drop it a rate and some feedback, also feel free to drop a link to your own game and I'll check it out! LINK: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/lizard-chef

In this deck builder you are playing cards to defend a tower against the a horde of evil. After every turn the enemy advances for 10 seconds. Do you have the wits to protect Kraduul's last settlement and hold the horde for 33 turns? Only then will you be victorious!
Thank you for checking out our game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/tower-of-kraduul

Heyyy this is Chan from Call It a Day:wave::skull:

I'm one of the 2D artists of this jam and wish to share some BTS with you guys today :alien:

I mainly focus making icon and items this time, let's take a look of my working area first HAHAHAHA super messy I used to create all assets at the same ai file cause I think it is easier for me to keep the style in sync! This also can work as a mood board '3'

For the ideas, I usually refer to what the game designer shiro suggested me:sunglasses: like theseeee Then I might make some minor changes to make it fits the theme more/ make it easier to draw LOL.

For items, according to the difficulty, I completed them in two ways. For simpler graphics like this, I will draw directly with the paintbrush tool in AI, with exactly the color we shown here. After finishing the base, then I will add shadows on it. Shadow be like: I don't have much to share on the choice of colors. It really relies on experience:sob: But I guess using "color theme picker" in AI would be a good choice for beginner.

Some graphics are relatively more complicated, and I really need to think carefully before coloring it and shape it. For these cases, I will focus on the shape first. I will draw every parts I need and just paint it in some really random colors so that I know they are different components. When I'm good with the graphic, I will start coloring it and it became the following:

Last but not the least, Pinterest is my favorite reference website! Big shout out to them :clap::clap::cry: They help me with refining the art:cry::two_hearts:

I hope this can let you know more about our game progress and please go try it outtt :heartbeat:

How did you leave your parents' home? :house:

Don't forget to PLAY

Also PLAY Itch (recommended)

LDJam is finished and the dust settled. We had some time to gather initial feedback for Sunk Cost Fallacy and think about our life choices...

The concept is quite good, and I am proud with what we made. It could use at least a couple hours for finishing touches though.. - A character, running around the room - Better UX! - Water VFX - Less text in favor of visual cues - Balancing level design (looking at you attic door opening time)

Onekke, hard at work with her furry QA lead.

One of our favorite levels.

Main/end screen and item art were generated by MidJourney

Overall, I had a great time making this game and I hope you will have a great time playing it <3

Please, if you have a minute - Share your feedback, we might continue developing this game in the future.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/sunk-cost-fallacy

Please comment your game links so I can play them!

Also, remember to play our game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/peekaboo

I don't have an entirely free schedule, but I'll try to play most of the games posted. This post's original purpose was to promote my game :) , plz give it a try. I am really proud of it, and it is my first compo game. Here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/betrayed I'll also try to comment and provide as much feedback I can.

Ludum Dare is perfect for experimentation, weirdness and flexing design muscles! After a false start with an idea that was not too appealing I came up with the concept of a land that changed every 10 seconds. If you are not on the ground, you die (the floor is lava!)

I got it working in a few minutes by means of Simplex 3d (x,y,time), and it looked nice. For 5 seconds the ground shifts smoothly, then stays still for 5 more seconds.

Next I made a character that could run and fly around with a jetpack, but just for so long before it overheats and switches off. Just fooling around trying to stay alive was fun, so I went for it.

First system was working. What else? Well, it made sense to pick things up. I thought it could be some kind of miner on a planet where shifting tectonic plates pushed minerals up for you to pick up. Spawning diamonds on local maxima of the Simplex function worked well enough. Trying to reach them before they sunk into the lava was fun!

With that in place I thought it would be a nice touch to score only when dropping collected diamonds somewhere. I added a dropship that lands when the ground is still, then flies back into space. This made collecting diamonds much more interesting and challenging. I discarded collected diamonds slowing you down because of weight. It made the game way too difficult.

Well, on the first version the dropship was some kind of ugly purple bowl, but you get the idea...

Instead, I added some lava creatures that wander around, chasing you if you walk nearby. You can scare them by using your jetpack, which heats it up - so you have to be careful, maybe you won't be able to use it when you need it most! Ha! Dual purpose. That's always nice.

FX, particles, the lava effect, a few details here and there... polishing always takes between five and ten times it took you to make the core game. But I thing it was worth it, I like how the game looks.

All in all I invested 15h between Saturday and Sunday. Tecton Inc. feels solid enough, a fun little arcade to enjoy for a few minutes. I would have wasted quite a few coins on an arcade cabinet with this game back in the day!

Give it a go! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/tecton-inc Hope you like playing it as much as I enjoyed making it!

Hi guys!

A lot of people participated in Ludum Dare 51, many of them for the first time, some just don't have enough time to promote their entries and ask for feedback, some just not aware about the way, how usually it works.

I've played more than 70 entries already and have some to share. I won't share ones, which creators promoting them often on the front page, but would like to offer you a few entries, which are really catchy, but a very little amount of people reviewed them. Let's go!

Drum Dance Showdown from @cyberfrank

Yes, it doesn't look very attractive, tho has it's own charm, but try it out if you are not afraid to download it. One of the best music-based entries I found on this jam and that's quite sad, that not so many people crafted something music-based for such theme. But anyway this one is definitely worth to check!

Auto Parker by @grlmc and @bathpirate

Do you have driving license? If yes - probably you know how hard to park and this game doesn't make things easier! Aside of the cool puzzle mechanic there are cute assets, nice UI and one of the non trivial gameplay for the given theme. Are you still sitting here? Go and try it now!

Jumprope by @djd123456

How often I've heard excuses like "I'm not an artist" or "I'm not a game designer". This little creation shows how little you need to actually make something first of all playable, second of all funny as hell.

Toad Cat's Cemetary Watch by @43sam

I always wonder how a small team (or even one person like in this case) can create a small, but pretty compete game. This one is a good example how to keep balance between everything - gameplay, art, music and code (which is not buggy at all), give a player in-game tutorial and still match the theme!

Farming Fatigue by @benstar, @disomikron, @thcgourami and @halleester

I don't know how this one missed the hype-radar, but that's a fact it has not a lot of review. Want to udnerstand what's going on? Try to imagine a plants vs zombies, but where all flowers are actually fighting against you right after you've plant them. Imagine? Now try to survive!

That's all for today from me

But keep me posted, did you find any other good example of gems inside the piles of games people created during the jam? Is there something to share? Or maybe you created a game, but didn't have enough review? Leave a comment and we all will be able to check out and help each other!

And don't forget to play some Dangerous Zone games, let's keep the event cool for everyone!

Hey fellow jammers ✨

I wanted to share a few things on how we designed and built Poda Wants a Statue around prototyping. I love reading post mortems and dev stories here, so here is me giving back to this wonderful community!

The idea

Before starting any prototype, we needed a game idea. Among a lot of out-of-scope or just plain weird ideas, one of them felt cool: a job dating game where you have 10 seconds to say the best corporate bs with an autocomplete interface. It felt a bit too much like something we knew we could do as we already explored the “fun game with silly words that makes funny sentences” in a previous game we made: Welcome Googoo.

Then, in the middle of our ideation session, something happened.
Blibloop ~ looking outside the window with a “woke up 2 hours ago and still sleeping” look on her face and coffee in her hands: “Hey wait wait I have something…”
Me: “… ?”
Blibloop: “Picture this: there is a bear or something, maybe a panda, and every 10 seconds he shakes everything!”
Me: “Ok cool, what’s the game?”
Blibloop: “Oh… Idk 🤷‍♀️”

A few walks around the park later, and me refusing to do a puzzle game because damn puzzle games are so freakin’ hard to make, we settled on something pretty similar to what the game turned out to be in the end: a small god game where you assign workers to either collecting resources or making a statue, and every so often everything gets shuffled. A management game for a jam, nice! That’s definitely easier to do than a puzzle game, right? … right? 🥲

here is a very cool and understandable design scribble by Blibloop.

Technical prototype

Second half of the first day already, let’s start!

Blibloop focused on choosing an art style, Zakku researched references and started a first draft of music, and I worked on a technical prototype: Am I able to code some functional state machines for our workers AI? Can I do a resource and upgrade system? How is the Panda system going to work? How to make drag and drop in Unity?

Here is our Day 1 prototype 🖥️

We tested this one ourselves, and here were the learnings:
- Everything seems doable, but not easy. The workers state machine is already complex, and they don’t have pathfinding yet. - Current drag and drop system with OnMouseDown and OnMouseUp is a nightmare. Leads to a lot of bugs and clunky controls. - 10 seconds for the panda shake seems a bit extreme. in the final version, it's closer to 20 seconds! - Is this understandable by a player? (spoiler - it was NOT)

Feature complete prototype

After a good night of sleep, let’s start day 2!

As with any Ludum Dare we made, this is the day when we want to be able to make other people playtest the game and give us some feedback.

To do that, we needed something that was:
- a bit less buggy and clunky: I had to rework the drag and drop from the ground up. I might explain this in another post later!
- with all the features that we currently intended to put in the game: As you could see in the previous gif, we were still missing upgrades!
- a bit more self-explanatory. Playtesting is a bit useless if playtesters don’t even understand what to do or how to play I guess.

Here is our Day 1.5 prototype 🐼

We had friends at our place in the afternoon for teatime, so we made them test our prototype! Here is what we learned:
- The game is NOT self-explanatory at all yet. A lot of things were misunderstood or not understood: What are the rabbits doing? What’s my resource count? How do upgrades work? How do I get gold? What is the panda doing? Nobody understood they could drag and drop resources too. - Once they understood, the game seems fun but completely unbalanced. Road is busted, building upgrade (they only updated speed and didn’t gave more resources are useless), Poda shaking a random number of bunnies is confusing and unfair. - The game doesn’t seem to have too many bugs! That's at least a success with all those somewhat complex AIs 🏅

Here is an attempt by my brother to break it 🐇

Asset complete prototype

So here we are on the last day, with a game that is impossible to understand! Turns out making a management game is not only hard to code, but mostly hard to design so people understand how to play and what to do!

We started by implementing all the beautiful visuals and sounds Blibloop and Zakku did, and then spent a lot of time working on the clearest possible UI and on adding a lot of visuals to help the player: White indicators for idle bunnies and clickable resources, blue overlays on everything you can interact with, big chunky arrows on were you can drop what you have in hand, game intro and Poda’s prompts to set and remind the goal, small animations on every bunny state, and a lot more!

We kept asking friends to playtest through the day, and their feedback helped a lot!
- They are not sure when a button is clickable? Let’s darken it even more and change text color when it’s not! - Having upgrades available right from the starts makes it information heavy? Let’s push that to a bit later! - They feel let down without a cool ending animation? Ok let’s prioritize that then.

Final jam version

And that’s about how we came up with what we have today ✨

Now it’s time your time to tell us what you feel is great or what could be done better!

Thanks to all the wonderful people who already tried the game, here is what we learned so far: - Everyone seems to love the art and music! Huge congrats to Blibloop (@dodidouda) and Zakku (@zakku) 💖 - It seems like people understand the game quickly enough! That’s something we are really really happy about, since it was the part we spent the most time on ✨ - Not a single bug found! I believe that's a first for me, on my most complex jam game 🧑‍💻 - Some people feel Poda is too annoying during late game. It becomes almost impossible to put all your bunnies back to work and gather all resources again before they throws another tantrum! That was actually a design decision but it seems it's not liked by some, so we are already thinking on solutions. - Dragging a lot of resources is painful. We are thinking on what could make this easier! - There are some small visual things we need to fix, like order layers for the bunnies that is sometimes wrong!

Here is the game if you want to try it and leave your feedback!

Play Poda Wants a Statue here!

How about you? Do you prototype and playtest a lot during game jams?

We got a hold of Mike and were able to get our game up with ratings. Thank you to everyone that gave me suggestions on how to fix the issue. Go ahead and check it out any ratings would be really helpful since we are only able to accept ratings now.

🎶 Banger soundtrack that evolves with gameplay

👽 Kill those aliens and turn them into, well, pixelated purple splatter

🧃 "JUICE", as many of our commenters have said (find out what they mean)

👉 PLAY THE GAME IN YOUR BROWSER

We will check back every game and give you our feedback!

There is one function in our game that I don’t think a lot of people have noticed or clicked on… on the start menu (or the pause menu) try clicking the three colored buttons. We built in this functionality and it’s actually a lot more powerful than it seems. Everything is textured with one texture map (minus the robots)

Check it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/bots-bots-bots

I see everyone writing well curated and well written post mortems on the main page to promote their entries, and while on one hand I Do want to get in on that, cause i love to see the little numbers on my game's stats go up, on the other the development of the game, I feel, was fundamentally less interesting than most of the other entries. Still, more than a full post-mortem I can go ahead and just deliver some fun facts and lessons I got from making this thing.

#7: THE GAME WASN'T SUPPOSED TO BE THIS DEPRESSING FROM THE START

Honestly, my first thought when reading the theme was "Ah! I can do Dream Drop Distance!". My original idea was just to have four characters solving four different sokoban levels, and the player would just continuously switch between them, making the experience more frustrating. Thing is... that just wasn't fun, so I started implementing different tasks for each character... and while doing that I thought "Oh you know what happens every ten seconds and makes boring tasks really hard? Depressive intrusive thoughts!", so I ended up shifting the whole design and making yet another emo-ass game.

#6: I THINK I MIGHT HAVE MISREAD THE ROOM

Thing is I don't do many jams nowadays, and when I do it's mostly as an excuse to get off my ass and make something. The thought that this might have been a bit of a heavy topic for a jam never even crossed my mind. I just tend to make sort of sad games lately, and I really didn't question the theming once during development. But now that everyone commented about how it's a bit of a heavy thing for a game jam... yeah... i can definitely see it... sorry :sweat_smile:

#5: MOST OF THE ASSETS ARE FROM A THING I'M MAKING THAT WILL EVENTUALLY RELEASE

A lot of people praised the art-style of my Ludum Dare entry, which made me very happy, because most of the assets I used for this jam are from another game that I have been in the process of developing for a couple of months!

It will probably take a bunch more time for me to release this project, since I mostly work on it in my free time. It was originally named "All We Have Ever Known is Death" but I recently changed its placeholder name to "When I Said That Now It's Ok To Be Cringe I Didn't Mean Like That", and it's basically the original NES The Legend of Zelda but as a millennial mumblecore drama. Either that or a post-game without a main game to be a post-game of. Basically you walk around and talk to people and sometimes things happen. It's a project I'm very excited about and I'm happy to know people dig my assets for it. If anything it will probably be less aggressively depressing than this Jam game (still sort of depressing, just, like, in a different way).

Anyhow if you like my Jam's game art style you can follow me on itch at https://actuallythemoon.itch.io/ and when my other game releases you'll probably get a notification or something.

#4: SEEING PEOPLE STREAMING THE GAME WAS BOTH INCREDIBLY FUN AND ALSO NOT FUN AT ALL

It's super weird right? Most streamers try to keep this bubbly entertainer persona going and then you barge into their stream being all like "pls play this game about depression" and everyone gets really uncomfortable. I eventually just stopped posting the game to Ludum Dare streams because... yeah, it both felt off-tone and hearing all that trauma dump dialogue read live was a bit uncomfortable for me too. That said, kudos to the one dude who did funny streamer voices throughout the game for offering me the most surreal thing I've experienced in months.

#3: THE CHARACTER SWAP MECHANIC WAS A PAIN IN THE ASS TO IMPLEMENT

Seriously. I love RPG Maker. It lets me bypass the most odious parts of making a game (mainly making up a dude and having them walk around), but as someone who previously had mainly worked in Unity, it's sometime incredibly frustrating to realize how unwieldy and complicated it is to implement things that in a more regular engine would be incredibly straightforward.

Above you can see what my code for switching characters looks like, and it basically took me a whole day and a half to figure it out, leaving very little time for polish and level design.

That said, I also feel like working on this definitely levelled up my ability to make complex stuff happen in Rpg Maker, so that's a plus!

#2: A GAMEBREAKING BUG IS STILL IN THE GAME

For some reason, if you rewind time during the second half of the box-moving tutorial, boxes become immovable, leaving no way for the player to progress. I have literally zero idea why that happens (and why it only happens on the "exported" version of the game, not in-engine). It makes literally no sense. I'm currently in the process of moving so it's probably not gonna be fixed anytime soon, so... y'know... just don't do that.

#1: I'M ULTIMATELY VERY HAPPY WITH HOW THIS JAM HAS GONE

I dunno, there's definitely a bunch of things I wish I could have done better design-wise (specifically the different abilities need some tweaking -not letting the characters step on the target tiles made puzzle design hell-, the puzzle design could have been widely improved and all of the timers need to be tested and re-adjusted), but still, I feel pretty happy with the result. I learned a bunch of new stuff about RPG Maker, got a lot of nice comments about my gameboy assets and made a game that ultimately I feel is resonant and a good expression of a specific experience I struggle with. Making games is ok sometimes!

Anyhow if you want to play and rate and comment Every 10 Seconds I Find New And Exciting Ways To Hate Myself you can do so here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/every-10-seconds-i-find-new-and-exciting-ways-to-hate-myself

TRY THIS👉https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/ten-secs-to-pack!

I'm wondering if it would be allowed to reuse the game I made for this LD to the next one. Fully changing the rules, but still leveraging the same game base "engine".

Looks like a gray area, as tooling and libraries are allowed if the source code is available.

But I guess I'll just submit it to the Jam if I reuse it. As it won't be a 4h game anymore, but a 8h one :wink:

If you want to play a platforming game why not RoboPup Goes To Puppyland! It has puppies, humans, and meat blocks! Everything you need for a few levels of fun 😁

This is the first of hopefully many dev logs that we'll be posting to share the process that brought you 'Dragua' -- a short rogue-like inspired by Balkan mythology. In this log, I'll be talking about what inspired aspects of the design, the lore, and the music.

The Theme (Every 10 Seconds)

When we started brainstorming, we wanted to avoid implementations with a mechanic centered on the timer itself. We really liked the idea of implementing a rogue-like, where the point was to become as strong as possible but eventually lose. Our lead developer (@tempest-smh ) mentioned an idea inspired by some of the other potential themes, where vines grew from the ground and spread across the map -- every ten seconds.

The Music - An unnatural time signature

We considered ways that we could give the player cues (about the vine growth) without placing a countdown somewhere on the screen. It seemed a good idea to add a 10-second "motif" to the music, something that repeated and would become associated with the recurring event.

The morning after the theme was announced, and we had begun prototyping, I woke up with some inspiration: if I chose a signature with 5 beats per measure, that would make the 10 second timer occur right between measures instead of inside of them. I started researching examples of music that employed 5/4 or 5/8 signatures (the "Mission Impossible" theme is a famous example). This video by Adam Neely is a great introduction to this topic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6kPKtix4

The Lore - A Balkan Myth

In my search, I quickly came across Balkan folk music. To ears steeped in Western signatures like 4/4, the folk music is immediately arresting and intriguing. I wanted to bring some of that character to our game. So while my teammates worked out mechanics, I delved into Wikipedia articles, searching for a story.

I came upon their ideas of the heroic Dragua, a warrior destined to fight against a destroyer figure. This was a perfect backdrop for the core mechanic of "vines overtaking the forest."

Hindsight - 5/8 is tricky

Remember what I said about certain people being used to certain time signatures? Adam Neely describes this perfectly as being able to speak "a language", and boy, I did not feel at all fluent trying to write and perform music in a 5/8 time signature. I eventually kept to fairly simple patterns in order to produce something that sounded clean--far from the complexity that I had dreamed of. But those are the kinds of quick judgements that have to be made on a short timescale ...

If you're interested in hearing the composition, check it out here.

"Follow the Fun"

In the next dev log, I'd like to share a major pivot in our design that came from inspiration following the adage "Follow the Fun". Look for a post during the week!

In the meantime, if any of this intrigued you, we'd love for you to stop by and enjoy our entry 'Dragua'! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/dragua

- Hawkin

I like playing games that are on the top of the Smart Balance (to reward those who rate and leave feedback, at least in an ideal world). The issue is that games that can't be rated (as they've opted out of every category) seem to get stuck with high Smart Balance as they can't be rated. The top 5 or 6 games on the top of Smart Balance right now can't be rated for whatever reason.

This seems like a bug or an issue with how the games are ranked, and I don't believe that it was an issue in previous jams. I guess a fix would be to not have games that can't be rated in the Smart Balance queue, but maybe there's a better solution.

Edit: I've just seen that the games that are suggested to me at the top of this page aren't actually the top of Smart Balance. How are they positioned there? Those are the games that I can never seem to rate.

How do you envision your wedding? :heart:

Don't forget to PLAY

Also PLAY Itch (recommended)