Greetings!
Last post where I asked for danger zone games went really well! The game I tried were a treat and criminally underrated gems!
So following this trend I ask upon the great community of Ludum Dare to hand over your danger zone (less than 20 rating) games! I shall try and rate your games to help the game get out of the danger zone!
(also yay new art style)
Looking for a puzzle game to play? Check out my game!
This game was made by 7 hardworking and skilled people, without any ready-made assets (except for stuff like font and game engine features) or AI generation. So if you want to play a game which is 100% human-made, we got you!
I decided to share my little ink shader, since it caught so much attention!
I used Unity Shader Graph, it turned out rather huge, but pretty I think
And since it is obviously unreadable, here is a diagram:
Feel free to ask any questions :heart:
Please let me introduce you : The Drunk Bassist of Hamelin the movie
It will take you less than 3 minutes to watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QL9t8TGi2g
If you like what you saw please play our game and be sure to leave a comment so we can improve and find your game to play it too.
Edit :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uA0eK7vO8s
PS1 was a difficult platform to work with, but all the wobbly quads were definitely worth the hassle!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/friends-adrift
Can I post an improvement to my game on the game page even though it was made after Ludum Dare? Please help!
Home -> Ludum Dare 56 -> Me -> My Grades
Or by clicking here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/my/grades
And if you haven't played my game! Play Shrimpy
We want YOU in our team, mostly to play our game, but still, we want YOU!!
(https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/aqualens)
[hey guys, here is AquaLens a diving fish photography game, it's our entry to this jam! Any feedback would be very appreciated!]
Because they have tiny ant-bodies!" 🐜💪😂
After failing LD54 and LD55, I'm glad to have a finished game once again for LD56. So thought I'd just write up a classic post mortem of what went right and wrong.
Ambitious but tight scope - I knew I wanted to make something story focused but with some tactical sections to break up the dialog. So during ideation I mulled over a lot of different combat systems but I ruled out anything complex and kept trying to think how do I simplify this down to something I can code in a few hours. I really wanted each race you ally with to bring a unique flavour to combat and when I finally decided that each ally would essentially just add extra combat abilities like healing or tanking I realised how simple I could make it. When adding a new race just meant adding one extra button that heals 5 hp you're onto a winner for a jam length game.
Simple art style - I was planning to do the art for this and I'm not an artist so I needed something I could do quickly. 1-bit low resolution pixel art with a striking colour scheme was something I was sure I could do passably. Thankfully we ended up switching roles so I had a much better artist in the end but the quick style meant she wasn't overworked in the process. I don't always think enough about art style ahead of LD but this time it really helped a lot.
MVP first - I'm a big believer in get the game playable asap and build from there. The "it'll all come together at the end" approach so rarely works. So I had all the basic gameplay systems build by the end of saturday. That way we were going into Sunday with a clearer idea what was working, what wasn't and how much time we had. Made adjusting scope and delivering much easier. At one point the game had four tribes and four bosses but both went down to 3 as it became clear how long things were taking to build.
Untested project roles - I worked with the same partner on LD54 and we made a cool little deductive adventure game. We wanted to try mixing up roles and trying different stuff for this jam, however we neglected to really test or prove out these changed roles were going to work ahead of time. It didn't quite work out and Saturday night when we looked at progress we knew we need to make a change if we were going to deliver. So we reverted to how we'd done the last jam and that worked out great.
Genre confusion - To me this was always an interactive fiction game with some combat sequences to break up the storytelling. However from the LD feedback it's clear a lot of players were enjoying the combat but felt the storytelling was long and getting in the way. I don't normally run into this because when you show screenshots of a point and click adventure game you kind of get a self-selecting audience who are into that style of game. I think screenshots of this game draw in RPG players who aren't down for pages and pages of dialog. There's certainly improvements I could make to make the dialog more engaging but there is a fundamental problem of mechanics driven gamers are going to be frustrated by half of what is in this game.
Monday commitments - I was sure I had Monday clear to finish up the game. Wrap it up, polish it, release it. Instead I rerealised thanks to social media it was one of my best friend's birthdays that I'd forgotten about and spent a bunch of my evening being social and hanging out with them. So I had to finish up the game on Tuesday. It was always going to be an "Extra" game anyway as I'm non-competitive but a recurring problem for me is not having time on Monday to finish up.
Learnings for next time is to keep a tight achievable scope, focus on MVP first and make sure we've got a clear idea who's doing what and that they're prepared for the work involved. I would like to say "make sure Monday is free" but I say that every jam and then somehow it's not.
Great jam folks, see you all at the next one...
Keep playing and ratings games!
... And if you are already here
I've started working on a post-jam version of the little fishing tycoon game that I made for Ludum Dare 56, Snow Flipper!
I've posted a video on YouTube with a couple details and the announcement of a newsletter that I've set up!
https://youtu.be/QAtNNlHIKu8
I was rating games, right? Well, then I came across Springtail, one of the hardest games to beat WITHOUT CHEATING. And I guess all that's left for me to say is this: I currently hold the speedrun world record...
Here's the whole story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eJq3y1sJfc
I want to rate your games :3
We want YOU in our team, mostly to play our game, but still, we want YOU!!
Boil em, mash em, stick em in a stew :musical_note:
Play our lil' potatoe game :arrow_right: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/fry-quest
Play and rate Fastigrades here! (there's a Web build ;))
If a trebuchet can launch a 90 kg projectile over 300 meters, how far will a very tiny cannon launch a 1 mm tardigrade?
I'm still going through my backlog of games to try, but I feel like most games are still struggling to hit 20 ratings. We certainly are! So if you think our tribute to Yetisports sounds fun, I'd love it if you could take a look! It's a very quick game to try.
Come on down to https://www.twitch.tv/coleslawski for the usual shenanigans!