Heya :wave: I’m just doing the traditional I’m in post. I’ve been doing Ludum Dare for awhile now. (Since LD29 on and off). This competition got me programming and making games, and as of now I’ve been a professional software engineer for the last 6 years! Please if you are on the fence about joining or worried about how you’ll perform, just jump in! Every year you join is a win for you and a win for all of us!

This year I’ll be using Unity again, and I want to make something 3D again. Last year I took a whack at an open area platformer/brawler and while it worked out I didn’t have much time to play test or plan out level design. This year I want to have a good idea of the mechanics and level design before I ever place a vertex.

Here’s to a good dare! :champagne_glass: Cheers!

I started learning Unity a month ago, and I made my first game for an itch.io game jam these past two weeks and I'm hooked. I have no idea if my partner and I will even manage to finish a game in time, but I have no doubt it will be a great experience. I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone comes up with and also, kudos to the people posting preparation tips, it really helps put things into perspective.

It's been a while since I've been able to join Ludum Dare. Since the last time, I've been blessed by two kids that's now 5 and 8 years old. Becoming a parent comes with some caveats it seems. Well, finally I'm going to be able to join the Jam once again and it pains me to say that I probably haven't finished a single game since the last time I joined. Friday, I will pack my bags and travel to an old friend to keep me company during the Jam.

This time I'll be trying to limit myself somewhat. I'm going to try to do everything I can to only use my Raspberry PI 400. So whats my game plan? Well... I'll tell you.

Environment: I'll be using plain HTML and JS (I'm a frontend developer after all). The project will probably not hit anywhere close to 60 fps on my own system, but I can probably handle a bit of lag during development.

Editor: VS-Code probably, but I'll try to learn a bit of VIM as well. VIM is a whole lot more performant than Code but old habits die hard they say.

Graphics: MyPaint for sketching and doodling around (RPi works amazing with MyPaint) and probably Piskel for final art.

Music & Sound: This is the biggest hurdle. I'm used to FL Studio and Renoise which is quite modern software. Unfortunately the system isn't capable of those tools, so I'll go with Milkytracker and Audacity for the sound bits I think.

I love to work with limitations and see how much I can get out of as little as possible. Hopefully this won't bite me in the a** to much. From the start I was going to program in C using RayLib, but I don't have the energy to compile for all systems at the end.

Good luck to you all. I'm looking forward to trying out some amazing games!

Hello,

Been wanting to do this for a while and utilize it as a learning experience. I have monogame and unity experience but never truly finished anything! Here's to maybe sparking a new decent idea!

Welcome back to this weird series where I refuse to just use Unity's Input System and crunch before jam for no reason. Luckily, I have made good progress this day, so I hope the pain will go away soon :)

Reading input

Finally, I am able to read device input. It was surprisingly easy, as I had all of the device code already written. I just had to modify a couple lines of code to make it work with the recent changes and here we are.

For reading gamepads I'm using Unity's Input Manager, which isn't great. The main issue with it is that it changes it's mappings between operating systems. It's working ok on my windows computer, but I have no idea what will happen if someone plays my game on a macbook. This is why I need XInput, because I do not have the resources nor time to worry about this (also, you can't use vibration for some reason).

Gamepad deadzones are also working. Even my drunk xbox360 controllers stay on 0,0 when I'm not touching them. This was also quite easy to setup, as I just copied code from Unity's own Input System.

Saving & loading

I have managed to add a very temporary save system. In the old version of Cablebox, you can select how the preferences get saved. In this version I want to allow people to even make custom providers. However: I don't have time for this, so I settled on a basic json serializer.

Cablebox also has multiplayer support, which means that there can be multiple players with different inputs and bindings. I temporary forced Cablebox to add every device to the first player, because of saving. It's not like I'm gonna be making a multiplayer game any time soon (and especially on LD).

Remaining systems

I am really close to finishing and I have 2 main features remaining: - input remapping - xinput gamepads

Input remapping should be easy (famous last words) and I will have to look into how xinput works. For now, that's all I have. See you tomorrow

I'm already doing mental daydreaming over stuff I might want to do with my game this time, I don't usually have a lot of text or story in my jam games but I also am really curious to play around with setting up localization files (I also like dabbling in language learning, so translation into my target language(s) sounds like a fun mini-project on its own).

So if I set it up for localization but it only has English at launch, do you think updating the entry with other translations counts as a "new feature" (thus unacceptable addition post-jam) or "porting for accessibility" but for languages instead of consoles (where console/web/etc. ports are encouraged post jam)?

Good night! For tomorrow we are preparing a mini-game for warm-up. Today we worked on animations and environments.

I've had plenty of gamejams go to ruin by bouncing against technical issues I should have seen coming. So these days if I'm using an unfamiliar development kit (basically anything other than Unity) I try to do some prep work so that my time during the jam is focused on the game itself, and not learning the platform.

As I've decided to make a SNES game for the jam, I've been spending my evenings this week learning how to build games for the SNES and building myself a fairly basic framework so I can hit the ground running.

I'm working with the PVSnesLib SNES SDK, and oh boy am I glad I decided to do prep work. There's a lot to learn here. My goal was just to get a background image, control an animated sprite and draw text on screen. Theoretically it's straight forward and thankfully PVSnesLib includes lots of examples. However there's a lot of weird eccentricities to working on the SNES that have thrown a lot of obstacles in my way.

Thankfully it's starting to come together and as you can see from the GIF above, I've got some placeholder assets in place and I have my character moving around the screen on real SNES hardware. I'm going to look at music and sound effects tomorrow night to make sure I have a good pipeline for them and then I should be ready for the jam.

Very excited to do LD51, after doing 50 and 49

I liked exactly half the options

shoutout to whoever suggested "ascend to froghood" during slaughter because that's the only dream that's kept me voting for "Ascend"

Hello all! I recently released EasyLeaderboard, a framework to add an online leaderboard to your game in under 10 minutes!

I've used a version of this system for my last few Ludum Dare games, and it has been really fun to watch people play for the #1 spot.

With LD51 coming up, I wanted to share it with you all as something to keep in mind for your games! There is free hosting for the API, so no need to worry about setting up a server.

It comes with a Godot 3.5 and Godot 4.0 client already built and ready, but it has a simple API for use in any game! The clients are extremely customizable, so you can drop them in to work immediately but then iterate on how they look and what data they show!

Give it a try and let me know what you think!!!

Check out the API here

Godot 3.5 client here

Godot 4 client here

If you make a game with it, tag me on Twitter! @garrett_makes

What themes are you voting for?

Every LD I start a little poll just for fun to see what people are voting for. It has nothing to do with the actual results but I still enjoy it anyway. Click the link and select the themes you're voting for, then see the current results so far!

Take the Poll!

Is there any way to access the pages for games that were hosted on the wordpress site?

I've looked it up on the wayback machine but it seems not to have cached the pages, at least on my profile.

It's also our 5th wedding anniversary :)

We've made a lot of progress on our Haskell game engine. We have frame-stepping and the ability to hook the Haskell REPL directly into the game now. It should speed up iteration time like crazy. Perfect for a jam.

We've also open-sourced our tooling that we use to develop on Linux and cross-compile for Windows! Check it out.

Excited to be making games with everyone once again. Can't wait to play them all 🥂

Downvoted pretty much just the ones that I didn't saw myself doing.

Like "Corruption" or "Parasite", or like half of Round 2.

I don't understand you.

Like I get it, the world is fucked up right now, we live in a society... but we live in a society 24/7. Doesn't mean we have to be reminded of all the shitty parts of it on every occasion humanly imaginable, okay? Just... have some fun, will you guys? Have some fun! You can make your dystopian sim where every 10 seconds a child get sacrificed to Satan all right. At least let the rest of us who do want to have some fun, have some fun. Please...

Thank you very much.

The guide is over here: https://ludumdare.com/resources/guides/embedding/

Discussion is below.

IMPORTANT: Please reach out to me if you're an Unreal user that uses the new HTML5 exporter. We don't yet know if our setup is compatible. Thanks!

Four years after my first dare, me and @Pegasys are working together on our third joint Ludum Dare game. Once again I am asking you to not let shelter win.

We have a little extra help this time. With my girlfriend providing music and artwork and my housemate helping us with code.

Hopefully we can all make some great games and have fun!

Engine: Unity

IDE: Visual Studio

2D Assets: Photoshop and Aesprite

Audio: Audacity and Sfxr