind-bending puzzle chambers using ONLY a binary signal. Can you pass the Turning Test?

This is what our first sketches of the game idea looked like — probably chaotic and hard to understand 😅

Do you still have your first sketches? I’d be really interested to see them

Calling all sea dogs and especially motivated landlubbers to help The Keeper defend his lighthouse!

Play our game here

• Fun slash-em-up, Hotline Miami-inspired gameplay!

• Original dialogue and voice acting!

• Beautiful pixel art, animations, and portraits!

• Bonus sea shanty!

No gen AI used.

We’ve launched the v1.1 Update! Thanks to the awesome feedback so far, we've added much clearer tutorials and overall improvements. The whole puzzle experience is now much more easy and relaxing to play.

We would love to hear your thoughts and get your ratings! Drop a comment on our page after playing, and I will 100% go play, comment, and rate your game in return! Let's support each other!

Play it now in your browser! 👇

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/turning-signal

I was thinking, what if we keep developing it and release it on Steam? What's missing? What would you like to see?

If you haven't played yet, here's the link:

Wi-Fix It

The first days after the deadline have been crazy! I honestly didn't expect such a positive response to my game. Thank you so much to everyone who played it!

I’ve spent the last few days playing every single game from my previous post and checking out the projects of everyone who left me feedback. I didn’t miss anyone!

Right now, I’m feeling a bit of a "gaming overdose" (never thought that would happen, lol). I need a one-day break to recharge, and then I’ll get back to your games.

Feel free to drop your links in the comments! And if you have a moment, please check out my game too: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/save-the-cat

We added a short video, so you can see what the gameplay of deadly cliffs is like before you jump into it.

If you want to handle big old rusty lighhouse machinery and lure ships into their explosive demise, this one might be for you! Give it a try: Deadly Cliffs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw8oJceCKJc

You can try it out if you're curious! :D

Entry page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/melting-sun

Play in browser on Itch.io: https://justcore.itch.io/melting-sun

Howdy Folks! When we heard the theme for this we had a lot of ideas, but we settled upon a metal detecting game. In a lot of ways this is an homage to my Dad, with whom I have many memories with metal detecting when I was a kid. It was always cool to see what we'd dig up next, even if he was just using me for free digging labor :D.

This was built by 2 people from scratch during the game jam time frame. It was really great to see what we could do in the short time frame. I know that there is a pretty annoying bug where the mouse doesn't lock into the area without you clicking after a UI, unfortunately we didn't have time to fix that before publishing, but it'll be the first thing we fix after the judging time.

Thanks for checking us out!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/treasure-detector

That's it, that's the post!

We’ve made a game where your goal is to infiltrate a secret society and decipher their signals to stop a conspiracy against the Emperor.

LD page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/vice-signalling

Play in browser here

We know what you should get — Kebab, of course. But all jokes aside, have you tried to save a nation of shapeshifters from hunger? If not, you should — help them find a kebab in a cyberpunk style world populated by cats

Intergalactic Kebab-Hunger: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/intergalactic-kebab-hunger

Hi All, Today I'd like to share with you that our LD59 game, Officially Dead is being taken further, with the goal of a steam release. If you haven't played it yet, Officially Dead is a fast-paced action game where you have to survive a zombie attack on a Radio Station by using the environment to kill zombies (i.e. squishing them under bookshelves or bowling them down with office chairs). Go play it now ~~or the zombies will get you.~~

In addition to polishing existing gameplay, me and @sputnix0 want to add multiplayer mode, multiple unique levels with different furniture and mechanics to utilise (such as a hospital, or a restaurant), and add more gameplay modes.

If there is anything you would want to see added to the full game, such as furniture (or as I call it, weapons), levels, or jokes, please comment below.

We made a couple of bug fixes and so on as well as adding it to itch.

We still have to improve the UI a lot as goals are not clear. It addresses some of the gameplay related issues with understandably enemy spawning etc.

But the game seems to catch on, i saw a new tactic born to heal faster ^^

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/too-late

This might look like a "tree found in forest" type post, however, I still want to share this.

Achievements and leaderboards turned out to be powerful tools, even for a jam game.

Recently I've put up an extra edition of our game, LiNX Elektrika (click to play hint-hint wink-wink), on Newgrounds. Side note: Newgrounds is BASED. After giving it some thought, I've also incorporated some of the feedback seen here on the LDJam (mainly, ironed out the extreme difficulty curve) as well as added support for Newgrounds' very own MEDAL and LEADERBOARD systems

Very quickly I found out that this funky little feature gives me a very good spread of what people do in my game, how and when. By checking my leaderboards top to bottom and bottom to top, I get to see how far people get in my game, and by checking the medals I can see the involvement for more challenging parts, and draw conclusions on what people actually enjoy doing.

Right now, for each level, I have 2 achievements - "complete it" and "overachieve in it." I noticed that basicaly nobody (other than achievement hunters, which do exist!) has the achievement for overachieving on the first level, where it doesn't come naturally, but much more stick around on later levels - which checks out.

It turned into a strong analytics feature (yada-yada metrics analytics) for finding out what people are willing to do, such as the achievement for looping 5 times, nobody got it yet.

This is both fun and informative! If uploading to a supporting platform, do add achievements!

Also, play it on Newgrounds, darn it!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/ultra-radar

When I started this jam I wasn't feeling super confident. I hadn't programmed anything since Ludum Dare 57 and the signal theme wasn't really something that had much appeal to me in a traditional way. I'm one of those people that has an interest in all aspects of games but have really mastered no skills. I have a limited programming set and quite frankly the art skills of a programmer.

Yet somehow, I prefer to work these events solo to try to stretch all of my creative muscles simultaneously. I'm a glutton for punishment and I love the 72 hour grind.

When I finished the brainstorming process and started a very minimal prototype night one, I wasn't feeling my game. It was lacking any sort of aspect that set it apart and just felt like a bland nothing. I woke up thinking I needed to find some sort of angle or change up my concept completely. This is where my game McFoley's began. I promise, it had nothing to do with the wrestler. It didn't even click that it could be a pun until 24 hours later.

McFoley's on the surface probably looks like a million games you've seen before from screenshots.

You take orders from customers, you get paid, the day ends, rinse and repeat. Screenshots do not do the vision justice though. McFoley's as a concept is a game where you convert customer orders into sound clips and send them to a robot which then makes the orders. You never even see the food over the course of the game. It's almost a loose take on the Chinese room experiment where you are translating text into sound. Rulesets are very finicky and I wrote a manual that changes each day to introduce more elements.

The only way I can overcome the generic qualities with my limited skillset is by leaning in to something and for this game I decided it would be great to force myself to learn more about audio. I recorded a bunch of audio snippets for the various ingredients, customers, and more. Every single sound effect in the game is recorded with my microphone. Most done without the use of any props. I played around with randomly pitching noises and getting in variation. I went for a bit of an Animal Crossing-esque voice system because I've always wanted to try that.

Once the sounds were implemented, the game as a whole started to feel more like a program that was in line with my style of creation. If there's anything to take from this post it's that you should not fear experimenting with concepts that ultimately don't work or feel generic because you might just find something that makes the vision stand out even more.

The vision of my game went from being dark and sinister into something light hearted and humorous. Once I saw what the game was turning in to, I added in pricing systems for each menu item and each ingredient. I started animating a results screen that added a bit more of a layer of exaggerated commentary. You can work hard, be successful, and will still walk out of a day earning mere dollars - or even worse, in debt. Every mistake you make, the company will charge you for. Getting negative earnings is pretty easy. You can even just spam ingredients on to your submitted creations just to waste the companies money if you so desire. Just know, it's coming out of your own pocket at the end of the day.

I leaned a bit more in to puns and started referring to the character as a foley artist which was a bit of a take on the obvious foley work and "sandwich artist" mixed together. The drinks were turned in to energy drinks with gas themed syrups. The dipping sauces became weird flavors such as the infamous chicken sauce for your order of chicken nuggets. Some of the character templates got extreme deep booming voices while others were greatly sped up. Every decision I made, I tried to have a slightly more absurd spin on it. Lean in to the silliness of it all.

My game is goofy, a bit rough around the edges, but something I can say does wholly represent my creative vision. A lot of features had to be cut as happens with most jam entries. I know I'm not alone in wishing my game had done more, but that's part of the fun of the time crunch. I like being forced to narrow down what core concepts have priority over others. I entered this jam with a checklist of goals and managed to hit them all. I do consider it to be a success even when I'm my own toughest critic.

If you'd like to play it, give it a go. Don't be afraid to give me real and honest feedback because ultimately I use these jams to try to become better at all aspects of game creation. I only do it as a hobby so its always been helpful to see comments about not just the shortcomings I already know but also some comments about things I never even considered.

If you'd like to give it a try please check it out! Means a lot to me that anyone would take time out of their day to play one of my games. Still feels very rewarding even if this is my fourth Ludum Dare experience.

You can check out McFoley's here.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/mcfoleys

Thanks for reading and congratulations for taking part in the jam whether it's your first or thirtieth entry! Happy rating to you all! I look forward to playing your creations as well.

CXNTACT is a short exploration game where you explore a seemingly abandoned space craft, the USC Lock Break, and try to find survivors. You play as an astronaut, observed remotely and enduring interference from an unknown source. Scavenge tools and make use of the helpful CO/SU terminal to uncover what happened.

Playable in your browser!

How It Went

Hectic! The week leading up to LD59 weekend I made to the jump to Linux as my primary desktop OS. Overall it went very smooth and it's been fun to tweak things and settle in. Porting over my helper tools was very simple. Unfortunately I didn't get time to try out DAWs on Linux (any recommendations?), so was left smashing things together in Audacity to make BGM. (And coming back to it a few days later it was way too subtle.) Along with two days of practically no sleep and classic over-scoping made this time pretty difficult. Luckily I have something of a tradition of making a huge batch of chili before Ludum Dare, so meals were trivial over the weekend.

I leaned quite heavily on a couple of my favorite sci-fi media for what can shakily be called a narrative. I'd be super interested in anyone can get them both right! I'm still not used to writing things for games and find I have to constantly reword and rewrite to be less verbose and repetitive. Hopefully the dialog is passable at least.

Overall I've got mixed feelings about how CXNTACT came out, but I'm glad I tried.

The Tooth Fae

Last Ludum Dare was bewildering. My entry, The Tooth Fae, got 1st and 3rd place across two categories and top 10 in two others. And even got played by ManlyBadassHero which has over half a million views now. I wasn't expecting any of that and was really blown away. So as the jam wrapped up I did a short term improved version and announced a full version coming to Steam. (Obligatory please wish list!)

That was six months ago, but it's still not out yet - what happened?

Without going too much into it, I've been dealing with personal issues for a number of years now and things came to a head a few months after LD58 ended. This was on top of flip-flopping a few times on how different and narrative driven I wanted the full game to be. Since then it's been a long trek to get back where I've needed to be to sit and focus on a game. All I can ask for is more patience, but I'm hopeful it will get back on track soon. I'm excited to see the reactions to what has changed and improved!

Otherwise I hope everyone had a blast working on their entries! I've still got a giant list of games to get through. If you're still in need of ratings, post yours and I'll be sure to check it out!

Hey guys!

First of all, thank you all for reviewing our game. We're so glad that you enjoyed the game that we spent so much of our energy on this weekend. :heart: :two_hearts:

The Ludum Dare amazing community gave us a boost to move on and spend some time writing a devlog. We had no idea where to start nor where to go, so we'd be grateful if you could share your opinion on this one.

Here is the first entry of the devlog: Devlog #1 - Pivoting after day 1

https://flowerfield-games.itch.io/bpm/devlog/1497616/bpm-devlog-1-pivoting-after-day-1

How we got from that:

To this:

Into this:

If you'd like to hear more about the backstage of our project, tell us in the comment! :arrowdown: :arrowdown:

What would you want the next devlogs to be about?! :v:

👉IT'S CUTE HERE 👈

You´ve been called to serve! Let´s give Mother a goodnight kiss!

Hi everyone!

Thank you very much for rating our game so highly! <3

I’d like to share some details about developing our first game for Ludum Dare.

The whole idea for the jam started with just a few lines on paper. Here’s what the initial sketch looked like:

And here's what grew out of it:

We had plenty of other ideas for next levels and ways to make the existing ones more challenging. For example, we considered adding a rhythm-based mini game and introducing enemies into the gameplay. We also wanted to refine the music and some of the implemented mechanics, but we decided to stick with what we already had so we could polish it into a solid, playable state within the three-day timeframe.

Try it out in your browser:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/last-frequency

My 13th Ludum Dare submission is called Trippin’ Ballz and I think it came out much better than expected… considering I didn’t expect too much!

I think “Signals” was a great theme… I always have zero ideas for each theme, but audio signals was something that came to me right away and I wanted to explore that. I also like developing shooters and arcade-like games so I naturally moved in that direction.

I actually started putting something together Friday evening (a rare occurrence). I wanted something that can be “listened to” for audio clues and then shoot them. I eventually decided to use colored cannons to shoot “something”, and decided to use colored balls. Since I previously created a game where balls were bouncing around (The Pongs) I didn’t want to repeat that game mechanic, but reluctantly I decided to go for it.

It seemed like most of the features were added ad-hoc, and very late into development:

• Originally, you selected which cannon you wanted to use, and I changed it to automatically select the cannon when you hovered over a Ballz to reveal its color, and kept that mechanic going for most of the development weekend. About 2 hours before submittal, I determined that it was better the first way, and changed it back to allow you to select the cannon before listening for audio clues. After all, auto-selection of the cannon defeats the purpose of listening for specific tones the Ballz broadcast.
• If felt I needed something more, and decided on a Power-up. But what to use? How about a Magic Mushroom? I coded it where the Magic Mushroom only worked when you hit a Ballz with the color of the active cannon, but it works so much better when you can just use it without hitting a Ballz. I am glad I made that change, but unfortunately, it was about 1 hour before it was time to submit. Luckily that change wasn’t hard to implement.
• Late Sunday, I had a working game, but I didn’t know how to end the game. Just blasting Ballz is fun, but how do you win or lose? Let’s add an asteroid to protect. Why not?

During the weekend, I was trying to come up with a name and decided on Trippin’ Ballz (child-like humor, for sure). Well, now that the name has been decided, I got to add some trippy features.

Without the time to develop shaders (my shader skill is passable at best) I simulated some screen shakes when you pick up the mushroom and use the mushroom power-up. Some on screen text, trippy background effects, chiptune, and Ballz expressions fill out the effects.

What Went Well

• The theme was very good. Usually, it’s tough for me to get an idea I am happy with, but this time it was a pretty easy process.
• Godot made this so easy! I’ve been using Godot for about 2 years now (former Unity developer), and I just love working with this game engine.
• Playing the game gave me additional ideas to add effects and sounds, albeit at the last minute. Changing the game mechanics at the last minute was stressful, but successful.

What Didn’t Go So Well

• Man, changing game mechanics during the last few hours is stressful! Luckily it worked out. I was contemplating just leaving some things as-is. Glad I went for it.
• Some reviews indicate that you can shoot the Ballz without really listening for tones. This is true (somewhat). I know that many LD players check out a game for a few minutes at max, and then move on, so I decided to have the player jump right in without the length build-up. You do have to listen for tones at some point (to maximize power-ups, for example), but this will be addressed in a future (perhaps full release) version.
• I guess a Macintosh build isn’t going to be as easy as it used to be. Gatekeeper was choking on it so I had to remove it. Luckily a Web build was much easier.

What’s Next?

As with every LD game I submit, I’m thinking that I want to expand this into a full release. I guess it depends on my final rating to see if it is worth it. I like it, I like shooters, and I have some additional ideas that I want to implement.

I am curious if there is anything you would like to add/remove/change.

but it cannot help moving toward the signal!!!

Play here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/goobers

Our game was updated and now its better then was before.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/shoot-the-math

The anon option isn't popular, but it's there. I'm writing this post because I saw an anon comment under a game. Actually, I lied; I didn't see it, and nobody did. All anonymous comments show up as just - to anyone but the author of the comment.

Bonus pic of me bellyaching about this during the previous event:

This feedback for Pyre Outlook has absolutely made my day:

I need to wait for the weekend to play more games, but saving theirs on the first spot of my list! Go give it a try now HERE!

I find it like a coincidence that I made a 2.5D graphic game again. Low-poly 3D environment with some 2D characters and 2.5D decorations on top. Slowly becoming expert in it and I don’t mind it :D

Play and rate our game here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/awesome-work-in-progreess

Words can't describe how hard it was to make a Mac version and how many problems it caused, but how can I refuse someone who wants to play the game?

Now you can play on your Mac!

Play here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/goobers

anyways i had some intrusive thoughts and made a really stretchy frog that screams really loud. play it here.

also bonus funny node name

Thanks for commenting you feel like "… and I feel bad playing this for free!" ❤️ Felt amazing! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/mixed-signals-3

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/mixed-signals-3

...so they hand scultped us a clay asset and we digitized it for the game!!! How did we use it in game, you may wonder..? Guess you'll have to play to find out!

Check out our Katamari/Pikmin-inspired UFO catcher incremental game What's Up? UFO! on our jam page!

got bored in the middle of doing my finals so i decided to doodle the characters in the game i helped with

despite seeming like enemies, they're actually quite good friends (to me) behind the cameras

try out the game ! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/caller-idie

Hey, you can still play & rate my entry here!: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/sacred-bleorgan-artifacts

There's a timelapse of me coding here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2Jh97njZ6s

There's also a gameplay video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsfZQCgSr2w

Sacred Bleorgan Artifacts Postmortem

It's a postmortem time! I try to write these type of posts after finishing a project because they allow me to reflect on things and grow. Or sometimes it's just funny to read how I make the same mistakes, all over again.

I always enjoy reading other postmortems as well, so be sure to write your own - and I'll be sure to watch out for it! This time I tried to be prepared even better, so I made notes for it during the compo. I used Obsidian which I use for everyday stuff and work, and this worked pretty well for me.

Theme

So the theme wasn't really my favorite, as you can see below. I had some ideas for "Side effects" and I thought "Leave something behind" and "The wrong tool for the job" were well, more "theme-y".

The event starts very late in CET (3 a.m.) so I managed to learn about the theme and went straight to sleep. In the morning I did some brainstorming and I explored couple of ideas, I'll basically paste them here:

• searching for mobile signal

  • hide and seek mechanics, or rather hot/cold mechanics
    • top down view, or angled top down
    • obstacles: stuff which is trying to catch the player?

• waiting for a signal

  • tower defense (waiting for something to activate while protecting it)
    • obstacles: anything, aliens etc typical tower defense
    • lots of opportunities to expand
  • acting whenever a signal is being sent
    • maybe sending signal back? like data

• making signs (like with hands) as in gesture

  • being traffic lights
  • signalling when something can happen (e.g. being a policeman on the street passing to allow people to walk to the other side)
    • one-button game?
    • essentially frogger or similar; e.g. policeman telling people to go left, right on the street to avoid cars

As you can see, this brainstorming was quite productive. I knew I had to lock in so I decided on (this is an exact copy from my notes):

• player is a peaceful alien trying to get home
• enemies are humans who try to catch the alien for experiments
• top down (angled?) control to search for couple of parts per stage
  • parts are visible only at the beginning, then disappear
  • player must find parts based on signal
• audio & visual cue for signal strength
• enemies trying to catch the player
• player able to stop them for a while?

Not all of this is implemented in the final version, but I did manage to get some additional stuff (story!) instead.

Compo timeline

Unlike my previous attempt, I was able to define my entry as playable before the Compo deadline, and that was THE goal. Ten and a half years (!) have passed since my last successful Compo entry, and I am so very glad I was able to make it. I feel this is a massive success for me and what contributed the most was the preparation. Even just thinking about the event beforehand, having a "todo" list, cleaning up my desk - small things did contribute a lot.

I even managed to not spill my Saturday morning coffee (it's a reference to a previous accident):

The plan for the Compo timeline is generally kinda simpler than for Jam: you want to have the core mechanics done on the first day and deal with polishing stuff on the second day.

I mostly managed to achieve that, though there were some mechanics-related decisions that spilled into second day (opening up the ability for the player to transport on their own), and some initial polish was actually started on the first day (it did help though). I was able to finish like 2 hours before the deadline and decided to not pursue additional changes, which I think wasn't a bad decision, because I didn't have to struggle at the end.

What went well

Preparation

Whatever I managed to prepare the compo, was on point. Obviously, the code disclosed pre-compo with libraries, as well as having a base project ready, saved me some time. I actually had a large TODO "preparation" list - containing stuff like "prepare this and that library", out of which I managed to tick around half of things. I wish I had spent more time on actually completing that list, because during the Compo it turned out that:

• Having a clean desk actually contributes to my ability to focus
• Having a plan for non-coding things (timelapse, where to deploy, how to deploy) allowed me to spend more time actually focusing on the development
• I correctly identified areas of my previous code which could be improved (in fact, I should focus even more on this next time)
• My previously battle-tested code (as in, used in previous LD) was mostly just working - tweaks were needed around stuff which I had prepared, but not really tested

Preparation and how you do it (and what to prepare) matters a lot for Compo timeline, especially with code-first frameworks like PICO-8, because whatever you can decide to be the immutable (language, framework, even genre - if you're willing to decide on that upfront), allows you to make some preparations, even if it's just "thinking on how I'm gonna do this or that". With Lua, which is the language PICO relies on, even deciding on the type of OOP approach matters, and the impact is huge.

What also helped a lot (and what I didn't do last time) was taking a day off work on Monday. This allowed me to stay up late on Sunday, and to deal with the entry page on Monday, as well as finishing the timelapse and gameplay video.

Progression

My personal feel is that I have improved indeed, and that is usually my aim during LD. Even not really using Lua since the last LD, I was able to handle most of its quirks, though you can read on about all the stuff that went wrong down below.

To me - and maybe this is just a personal feeling - the game feels more complete than whatever I did previously. There's a difficulty progression, story (made in a very short time on the last day), animations, points. There are obviously problems related to these, but in my opinion I think I've gotten a little bit better with PICO-8.

Oh yeah, I mentioned this during last LD - the engine itself is great in its limitations. Worth every penny, and then some more. I mean, I don't really expect to win the jam or anything, because I understand that PICO aesthetic isn't for everyone and there's still room to improve on my side, but what works for me:

• while the system provides the basic tools (sprite editor, sfx editor, tracker), it really is programmer-focused
• the PICO limitations force me to reduce scope in general, but I'm betting that it's actually quite hard to actually e.g. hit the token limit for a Compo entry
• forced simplicity in the gfx/sfx area isn't limiting to me because I'm not even good using those simple tools, let alone something more complex
• it gives the illusion of developing on an old platform without the hassle of writing assembly (I might check that out though at some point though)

My physical setup was mostly similar to what I had the last time, with the addition of a better mechanical keyboard (NuPhy Gem 80), which I'm enjoying very much. I actually only used 1 screen - the other being reserved by OBS for the timelapse (see below) and Discord, which I didn't really use during the Compo.

Submission

As I write this it's still waay to early to say anything about the grades - maybe I'll do a separate post about these later - but in the end, what worked in terms of submission was

• deciding to stop development when I felt that additions would only add pressure to finish them but wouldn't improve quality that much
• putting a version on the LD page as well as on itch.io (I'm leaning towards going with just itch.io next time though)
• itch.io providing its own analytics as well as a way to wire into Google Analytics (it's really cool to see people from all over the world playing my game)

Design

There are many parts of the design that could have been improved - you can read about the problems below - but I'm also pretty happy with the initial design. I'm particularly glad that I added a cheat menu:

It's available in the compo build, just press enter. The implementation is hacky, but this allowed me to test without spending too much time on time-consuming task of searching the dig sites.

The second thing I'm really glad I did is the addition of those intermission scenes with the Bleorgan communication:

These allowed me to develop a story and I think it contributed to the overall feel of the game. I did it on Sunday evening, so fairly late in the process, and it was basically the last "feature" thing I added.

Timelapse

I have established a toolset for a timelapse last time, and it worked quite well again. Basically, used OBS to record everything with 2 FPS and then used ffmpeg to speed everything up - if you're interested in details then here's how (sharing because I've spent a while before the compo researching that):

ffmpeg -i "recording.mkv" -filter:v "setpts=PTS/240,fps=60" -an timelapse.mkv

I took timelapse music from https://ende.app.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2Jh97njZ6s

There's also a gameplay video, if for whatever reason someone just wants to view my game, not play it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsfZQCgSr2w

What should be improved

You may have thought until now that everything went just great and I had no problems during the development. Well, no. I actually made sure to write down anything that bothered me during the event so I can actually think about how to improve there.

So here it is, grouped in categories.

Preparation time

I should have spent more time preparing libraries in particular. Classes/OOP worked great because I actually battle-tested them in previous 2 LDs. I actually had some code for everything - but for example:

• event system should have been re-reviewed and tested (I finally didn't really rely on it that much)
• same related to animations - which was probably more important than anything else (I had to re-do animation system and had to take serious shortcuts to have it working within my setup)
• complex multi-state animations, effects, particles and a lot of timed events were either skipped or built from scratch even though I should have a subsystem for each of those ready
• same related to collisions (I had a vector library, but I should have reviewed the methods inside)
• same related to camera (I ended up integrating quite well with PICO's camera, but I could have spent the time elsewhere)

What's probably most important is this: I really should have done Lua/PICO-8 mini projects. This should actually be my priority next time before the event. This would show me explicitly what kind of problems I might encounter and by the time Compo starts I might have an idea on how to solve them, instead of trying to do that during the event.

Technical problems

On Saturday I have spent over 1h 30m on a bug which was entirely my fault, and I couldn't figure out why it happened. It's entirely on me, because it was a concurrent list modification issue - not trivial in a system of containers containing containers where you're trying to remove something, but still my fault. When I found the issue, I was just mad at myself.

I think on Sunday I've found out first hand that calculating distance (vector length) with traditional (naive?) approach in PICO-8 will cause overflow problems - (see vector magnitude). It also took me a while to figure this out, because outside of PICO, I rarely have to really consider this kind of thing. I wasn't mad at myself because of this one though - I just didn't expect to see it.

And then there's code quality. I mean, I obviously don't expect much from a timed competition, but I feel that my code should be some sort of an example in books, to illustrate:

• what you shouldn't do 😅
• why hurrying too much leads to technical debt
• why we should keep classes/objects/functions in separate files (keeping them in single p8 file made searching for the correct object a chore)

I probably could have put some more polish on the last day, but because of the code quality, I struggled with managing animations, timed events, and graphical fluff. Really need to invest pre-event time into having a proper solution there.

Design issues

Even without the full feedback, I already noticed couple of issues. There was no time for playtesting the game during the Compo (also another thing to improve), but I've observed others playing after the event and this feedback would have impacted some of my design decisions.

For example, when generating enemies, I pick a random point on the ring within a constant distance from the player. This itself was just a hack to make sure that there's some constant pressure put on the player - and that works fairly well (would have been better with another animation to be honest). However, when the player is standing close to the edge, this becomes an issue, because anything generated outside the edge gets pushed in vertical or horizontal direction until it is inside the play area.

This means that whenever a player is very close to the border, they risk having the humans generated very close to them, which really isn't ideal. The situation is even worse close to corners. Unfortunately, dig sites also can generate close to the border, which forces the player to stand close to it when digging. There's an easy fix for that, but I missed that issue during the event.

Handling border was generally something I could have spent more time on, because when something is generated close to the bottom area, UI tends to obstruct the view:

I mean it's not the worst but the experience could be better. What I should have done is either remove the text when the player is there or move it elsewhere. A good alternative would be to just not generate dig sites so close to the border, but I already mentioned that.

I started truly playtesting (on my own) pretty late in the process, and I think that actually contributed to the final outcome the most. In fact, I'm pretty sure that finding someone to playtest my entry during the event would be something that would significantly improve the experience. AFAIK this is allowed by the Compo rules, though I cannot find a source for that statement. 😅

Also, I'm pretty sure that no one actually gets to see this pretty situation:

If you wait too long, the transport area shrinks to zero, and it's not possible to get extracted. Unfortunately for the player, humans probably will capture them and... well, best to think about something nice then.

On the "no AI" challenge

I made a post about the "no AI" challenge before the event, and I was able to complete my challenge fairly well (it would be quite weird if I didn't, haha).

I have my reasons to avoid AI usage (see below), especially during Compo, and I made significant effort to avoid anything AI touched. That included also things like Google searches with -ai (works quite well), my VSCode having everything AI-related turned off, etc.

Just to be clear: I don't want to bash anyone for using AI assistance. There are different views on this topic, and the LD rules do not forbid the usage of AI code.

And while I think that game jams generally benefit from having a separate category for entries with AI input, it's important to recognize that Ludum Dare rules do allow AI-assisted coding.

I'm sure there are some people who feel enabled to create their game because of that, and for that reason I'm going to stay unbiased. If it so happens that a good entry was made with AI-assisted coding (and I've already seen a couple of those) - well, maybe that's the reality of it.

As for my personal reasons for not using AI, I want to cite part of a comment provided by @skleembof in one of the recent posts, because it resonated with me:

I tried AI assisted programming a couple of years ago and while not as effective as today it was still good enough to produce usable code. I thought it would help me improve my programming and that I could just use it as a rubber duck with no downsides, but after moving on from the simple problems it was easily generating code for, I ran into the biggest issue with ai code assistance: it was literally making me dumb and lazy.

When it failed to generate code that worked or met my requirements, I found an extremely powerful urge to just keep prompting it instead of looking up documentation and trying to solve the problem myself. My eyes would glaze over when trying to read docs or explanations on stack overflow.

That experience made me realize how dangerous it is to offload thinking to an llm. Even if it can generate code for you, what then? You’re no better off than before except that now you have some code that you didn’t write. You’re not a better programmer, and your future relies entirely on the graces of our insolvent ai overlords. What happens when token prices inevitably skyrocket? Do you think you’ll be able to flip a switch and go back to learning the hard way? Will your cognitively impaired brain have anything to show for after these x years of experience as a game developer where you relied on an LLM? I for one do not want my ability to make games to be tethered to the whims of massive corporations (which is also why I’ve moved to fully open source software over the last few years).

This is totally true for me, because as a software engineer I see this everyday at work, but it became particularly important to me when it comes to my creativity. Your experience may be different, and I accept that. That being acknowledged, I'm pretty glad I did everything on my own, even though I'm pretty sure that some things would have been faster with the help from clankers. 😉

Summing up

As always, Ludum Dare is a wonderful experience to have. I mean, it requires pretty significant effort, as always - but the satisfaction is tremendous.

As always, I'm very glad I did this. It's really a great community and I'm so glad to be participating and to be able to play all your games. Thank you all. ❤️

We are continuing to work on the game and releasing patches based on your feedback.

If you have not played it yet, we would love to hear your thoughts!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/agents-rhythm-raid

This was the first ever game jam I've done and the second game I've worked on (after a tiny platformer I did just to learn the basics). I didn't know what to expect at all and barely had an idea of what all I'll have to do.

I ended up doing the art for Connection lost. It was a LOT of fun. There definitely is a lot I could do better, I didn't allocate my time well, so I didn't get to do a lot of the UI and didn't have time to finish/fix the towers nor to make a header image. For next time, I definitely need to get more familiar with the tools I will be using (Aseprite, Procreate) ((I am used to CSP)) and get some practice with UI so I can breeze past that much faster than this time, so I have time to do the more difficult stuff or take a break other than for food (^^;

All in all though, I had so much fun and I'm really thankful for my teammates for doing absolutely amazing on the gameplay and putting up with me being confused all of the time. (^^)

If you'd like to play it, I'd absolutely love any feedback on the art especially, don't worry about being too critical: I need feedback to get better!

https://www.ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/connection-lost

I just finished the promo poster for our game, you can play and see it here Trace In The Either

HELP WANTED!

Our AI went haywire, so we need someone to run our speakeasy remotely. It’s easy: open up and greet our distinguished guests, pour their favorite drinks, and ~~take down~~ deal with any rowdy patrons. Oh, and don't let the cops shut us down.

LEARN MORE

I was having problems with the web version of Dragonia Siege. Now I've fixed the issues and I hope it makes it easier to play.

I hope to see you there!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/dragonia-siege

Marshaller of Inalpla

• What's a marshaller? You know those guys in coloured suits with glowy sticks on airports or famously in action films on aircraft carriers. Their job is to direct pilots when they can't see past their plane. • What is Inalpla? It's an acronym. Short for: interdimensionary aircraft landing platform - InALPla!

When the theme for Ludum Dare jam 59 became "Signal" - and announced at jam start, in my middle of the night - the first order of business was to figure out the meaning for my game. The LD crowd likes games to stick fairly closely to the theme, so I tried to not go around too many corners when considering a game design. Among my first rough ideas was one about Flight Line Marshallers. The mechanic was of course to give the right signals. A quick and shallow internet search showed not too many games featuring it, and most were sims trying to be real and featuring more or less detailed real-life symbols to flag. Not only because one of the voting categories of LD is Humour, I wanted something that required little research and had some whimsy to it, which became: being a marshaller at a fantasy airport! Which made the aircraft not just the odd passenger plane, but also dragons, flying saucers (complete with cup), and moth-winged blimps.

My time was pertty stretched. On Saturday, I had game night. Felt wrong to call it off just for my jam, but we did play online so I could be a little more absent than usual, and lay the groundwork: general scripts, UI work, and a bunch of graphics assets. Being an illustrator means I can do those, no sweat. For short projects I am often inspired by some odd artstyle or another I saw recently; this time it was the outro artworks of the anime series Rising of the Shield Hero. It also inspired a colour palette - always good to have for cohesion of all visuals - and sketch style that I followed with some more of my own voice for the brushstrokes. When time is scarce, stylised is the way to go! I only needed a quick background of sky and landing strip, and a player character I could somewhat sensibly cut into pieces for animation. Then I could spend the remaining art time on whacky aircraft.

I do my coding in Defold. A blank project with some placeholders for start menus etc. is always good to have around. This time around I heavily used the messaging system. Telling all sorts of objects and scripts what to do and when from somewhere else, hoping that it might require fewer flags and state changes to listen for. It was... okay. Due to the hectic nature of jams, it soon became difficult to remember where I was sending messages from, what the messages contained, and where scripts were getting messages from. My biggest gripe was, and not for the first time (I gotta remember this), that disabling GUI nodes makes them not play animations and not render, but they can still take input. So placing a New Mission button on screen middle makes for a lot of new missions that nobody needs. I kept hunting this one button misbehaving, until with some effort, I found out the real cuplrit was in another collection altogether. It would have been awesome to have a leaderboard, but implementing it was simply too much and I figured if that's off the table, then a local highscore was also useless. There's alwas next time.

All animations are done in code. The aircraft slightly sway while flying in, the PC uses a very simple animation and setting combination for the arm movement. My point of interest, its USP if you will, for this game was the controls. I have toyed with the idea of games that use mulit-button input resembling symbols projected onto the keyboard. Those thoughts were stopped by the physical fact that most keyboards take only a small limited numbers of inputs at once, and making a game for only the precious few that use specialised, hardcore keyboards seemed pointless. But that's where jams shine! I came close in MoI by assigning each upper arm one key to cycle through three positions, and then the three outwards keys for the lower arms. I am not entirely convinced it's particularly sensible to do it this way, but I like the effect nonetheless. It did make the accessibility... low. I wondered which keys to use, but the obvious choice are F and J as base keys because of their ten-finger-typing start positions. Many keyboards have haptic marks on them, too.

The signals of course had to match the humorous setting's idea - even if we see almost nothing of it. There are regular signals like levelling out, dropping, or bringing out the wheels. There is also the Egyptian landing (all together: fly liiike an e-gyp-tiaaaan!), or dropping the invisibility cloak. I imagined very short timers for the individual missions, during which players have to manage an increasing number of signals before landing, but it turned out that even a restricted set of only a few signals takes much longer than anticipated, especially for new players. When confronted with twice as many signals in the same time, it became a real challenge. The chosen time in the submission is more than double what I first assigned. It's not exactly well-tested, yet I felt the sense of progression wasn't half bad (at time of writing I'd gotten feedback that it is just to much to deal with and the progression would need work).

When I am not lucky enough to find a composer, I take my sounds from freesound. I find most sounds easy enough to scrounge up. Finding fitting music that also loops is tad trickier, but entirely manageable. Mostly it takes time to sift through the sounds available. I expect that I will eventually have a library big enough to handle many use cases. Naturally I opt out of the audio voting category then.

This time I truly worked until half an hour to deadline - completely forgetting that there is an hour assigned for just uploading - only to encounter upload issues left and right. Then of course messed up the embedding function of the LD site (zipping the folder instead of the content so there was no index.html at root level after all). But a first commenter corrected that, then there were some more finding other bugs that made the game barely playable - blasted time constraints making testing so hard. And I even had my SO test from Sunday afternoon! - but for now I find that for a three-day jam game, it is stable and playable enough, even if there are still some minor bugs in there, like going back to menu ruining the game. Ahem. Minor, I say.

This game idea is fun for sure. It's too small to become a full game, but it might be a neat little basis to expand outward with for any sort of wacky fantasy setting or as minigame in any urban fantasy environment. LD59 was my first jam in a few months after working diligently on a commercial release and I enjoyed myself a great deal as always. In every jam game I try to add a tiny bit more polish, more content, or more complex system. It's cool to see the many interpretations of a theme, the skills people can muster in short time, and being inspired to get better at something with the proof that it can indeed be done quickly.

I noticed there are a number of games coming up in my suggested ratings list that directly credit stock websites for their sound effects and sometimes music. I know that these are allowed in the Jam (which these games are in), but the games I've seen so far also have opted into the Audio category for ratings. I thought that for the Audio category in the Jam, entries that use any sort of third party sound effects should opt out of the Audio category.

However, what about when the music appears to be made within the jam time, but the sfx are all or partly stock and not made/recorded within the jam time? I only ask since I'm not sure if the participants are aware of opting out of Audio and wanted to let them know. Or is this allowed or generally accepted? I understand if all the music/sfx were third party, but I'm not sure about the partial cases.

Click my avatar to try out our game!

For me it's the music/audio. For whatever reason, making a simple catchy looping game song isn't that hard for me. So I will go the whole game knowing I need to make a song, and on the last day I'll spend 20 minutes to an hour busting out a little song or two and throw it in. Listening to some of these back years later I'm always impressed that they are as good as they are. haha They aren't masterpieces, but for the amount of effort I put in, they surprise me.

Fun side story, one game jam a few years back, after making the music and having less than an hour left I really felt like we needed some sound effects. The game was dealing with building robots and things, so I ran out to my garage with my phone and recorded me using a bunch of different power tools and stuff in different ways, and threw them into the game. They ended up fitting perfectly into what we had made.

Last minute additions to games can be risky, but sometimes they are the best decisions and can really add a lot.

…until we play your games!

We already have almost 100 ratings and almost as many comments - and we've barely had any time to play anyone else's game yet!

We are very grateful for this, but please have mercy on us - we already owe you so much.

Our team is planning to play a lot of LD59 entries this weekend to repay our debt, so feel free to drop links to your games in the comments. We'd love to check them out!

Cheers!

Our game is here, by the way: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/jims-quest-for-birthday-present

游戏可以进行中英文切换！！！The game allows you to switch between Chinese and English！！！

Hello, we've been blown away with the positive reception to Mission: Stop Transmission! It's a UI based game about exploring an operating system to abort a deadly signal transmission.

We're currently working on an update to address some players' concerns and improve the game's general quality of life. Feel free to give us feedback if you have any cool ideas.

Thank you!

You can play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/mission-stop-transmission

The game works on Windows and on internet browsers on computers and even mobile devices!

But to understand it, you'll need to

play through it first.

I think this is a pretty good trailer for our game jam game that I made. Maybeeee, I dunnooo https://youtu.be/EDOXvlZudPo

I went to another country to visit my friend and make a game together! I usually do both art and coding myself but this time I could focus solely on art. I'm not very good at digital art, so we decided to do it on water color and scan each asset in with my phone. This was a fun challenge and I hope you enjoy playing it as much as we did making it!

Play it here!

Play here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/goobers

First sketch VS final result

Hello there!

We’re a team composed of kamikazeessj13, hrbdnicolas, sid-ahmed, and drydiamond! We’re happy to present our very first Ludum Dare game: Net Hacking.

Net Hacking was made for Ludum Dare 59 and theme was Signal. In our game, you'll have to corrupt every router in your path by sending them a signal until you reach the antenna. Be careful not to let the signal get interrupted by binary skulls!

As we’re all students from the same coding school (42 Marseille), we faced a lack of experience in 2D design and sound design. Despite this, we chose not to rely on AI or free-to-use assets, so in the end, Net Hacking is entirely homemade!

We all worked on the game design. kamikazeessj13, hrbdnicolas, and sid-ahmed handled the programming, while drydiamond created the assets and sound design.

You can play our game on browser, Linux and Windows here (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/nethacking). We hope you enjoy our game!

This is my first game jam experience. I didn't expect to receive so many positive reviews about the game.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to implement all of the game's features. I made a mistake in planning and misplaced my priorities.

Next time I'll prepare better and try to make a good game.

Thanks everyone! See you at LD60!

Spent way too long on this one. The box just squishes the boy like a pancake. Sorry to anyone who experienced this while playing 🥲

Spent several iterations trying to prevent Godot's collision depenetration. Ultimately decided on per-body collision exceptions:

• disable the hitbox
• let it slide past
• re-enable when it's clear

Work smarter not harder I guess...

Share your funniest bugs if you have em!

This was my 6th time participating and we usually use all 3 days to "finish" our game. Due to unforeseen time limitations this year, we created this little and simple game called Landslide within roughly 12 raw working hours.

It's a bit rough around the edges and really simple in its gameplay loop but that's the whole process of a gamejam - make it playable, not perfect. And we had a super chill time while doing so. No stress involved, no big issues, just some coding and arting.

The only thing that still haunts me is, that I had a much better idea halfway into the jam :cry:

This year, we took on a project that was quite ambitious for us: a point-and-click game! It features a mysterious atmosphere, the strange disappearance of a lighthouse keeper, and a few puzzles. We’re really happy that we managed to finish everything we had planned. If you’re interested, feel free to give it a try. We’d love to hear your feedback! <3 https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/below-the-light

👽 Play Human in the middle 👽

.- -.-. - ..- .- .-.. .-.. -.-- / .- -. / .- .-.. .. . -. / .. -. / - .... . / -- .. -.. -.. .-.. .