Here’s a 2nd post about how I made the music in Pom Planet!
You can read part one here: ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/pom-planet/$405620
If you haven’t checked it out, Pom Planet is an action puzzle game where you have to guide tiny creatures. (ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/pom-planet)
Having a unique track for all of the elements in the game, I knew I had to have some track for the Poms themselves. However, the Poms are in every level, visible at almost all times, so I had a difficult time deciding what I wanted to do.
Initially, I wrote a calm percussion track and a fast paced percussion track. The idea was for the calm track to play once all of the tiny creatures were born, and for the fast paced one to play when you completed a stage.
Both of these ideas didn't really work. From the player's perspective, the calm track started playing at an arbitrary time and was invasive on the ambient, cerebral mood. The fast paced track generally only played for a couple seconds before the player moved on to the next level.
My conclusion was to remove the calm track from the game. The ambient music could set the mood on its own, I didn't need a track representing the Poms at all times just for the sake of it.
For the fast paced track, I made it play when you scored the first Pom in a level. This infused the levels with a 3 act structure. The music is ambient and scary when the level is unknown and you haven't achieved any success yet. It becomes triumphant when you score your first Pom, and remains that way until finally you complete the stage.
Hey folks
Some may remember that a few years ago there was a website called https://ldstats.info (created by @pjnovas) which was pretty nice. Now it's offline but source code is still available. So I hosted a fork of it with version made by @sibi and also applied patch from this pull request by @ajayajayaj not to hardcode jams all the time. I am not promising you I will host it forever but for sure for some quite time :)
Took some time to find all those forks, pull requests and people who made all that nice stuff, but here we are:
https://ldstats.home.yogurtthehor.se
Oh, and a picture to get your attention of course
Play Survival of the Shadowlings in your Browser now!
Survival of the Shadowlings is a Lemmings type puzzle game with 10 increasingly harder levels.
Help those little fellas to survive.
Example of a level:
Leave your (Web-based) game in the comments and i will play it and rate you aswell.
Cheers.
and any other LD56 games that get stacked on the work pile. https://twitch.tv/funbasealpha 
[Mobile Friendly] [No Download] [Global Leaderboards]
Come play Deck Derby, a real-time racing card game where you play cards to control your racers and compete for the best leaderboard time! It was our first in-person jam and we had a ton of fun creating this, we learnt a ton about in-person collaboration, and honed our skills in Game-Ai and Ui.
Let us know what you think of this silly little game! :id:
Thanks for playing! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/deck-derby-sluglords-speedway
The first episode for Lily Adventuresses! is now fully out; and while it has an entirely different cast and story, it has some call-forwards to the second episode, not to mention both being set in the same world. It's an entry to another game jam, Safe in Our World Mental Health Game Dev Champions 2024.
https://dagitabsoft.itch.io/lily-adventuresses-episode-1-she-who-lost-everything-but-her-name
And Episode 2 Prologue is just one vote shy of being fully eligible for scoring (in the Humor category, since I snuck in a few jokes in the game). Play it and vote away.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/lily-adventuresses-episode-2-rise-of-the-arcritters-prologue
On Ludum Dare 56 among others appeared a game called Stolen Colors about tiny creatures that try to return, well, stolen colors from angry predators and make the world colorful once again.
For those who forgor or didn't played yet: in this game, you need to draw runes (similar to the pattern lock screen on smartphones), which summon and upgrade the little creatures that the player helps on their adventure. They fight off waves of enemies and gradually bring colors back to the world by collecting orbs at the end of each level.
While most of the players liked the concept, there was a lot of fair critique in its address.
UniOwl here, Stolen Colors' game designer and technical artist. Today I'll tell you, how did we improve our game, why we did some of the decisions, and what we have now.
Tutorial often is a big problem not only games that we do with our team, but of a jam games that we see. There's little time for development, and to succeed in gameplay, make a pretty graphics, some of the things must be thrown out, and tutorial is usually got rid of in the first place.
Despite that you can add tutorial on game page, usually players try to play first, and only after that they read everything trying to understand why they can't do anything. And that's very bad, because lack of tutorial and unintuitive gameplay frustrates the player and make its perception of the game worse (remember, no one likes to feel stupid while playing). We handled that, added short hints on how to play the game:
The second most mentioned thing was game's difficulty. Its fix is a lot harder as it requires a lot of hard work fine tuning various parameters.
And while it technically completeable (one of our artist made it to the very end!), it is quite a challenge, and most of the players didn't see colorfullness of the world.
First on our table was balance of the creatures. We understood how to fix that from the very beginning, but as for the tutorial we just didn't have time for that. We remade base characters stats and their progression over time.
Now one enemy is stronger than one ally (after all, predators are bigger and scarier than our tinies), and you have to counter every enemy with two or three allies.
Warriors beat tanks
Tanks beat mages
Mages beat warriors
Boss atacks were also changed. I accidentally made a mistake, where bosses had powerful attack that dealed a lot of damage to all allies. And if the player is unlucky, boss could use this attack three times in a row and destroy every possible squad. Now it is fixed.
Oh hell nah 💀
One of the comments lead us to a thought that too much random in runes cast must be reworked as player's success should not depend on luck. While we tried to avoid random in game (this is why you see the same exact enemies every try), it is difficult to do something with runes. So we tried to make it in such a way that if one of the runes don't spawn now, its spawn chance is raised (as described very well here https://www.charliecleveland.com/types-of-randomness-part-2/).
As we initially planned, after losing a wave, player is thrown back, which reminds a bit of tug-of-war game. And if enemies managed to capture all the castles or player is defeated in boss battle, level restarts. Instead, in jam version, player get sent to the main menu (uh-oh), and enemy capture raises the error, after what player gets stuck.
All of that were fixed, and now player also has two castles intead of one, which allows him to make a comeback on the beginning.
In jam version player sees drawing board and field where creatures spawn and fight. That's it! What should he expect from the wave? How much actually he gains from the bonuses?
There were no answers... Till now! Now player sees tinies' current stats and enemies on the following wave. Despite this, game doesn't show all of the info (for example, he doesn't know the strength of the enemies or what to expect from reinforcements).
At first, player is given with some time to draw the runes. There's very big drawback: player's success depends not only his strategic and conscious decisions but on how fast can he draw.
Fun fact: our another, somewhat similar game, Circle of Life, suffers from the same flaw. Why I didn’t fix this issue right away is a mystery to me.
We removed the timer entirely. Now, instead of being rushed, the player is given a set number of drawings they need to complete before each wave.
Even the narrative got a small but interesting change. The game’s page tells a short story about how evil predators stole all the colors, leaving the world dim black and white. At the end of each of the three levels, the player returns one of the colors to the world.
To better illustrate the conflict between the creatures and the game feel, we decided to make the predators and the boss always colorful. They didn’t just steal the colors — they kept them for themselves, refusing to share with others (how mean of them!). We wanted to implement this idea during the game jam, but modifying the effect for this turned out to be technically challenging (Unity works in quite a peculiar way sometimes). It took a lot of time after the jam, so we probably wouldn’t have been able to finish this feature within the short three days anyway.
Predators that stole the red color are now always red themselves.
Mages now actually fire their projectiles, as you saw earlier. And we replaced the locks with crosses so that players wouldn’t mistake them with something unlockable. Additionally, we played around with the bonus colors to make them more distinguishable.
All this didn’t come without technical difficulties. We were told that in one browser the game wouldn’t launch at all. Also, there were some bugs in the original version (luckily, no one seems to have noticed yet, or at least no one’s mentioned them), and we fixed those.
A lot of time went into refining the effects (and our genuine confusion about why the game behaves differently across platforms), as well as dealing with the jam site, which refused to play the music for some reason.
However, now all those issues are behind us, and you can try out the new version on the jam site or on itch. We’re very happy with the result and hope to delight you with more interesting games in the future! We’d love to hear your thoughts on what we’ve created.
Game on ldjam: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/stolen-colors
Game on itch: https://thespinningsofa.itch.io/stolen-colors
What are the games with the best art you've seen so far? Don't keep them for yourself!
And don't forget -
... And if you are already here
Written by @fooorsh
After a few fun sessions with the jam last week, we’ve felt inspired! My mind keeps going back to the little world we created with our prototype.
We went for a rather distinct and minimalistic style, and I’ve been testing out some alternatives. What do you think?
It was very tempting to test a night-time direction as well. It’s cozy for sure, but it might stray too far from the initial style.
Play the game online here: Stuart's Perfect Day
Hello everyone ! How bout' a little story ? :book: :pen_fountain:
Here is the one of 5 friends whom had the wish to accomplish a tremendous goal ! Facing the fearsome ennemies that are sleepiness, hunger and blank page syndrom, even tho they had strong opponent, they were animated by passion and love for their unique project ! Creating a video game in 3 days... :fearful:
At first, they reunited ! Happy, excited to start that race against time ! Many ideas were given but only one remained... The want to use Isometric 2D !!! A peculiar one, for sure BUT it was theirs. The chief of those little adventurers, Perkaholic The Mighty, the most experienced of them, guided them throught doubt and dread and convinced everyone of that great idea, at his support Chipsy The Sly and Fei The Wicked drew for hours and hours to create the perfect supports !
They would themselves create the story of a simple ink stain that was brought to life and decided that the fate it had wasn't the one it had chosen ! An idea created by the clash of minds of our great adventurers, Kyuz The Unhinged gave life to that idea through numerous intervention !
But we were talking of our stain, whom would face thousands of ennemies !
Those knights and eyes were the creation of the nasty author that didn't wanted the stain to interfere in their story ! :crossed_swords:
The Little Stain would then rebel fight over and over again to be freed from that fate !
Ourselves, The creators of that story grew it with love and care, making its real hero stronger and stronger, giving it some friends to fight with ! It had the ability (by absorbing its authors powers) duplicate itself to smack harder ! :scream:
With all of that said, Tarisma The Fool shall let you enjoy the rest of your day, but before you leave me ? How about you come play with our favorite stain ? We, The Five Tiny Adventurers would really enjoy to have some feedbacks on how to improve ! :smile:
In hope that if you try it, you'll like it and try to beat the records that are engraved in our stories :trophy: (That's a leaderboard allegory)
Click here to play Ink Rebels !
I've been so focused on making my game and then playing others I didn't think to make a blog post. This is my first Ludum Dare and I have to say it's been great! Really cool to see the different interpretations of the theme and see all the community interactions!!
Slug Sprooch (don't judge a game by its name) is a game were you throw slugs and other animals to the other side of the road, so they can feed!
Try it out if you haven't already!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/slug-sprooch
(organism dance)
In my cellular automata game Multimorph, check out the game at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/multimorph and TigerJ's stream at: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2276134956?t=03h01m09s .
Despite the overwhelmingly positive feedback on our duckling guiding puzzle game, we did notice some patterns in the comments about what could be improved. So we went and improved it!
The new version mostly contains various fixes for things we missed when we were frantically trying to hit the deadline (floating rocks, anyone?), but also a much requested mouse based camera movement system and our game designer even snuck in a whole new level.
Haven't played Waddle yet? You can check it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/waddle
Well... I didn't want to make this post as I already confronted them in the comments of their game and gave a huge TedTalk on our streams but here I am. Because they didn't stop cheating.
If you are not aware of what has been going on with this game, https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/laverino , they have been copy pasting the same messages to everyone's games but not rating them. (and other sussy and shitty things other devs complained)
In the comments of their game, you can find all the discussions and screenshots of my proofs and their team's confession and acceptance of them cheating the system. When I sent that message, they had around 200 karma from feedback, now they have 400+. Incredible!!
Perro said that they stopped doing it and clearly didn't. So, here I am making this post for the ones who are not aware. The judgement is yours.
A few people DMed @pov , Mike, on Twitter for it. He said he will look into it. But I am not sure if they will be banned or not, if something will happen or not. So I personally took the justice in my hand, unliked their feedback (so took their feedback points away from their comments on our game) and gave them a 1 star. They are already the most rated Jam game, so it doesn't change anything at this point. It's already out of control.
But that is my sense of doing it, you may or may not agree with me. That's OK. Leaving a message and flooding their comments without rating them would work too I guess. Or something else. You can have your own critic and judgement if what I did doesn't sit right with you. I am sure there is someone(s) smarter and wiser than me lol
Thank you for your attention. Despite this, let's keep on jamming and enjoying LD! :v:
Today I saw people talking about this entry, where at least two team members where spamming comments to farm karma (and somehow they even managed to accidentally (!?) spam links to the wrong game at some point).
Coincidentally, around the same time I got a comment from another, unrelated user, on my own entry: "Nice game!!!Very interesting aspects in game !!! Looks Wonderful 10/10!!!"
I decided to check the top graded games just in case and lots of them have a comment by this person. The most common is "Nice game,very interesting plot!!!!Nice job!!!!", but I also saw one or other entry with that same message posted on my entry.
Although this behavior doesn't affect me directly, it still kinda sours the experience...
(edit: by time I finished writing this, @burchyn wrote a more complete post about the issues with Laverino: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/fry-quest/they-didnt-stop-cheating)