Thank you all for the great feedback.
I released a post LD version on my itch.io profile! You can still play the compo version as Desktop version.
Would love feedback on the patched version, feel free to also play the compo version!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/no-my-creatures
Play: https://rhewid.itch.io/no-my-creatures
Need one more reviewer, if someone is feeling generous :smiley:
Play as a squirrel using your squirrel friends to solve puzzles
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/squirrel-mail
Play Drawer Sheep Here!
We decided to add some puzzles and traps in game
— Spikes (player must follow the correct path past the real spikes)
— Doors (player must choose the correct doors, in case of mistake - rolls back to the first door)
— Leavers (player must pull leavers to make a correct combination)
— Picture Puzzle (mini puzzle game in which the player must rotate parts of the image to make a complete picture)
Please rate out game on Ludum Dare https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/the-ritual
New versions of the game will be available on itch: https://logovostudio.itch.io/the-ritual
Hello! I'm Misa, from https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness and I've been making games professionally since 2008. I've worked for Sony, Wizards of the Coast, and Cryptic Studios.
I'm going to be live on Twitch for a bit and I'm happy to stream your game! Pop on and let me know if you have a game you'd like me to play!
https://www.twitch.tv/misaravensoul
A WW1 trench warfare simulation game, with a personal touch. Take command of a Regiment in the First Battle of Ypres as either a French Colonel or a German Oberst. Underneath the simple UI is an ECS simulation of 12000 troops and 24 artillery pieces. Each soldier has their own name and story, which you can shape by how you use them.
HTML5 Version is the main one. Leave feedback on my game and I will do my best to play and rate your game, especially if it doesn't require an install
What are your favourite games so far? Share links!
Bonus if it's playable on the browser 🤩🤩
... And if you are already here
This is my entry for this ludum dare, Gunpoint Sojourners.
With the ukraine war and the palestinian genocide I've been thinking a lot about war lately. Now there's the expansion of the conflict into Lebanon and it doesn't look like things are going to stop anytime soon.
There is a lot of media out there that covers these events in a completely dehumanising way. It feels normal. The stories are cold. The data is just numbers.
So I've crystallized my emotions into this tiny narrative experience. It's about normal people.
I hope you like it.
It's the first time I make a game all on my own and that I use godot to do so. It's available only as a download as I used a C# ink narrative system engine and at the moment godot sadly cannot build C# projects for web. I plan on upgrading the project once this is a possibility but as far as I've read it'll be late this year, maybe next year.
Guide lost critters to the ancient runes using Luminates in Forest Guardians. Give the game a try and help rate.
It is best played on a desktop browser.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/forest-guardians
Looking for a puzzle game to play? Check out my game!
I wrote my regular "techy stuff" deep dive into my jam entry yesterday - spent a good 1-2 hours on it - and now it's completely disappeared, like I never wrote it. Did it get deleted for some reason? I really don't want to have to type it out again...
Thanks for everyone who tried and rated our cute game!
Do you know our silly tiny creatures disguised as ducklings have names?
Squishling, Boingling, Batling and Furbling!
If you did not try it yet, please give it a go! It's very simple, takes about 3min, but it's here to warm your heart!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/quackling-rescue
By the way: the ending gets a twist depending if you save all the ducklings or not. Will you manage to see both?!
Let us know! <3
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They all are in - in the story here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/cosmic-themes
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Hi! This is my first post for my first ludum dare game, Fishfestation! It is a barelly 15 minute play-in-browser jam game and i think it'd be cool if more people checked it out (:
I also try to comment back everyone who writes me comments!
also this screenshot unfortunatelly was made where a typo in the title... sooo fishfistation it is :')
We are a team of three based in Norway. This was our first game jam together so we are far from being seasoned jammers with effective plans and routines (We have none! :D). Our aim was to have a bit of fun and see if we could come up with something unexpected over the weekend.
The only prep we had done was from Fredrik, our in-house designer and artist, had done some concept sketches to get a feel for an art style that we wanted to aim for. These were the concepts:
Saturday morning arrived, along with the theme and we started throwing out ideas around the Tiny Creatures.
Fredrik also happens to be lethal at the oul Construct 3. He can bang out 2 prototypes before you can say "So what engine are we using?". While we sat in the first coffee shop of the weekend, he took one of our early concepts and got a quick version going. We could then see how that played, riff off it and do a good few "what if"s and see where it would lead us.
We went through about 3 or 4 of these.
A platformer...
Another platformer...
A circly platformer...
An arty platformer...
...and they all could have gone somewhere but they weren't lighting our world on fire. Instead of choosing one and going for it like we should have, we decided to park them and try something else.
We returned to Fredrik's concept sketches in search of inspiration and decided to capture the boat sketch in something simple that incorporated some tiny creatures. Fishing game! Lets go! Suddenly this brought life back into the gang imagining the world that could belong to the image.
Saturday evening, in the dark corner of a cafe/bar situation in Bergen, we set off at trying to figure out this world of Stuart and started bringing it all to life.
At this point we are almost a day down with nothing substantial towards a submit-able project. However, without being able to try out those different ideas quickly, we wouldn't have found Stuart. Being able to test the ideas in reality as opposed to concepts in our heads or on paper was beyond helpful.
For the rest of the jam, we needed to scope down even more than normal since we had about 1 day to get the rest done but we were still able arrive at something that brought us joy!
You can see the Ludum Dare page for Stuart's Perfect Day here: Ludum Dare - Stuart's Perfect Day
And here is a timelapse of Stuart and is world coming to life...
Find the others.
Alone in the forest, you awake to a different world than the one you knew.
Seek out other fae; more are lost as you are, and with numbers comes strength. Once you are many, you may find your way home.
Play our LD56 entry Will of the Wisp here :)
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/will-of-the-wisp
I'm working on a follow-up version to the little fishing tycoon game I made for Ludum Dare 56! I'll wait until the jam is over of course before releasing anything 😊
The first order of business is definitely to improve the fish sprites. I think these read okay before but they looked a bit odd being straight on, what do you think of the new ones?
Old: Above, New: below
Hello @pov there is a glitch with "ratings given" stat showing less than what was given, I guess there was some period of time when given ratings weren't being recorded for some reason? In my case, it was showing 6 instead of 9, so I went through every game I rated and re-rated only one category per each, and now the Ratings given is a fraction 7.629, meaning that it only took into account this one category that I re-rated, while previous ones weren't recorded. So, I guess I have to re-rate every category for every game now.
Did you know that in Godot, you can select any Sprite2D, and create a polygon collider with the same shape as your sprite?
(Sprite2D > Create CollisionPolygon2D Sibling)
I used it all over my game Snail away so that my little snail could stick onto anything!
I streamed the entire jam so I decided to turn that footage into a 10m devlog documenting the progression of my game: Carniverous Corpse Aquarium! Check it out. Hopefully if the YT algo picks the vid up, it'll bring more exposure to Ludum Dare?
https://youtu.be/CFxVmIFlU-s
Hello everyone, we promised a stream tonight but we are soooo dead. So we will be back tomorrow and make a last LD56 stream before we move on to our main project.
See you there! Have a great Sunday! https://www.twitch.tv/tobugis
Toodeloo!! :heart:
And we are no exception. We mistakenly excluded ourselves from the Audio category, and we want to make up for it!
Follow the link, play our game and rate it!
PODVAL THE GAME
P.S. Did you think this was really the end of the story?
Can you make it to the final boss battle in our challenging platformer / bullet hell?? Play it in your browser: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/rex-terminator
Don't keep them for yourself! Links to awesome games to play and rate are welcome!
Working on the browser is a plus :)
... And if you are already here
Just did a quick video of the slow vs fast route - I ran out of time to add more explanation / exposition from the characters :thinking:
Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMsaro3VkpU
What's New?
Fog effect
Spiders eyes glow
Church
Different footsteps sounds on different surfaces
Notes can display textures
Play on https://logovostudio.itch.io/the-ritual
Please, rate: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/the-ritual
I might as well list them:
Ant-traction,
Stackspolde,
Scrote Jenkins,
Pixel Repair Agency,
Micro Mayhem,
Slime Store Simulator,
Dreadzone,
Tiny Territories,
Goobers: Escape from Lab 8,
Mite Blaster,
Squirrel Puncher,
The Swarm_,
Tiny Tumble,
Night at the 8th werehouse,
Davids VS Goliaths,
Virus Vanquisher,
Waggle!,
Fish Fighter,
David vs Goliath WtGDWYTK,
Multimorph,
Colony Manager,
Tiny Creature Breeder,
A new entry to the FPS genre (First Person Snooker). The squabbles don't really know how to play a game of snooker but have invited you nonetheless, mostly to stand there looking confused at you. Pick up the exercise ball and just pushe them around for a few mins.
Have a go here: Squabble Snooker
Become a Tiny Taunter and haunt this spooky mansion, driving the residents nuts! Will you manage to taunt the witches out of their minds? Or will you find a pitiful death from a plague doctor's spray?
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Your objective is to annoy the residents of the mansion as much as you can. Run around using WASD or Arrow Keys and stay close to residents to get score over time. Press SPACE to taunt residents close to you, but be careful because taunting makes you stand still. Survive for as long as you can and wreak as much havoc as you can!
We'd love to hear your feedback on our game ❤️: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/tiny-taunters
We halfway to the 20 ratings, so any more would really help :)
LDJAM page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/frogscape
https://www.twitch.tv/xpmonsterx
Games played count: 37
Last games: 35. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/waddle 36. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/those-who-die-like-cattle 37. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/snake-rolls
So, this weekend I've been playing my LD56 entry "Mini Running Ant" on real hardware, namely the Pokémon Mini handheld console.
Tonight, I managed, to break my own high score, now at 347 points:
There is a friendly highscore competition currently running on my game page, thanks to the wonderful (and skilled!) members of the LD community. The current record is 413 points made by @samuli on emulator.
If you want to try to beat this highscore, you can play the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mini-running-ant
You can use any Pokemon Mini emulator, such as Pokémini, available for a wide variety of platforms (https://sourceforge.net/projects/pokemini/files/0.60/) or even as a RetroArch core. And if you have a Pokémini mini at home (and a Flashcart), you cf course use it too!
So, who can beat the current record?
Hey there, fellow mad scientists! 🧪🧟♂️
It's time to fess up – how THICC did your monstrous creation grow?! 💪👀 Did you splice together the ultimate beast with stats so wild it barely fits in your lab? 🧬👹 Or is it still a cute little abomination that needs a few more fusions before it can terrorize your enemies? 😈
Let’s see who’s rocking the beefiest, freakiest Monkepok out there! Drop a screenshot if your creation’s been hitting the stat-gain gym or chugging down that EXP protein shake! 💥💀
Remember, sanity is for quitters. 😏 Keep splicing, keep mutating, and show the world who’s the true mastermind of THICC MONSTROSITIES! 👩🔬🔥
Try it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/monkepok
Looking for a puzzle game to play? Check out my game!
Leaf Slurpers (link) Playable in Browser (HTML5)
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/escape-from-wonderland
My team just made our game playable on the web, if you want to try it out! :tropicalfish: :blueheart:
I wanted to share the journey of the current world record of my game, Springtail.
@coatline made a great video about his journey completing and speedrunning the game, ending up with a record time.
Then, @klaus-peter responded with his WR run.
Finally, a new contender submitted the current WR.
It's been really cool to see interest in speedrunning my game. The skips found, and the speed and accuracy these players have rushed through the game are honestly amazing.
Edit (3 hours later) : A new WR has been set!
Edit 2 (8 hours later) : A new WR has been set!
Edit 3 (10 hours later) : A new WR has been set!
Edit 4 (24 hours later) : A new WR has been set!
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 darker direction as well. It's cozy for sure, but it might stray too from the initial style.
You can test Stuart's Perfect Day here!
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.
You can test Stuart's Perfect Day here!
I added analytics to my LD game and noticed that big amount of players close the game on level 4. Fun fact: level 4 supposed to be a chill level to give player a break between challenges and a tutorial to a new mechanic at the same time. It was created to hook player's interest to play further, but instead had an opposite effect. How did that happen? Let's have a look!
When I started working on Tiny Inc. Repair Shop at the beginning of the first day, I set my self a goal: the game should have at least 5 levels and all of them should be finished by the end of Day 1, leaving Day 2 for polish only.
For those of you who didn't play, Tiny Inc. Repair Shop is a puzzle game, where you need to arrange differently behaving creatures on a grid board so that they bring a charge to a battery.
If you want to play it to understand better what I am talking about consider playing the game here
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/tiny-inc-repair-shop
From the beginning I had 3 creatures in mind:
Combining them along with placing some blocks on the grid opened some space to design a few interesting puzzles. But I got exhausted pretty quick (after the 3rd level) and decided I need a new mechanic: a button that will open a door. To introduce this mechanic I needed an easy tutorial level, something that should show the player that:
So I created this:
The idea is simple: you place a creature that goes from left to right (the green one) near the button and then another one near the charge. The one near the button will open the door and the one with the charge will go inside and finish the level. In fact, this was what most of the players who played in front of me did. But what happened instead was this:
The green guy presses button, encounters the wall, turns back and then presses the button again, closing the door right in front of the other green guy, carrying the charge!
Obviously I saw this during the development and tried using other creatures to see if the level is passable. In the end it was and at the time I though it might be a good idea to leave this as is, so that the player tries the most obvious solution and the game says "Gotcha! Try again!". I thought that maybe this will require the player to think a bit more and then once they realize how to pass it they'll get this "Aha!" moment which all puzzle designers strive for.
However what I observed from people playing this level, it was completely unobvious how to pass it. Some people randomly found the solution, some people exploited a bug (which I fixed later) and some people (majority) just gave up, abandoning the game.
One big mistake this level did for players was violating the rule of the puzzle genre. Instead of making a player feel smart it made them feel stupid. And no one likes feeling stupid!
The best fix for this level I think is bringing it back to the original idea: just introduce the new mechanic in the easiest way possible so player understands how to interact with it. If I just move the button one tile right, the green creature just doesn't have time to come back to it and toggle the door.
Yes, the level will be much easier and it doesn't show that the button closes the door as well as opens it, but it's okay. I can expose togglable behaviour on a different level and create this "Aha!" moment once player realizes how to overcome it.
However I didn't use the fact that button toggles the door state in any of the other puzzles, so the other fix could be to just disable it and use button to only open the door.
If I will do puzzle games for future jams here are the crucial things to take care of:
What puzzle design advices could you give to new puzzle designers? Would love to hear!
Attention all Animal Adventurers! Make your way through a library of animal themed page-turners and build a beastly brigade with your favourite companions in order to prevail in battles against enemy squads! Strengthen your fellows and build synergies in this exciting auto-battler called Battle for the Pages!
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This is our first LD game our team has ever created! We gained so much unique experience! Thanks to all of you! Your feedback is priceless!
Here is some meme for you!
If you havent played our game, so try and challenge yourself here :) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/drone-brigade
Last time we had little Harold...
This time we made an endless clicker game with EVEN cuter beeezzz! :bee:
Behind the scenes of the rig of the bee model:
I teamed up with @aghoulprince and @faedoll-attr-action for this Ludum Dare.
We had a lot of fun this game jam! I also loved working on all the tiny cute bee animations. They can fly, jump, get angry at you and even dance!
Also, crazy things happened! We reached the itch.io front page for a few days in a row... !!!
Like, wut? That can happen for a game jam game?
Not everyone sees it, but we still had more than 300 players actually click through directly from the itch.io home page alone! :dizzy_face:
But enough of that, what I actually wanted to talk about is a game update! :bee:
(not just the beezz have been buzzy!) - The game now has a little bonus ending cinematic! - There is now also an Android and a Windows build (next to the Web build which also runs on mobile devices!)
Head over to our Ludum Dare page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/buzzzy-buzzy-beez
In this game everything is made out of paper or some other type of material. We thought it would be a fun to go for a collage type of aesthetic this time. With some digital art, layer effects, and digital editing to get the textures, I managed to get the look I was looking for.
My goal is to always approach a different artstyle for each game I make
Some concept stuff:
Various assets:
Screenshots
If you haven't tried it yet you should check it out! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/small-problems-to-grapple-with
So... I've been collecting additional feedback through a more detailed questionnaire. So far, I was able to gather a lot of encouraging feedback that does show a clear future direction for the game. I wished Ludum Dare facilitated the collection of specific feedback, ratings and comments are cool and all, but I do see a notable lack of support for questionnaires or forms.
If you haven't played my game, you should give it a try! And if you do play it, or have played it already, please answer this form : https://forms.gle/YXiq9pgksjw8vG3f7
Thank you! :v:
You might have noticed in our game Fry Quest that we are proud Belgians and love Belgian fries. In Belgium we eat our fries with a sauce, and honestly we have A LOT of different sauces, compared to other countries. Apart from ketchup and mayonnaise, we have cocktail sauce, bearnaise sauce, mushroom sauce, brasil sauce, andalouse sauce, joppie sauce and way more than that.
But what I would like to know: *what is your favorite sauce for your Belgian/french fries? *
By the way: discover how this un-peel-ievable potato becomes a Belgian fry by playing our game Fry Quest: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/fry-quest
First I channeled my sadness into making an epic game for Ldjam...
And then I channeled it into making an epic devlog video about it...
Now I don't know what to do...
Heres the video:
https://youtu.be/CFxVmIFlU-s
The core mechanic of Sammich centers around covering a delicious-looking sandwich with thousands of ants. This proved to be a bit of a problem for us, because a general philosophy for us as an LD team is to make sure that our games work in WebGL as best as we can in order to make it as convenient as possible for people to play.
Because of this, a lot of curious players have asked us, “how the heck were you able to spawn so many ants in WebGL?” We hope this technical breakdown will serve as both a response to that frequently asked question, as well as a general guide for how to optimize your game for WebGL builds (at least in Unity).
This one’s pretty straightforward (although I didn’t personally learn about it until this jam). Materials in a Unity URP project have some advanced options that you can set to optimize performance. Enabling “GPU Instancing” for materials that will be drawn frequently and repetitively will allow Unity to batch draw calls for the same material, which will significantly cut down on the total number of draws that the game will have to do per-frame as it’s running.
The cool thing about this is that it’s super easy to do! Simply find the toggle to “Enable GPU Instancing” in the material settings, and you’re good to go!
Probably our biggest struggle with making our game performant despite having thousands of objects on screen at once was to vastly simplify the complexity of each individual object.
We started by minimizing the geometry of the ant itself, starting with the polygon count of the base body as well as chopping off their adorable little legs.
Fortunately, the ants are so small and numerous that this loss of fidelity (and mobility) doesn’t have too big of an impact on the player experience. This is great, because it just so happens to have a HUGE impact on our performance.
We also experimented with a cute lil wiggly animation for the ants to give them a bit more “life.”
Unfortunately, this “life” came at a dire cost once the number of ants reached 1000+ (a likely scenario for most players). So, despite how much we all LOVED the little wiggly animation, we all begrudgingly made the executive decision to prioritize performance over cute-ness.
My condolences go out to @ruddgasm, our 3D artist, who had to butcher his babies just so we could make the game as performant as possible in a web browser.
“But wait!” I hear you ask, “Sammich is a physics-based game! How the hell were you able to process the physics calculations of so many rigidbodies at once?!”
Fun Fact: The only rigidbody that exists in the game is the one directly tied to the sammich itself. Rigidbodies in Unity have a nifty little setting that allows you to automatically calculate the object’s center of gravity. It does this by taking into account the size and position of all of the colliders that are attached to that object and its children.
Because of this, we don’t actually need each ant to have its own rigidbody and physics simulation (thank god). Instead, we simply attach each spawned ant as a child to the sammich, and the automatic calculations of the main rigidbody takes care of the rest!
For a bit of extra performance, we also disabled collision events for bug/bug colliders as well as bug/sammich colliders. That’s right, the thousands of ants that players are painting onto the sammich aren’t even colliding with the sammich itself!
In fact, the only reason the ants have colliders in the first place is so they can contribute to the sammich’s center of mass and detect when a dropping piece of food lands on them.
You’d be surprised how much you can get away with visually without having any sort of lighting in your game.
In fact, Sammich does not use a single light source in any of its scenes! We have the wizardry of our 3D artist to thank for that.
Rather than relying on extremely costly lighting and shadow calculations, consider instead baking such visuals into the material itself. You don’t need a light source to make your objects look bright and colorful!
Out of all of our WebGL optimizations, this tip has by far served us the best when it comes to making games performant in WebGL (In fact, none of our games since LD45 have used lighting in any way!).
Making a game run smoothly in WebGL (especially a game that requires thousands of objects to be rendered at once) is a constant balancing act between processing performance and visual fidelity. You will inevitably have to make some sacrifices when it comes to your game’s assets, and even then you will eventually hit diminishing returns (even our game starts to struggle and sometimes break after ~2000 ants on WebGL, depending on the machine).
However, if you design your art style and asset pipeline in a way that keeps these constraints in mind as you’re developing, you can often avoid creating assets or scenes that are unnecessarily complex and performance-heavy from the outset.
As a result, your game will be able to run surprisingly well in WebGL, and even better in a stand-alone build!
Hopefully this ramble has been enlightening! If you would like to stress-test the performance of our game yourself, you can find it here!
We actually had time to fit in a physics-free “Sculpting Mode” that lets players paint with ants to their heart’s content, so go wild with it! We’d love to see your creations!
‘Til next time! :pointright: :cowboy: :pointright:
In Tiny HOC's Pro Creator, you can breed tiny HOCs and get combinations of the parents' features. Can you manage to reconstruct the complete sets?
Buying eggs from the shop allows you to extend you gene pool, try it now, you can play on your browser!
Feed them, breed them, sell them, the world is yours!
*[Mobile friendly and optimised] [WebGl/No Download] [Global highscores] *
Come and play as Rustle in our first ever in-person game jam as a team where you must earn your freedom as a card playing and racing strategy beetle - Deck Derby: Sluglord's Speedway!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/deck-derby-sluglords-speedway
Well, after a week creating all from scratch and solo, the faeries now defend the land and gather resources. (Working in a lot of bugs by now)
https://youtu.be/VlQLrrwS3K4
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.
You can test Stuart's Perfect Day here!
link:https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/vortex-of-life
We've added a skip button to the opening animation, and we've also included a button to play a sound guide for better understanding of our game. We're currently adjusting the display time of the story dialogue box, which still has some issues. Once testing is complete, we will update everything in the game. We welcome you to play our game and would love to receive your rating and feedback!
The original version of the game came out with just one hint per character, but that was not always great. What we have now is an ability to store multiple hints per character. Here's the format of my domain specific language for my game of hangman.
Rugrats "They're creative and always on adventures|Like to watch {REPTAR}"
Now if you are playing and make a wrong choice, you'll see more than one hint (thought), and if you guess letters inside the curly braces, you'll be able to unlock extra hint information that may help you solve the problem.
If you like watching Rust development, please follow me on Twitch! https://www.twitch.tv/coltonphillips
Hello everyone,
I am interested in your process to compose music for your games ?
For us, I wait that my programmer friends go to sleep on the first night and I composed that track to make a V1 in two and half hours:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc0uKdb5zwg
I use my Roland JDXI and the next morning I assembled and mix all together on ableton.
In the creative process POV, as we spotted the "film noir" or "neo-noir" movie-literature codes, I searched during the day the best BO of film noir and found Miles Davis excellent one Ascenseur pour l'échafaud
Hope you like the track (I am very proud of the result).
Don't hesitate to share your tracks in the comments or to share experiences on how you worked it out.
Kisses from North of France.
Our server was down for three days, making our links dead. : ( Now everything is fixed : )
Come and try our game "Down In The Well Of Souls"
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/tiny-creatures-awaiting-title
As someone who loves making and playing games in the fantasy console Pico-8, I thought I'd share all of the Pico-8 games made and submitted to Ludum Dare 56 that I was able to find, please go show some support and give them all a play and some feedback. (If I somehow missed yours, I'm so incredibly sorry! Please leave a link to it in the comments and I'll add it.) In no particular order:
Play as a protective penguin parent as you gather fish to feed your family. Slide around the ice and avoiding dangerous obstacles, while not letting anyone starve. A great fast-paced action game with brilliant spritework.
It's Frogger, but with a twist! Time your jumps correctly to leap across lanes of traffic to avoid getting squashed. Great art direction, and old-school arcade difficulty make this game stand out.
Raise your pet Kokin through interacting with short mini-games that will help them grow. Feed, play, clean and more in this incredibly cute Tamagotchi-esque pet raising simulator!
Defend your little creatures in their pen against the big red eyed monsters that are coming to eat them! Make sure that none of them escape as you balance attacking the oncoming monsters with carrying your creatures to safety in this fast-paced action game.
Guide moths to the Podiatrist's office past various obstacles by lighting a path. This puzzle games features some really great pixel art and excellent level design that utilises its unique mechanic well.
Carefully manoeuvre jars filled with tiny creatures through various levels of increasing difficulty in this gorgeous puzzle platformer made by the creator of Pico-8 himself! Do not skip this one.
Help Patch the rabbit gather as many carrots as possible while avoiding the farmer's tractor. A retro-inspired arcade game. How many carrots will you manage to gather?
I'm no animation expert, but when animating my mushroom for my game Snail away, I tried to follow some animation principles:
Exaggeration: you can see the stretching of the mushroom being greatly exaggerated
Squash and stretch: the volume of the object should stay consistent, so when stretching one axis, the other axis should squash.
You can see how just using 3 keyframes, I was able to make a simple but very satisfying animation, adding quite a bit of game juice. Here's also how it looks in-game:
Vox Regis is a game about a king who uses his voice to provoke conflict between the groups that are forming in his kingdom. For if a group were to grow too big, it could overthrow him. This is my game for the Ludum Dare #56 compo. Welcome to its post-mortem.
The worst part about Ludum Dare is coming up with an idea. As long as you don't have an idea, you can't start working on it. And as the clock is ticking you are getting more stressed, which often obstructs the process of coming up with a good idea. Last Ludum Dare I was lucky, and instantly knew what I wanted to make. This Ludum Dare I decided to try something new. Half an hour before the reveal of the theme I started meditating. Then, after I read what the theme was, I again meditated for half an hour. When I say meditating I mean sitting on my couch with my eyes closed. There is no meditation app or thought exercises involved. Just sitting, and let the mind do its work.
Did it work? Definitely! It's hard to describe, but my mind went places I doubt I would have considered had I been sitting behind my PC and looking up words related to the theme. I remember how my mind took me high onto a tower. "What does this have to do with the theme?" I asked myself."Look down," I answered, and so I did. There I saw them walking around, the tiny creatures. ...Okay, I might have romanticized this thought process a little bit, but I distinctly remember standing on the tower before I realized how this could relate to the theme. Anyway, as soon as I got this vision I was already sold. The visual of the POV of someone looking down from a high tower looked so cool, that I knew this is the game I will have to make.
But that's only a visual. What is the gameplay gonna be? There were some ideas:
That last idea is the eventual idea of the game, but there were still many questions left unanswered. Should I go for a completely different idea after all? I decided to go to bed (it was like 06:00 AM), and to figure it out after I woke up. The next morning I again meditated for half an hour, but no luck. I basically had two options:
Starting a game where you haven't had the idea fleshed out yet is risky. Because that fleshing out might never happen, and you end up with something unplayable that you wasted precious hours on. I've had this happen before multiple times, and it's not fun. But I took the risk, because I believed in this idea, the visual.
I can't even remembering thinking about the art style for the game. I just straight up started taking pictures of my hand with the goal to pixelize it. This is done in Aseprite, by setting the color mode to indexing while having a limited color palette. Though that doesn't always lead to favorable results, and often you need to do some color tweaking. One trick that I like to do is to simply pick some colors in the picture (normal, bright, shadow) for the palette before I apply the indexing. It also helps to improve the constrast and brightness of the picture.
Creating art like this is quick and easy, but if you use it for something, you'll have to use it for basically everything. If I were to try to pixel a balustrade, then it would probably look weird in combination with the hands. Unfortunately I don't have a balustrade near me that I can take a picture of, so I went for a search on the world wide web. Finding a picture of a balustrade from the exact angle that I need would be quite a search, if such picture exists on the internet at all. Luckily I had another trick up my sleeve. On the website Sketchfab you can view, buy, and download 3D models. Sidenote: This is also a great way to find references when you want to draw something from a particular angle. Just search for a 3D model and rotate the camera to get the angle you need. That's what I did for the balustrade. Whether I should have paid for the 3D model is up for debate. The same question goes for whether this should be allowed in the compo, where you are supposed to make your own art. But I believe I have made enough changes to the original work. Anyhow, with my hands and the balustrade I achieved half of the visual that I had in mind. The other half is the town to look down upon.
I needed a town with a big open spot where the people would be. A village square. Again, I searched the internet to find something that I could use, but with no luck. Even Sketchfab wasn't able to help me this time, as I wasn't able to find a town with a big open spot that I could use. So now what? I could attempt to draw it myself, but again I can only assume it would look weird in comparison with the detailed hands and balustrade. Not to mention my artistic capabilities are not that great. No, I needed something different. Something that allows me to build my own town. I laugh to myself as I come up with a plan. "This is so stupid," I say on my stream, as I open up Townscaper.
Townscaper is a sandbox game where you can build your own town. It's similar to the recently released Tiny Glade. I didn't go for the latter because I'm unfamiliar with the tool. Not that I have a lot of experience with Townscaper, but at least I know how it works. I spent a little more than an hour building a town. Every time when I thought that I was done, I zoomed out and decided that another empty spot should be filled. I still wasn't sure what the game was gonna be like, and I considered that the camera might have to move around. When I was done I made much more town than I ended up using in the final game. Like with the balustrade you can ask yourself the question whether it's valid for me to use Townscaper for my game in the compo. Sure, I made that town, but I didn't make the art style of the buildings. But again I'd say that because I use no more than a screenshot with color indexing that it's fine. And because it's a sandbox game. If I took a screenshot from a town in Skyrim, then it would be weird, but I made this town myself. I've also stated that I used Townscaper on my game's page.
Slowly I started to get a better idea of what the game was gonna be like, and I started spriting icons for factions and complaints. Originally I had the idea that the fourth complaint was going to be injustice, which is what the scale was for, but that didn't make much sense as a thing to blame a faction for. I changed it to criminiality. Using the scale as an icon for it is a bit of a reach, but it works. For the factions I started with a lion, because don't all kingdoms, fiction or non-fiction, have a house with lion heraldry? So what about the other three? I couldn't do a fish, because I already drew a fish for the complaint icon. So what other blue animal? A bird perhaps? And how about a green snake, and oops, I just copied Harry Potter. So I went for less conventional animals in the heraldry world (to my knowledge). The hare was originally supposed to be a wolf or a fox, but it started looking like a hare, and I went with it.
On the start of day #2, and the final day of the compo, I decided to make a menu screen. Why so early into the compo, when the main gameplay is far from done? Well here's a bit of silly advice: do things that are low on your priority list early, because you might not have time to do them later. That sounds counter-intuitive, but I believe it to be true. Because let's say I started with the gameplay. Because of how much time I still have left, I take my time to tweak and perfect it. It's high priority after all. But before I know it, there is too little time left to do the low priority things. And just because something is low priority doesn't mean it can't enhance your game big time.
So like I said, I started working on the menu. I thought it would be cool to get the other perspective, from the people on the ground. This time I needed a picture of a tower, again from a certain angle. And why search on the internet, when a perfectly good tower is at a few minutes walking distance? In the middle of the compo I went outside to take pictures of a tower from a church near me. The tower is not perfect though. The king is leaning on a balustrade, so where is it? Again Sketchfab comes to the rescue, where I take a screenshot from the angle that I need. Finally, it needs a king. A bearded man would fit the role, and thus I took a picture of myself from a low angle. Draw some simple colors on top, indexing, scaling, and there you have it. A king at the top of a tower leaning on a balustrade. A picture of my fist, and an image of a blue sky found online, and the menu is done.
Finally, I had to make a logo. For this I used the font Augusta. A simple border, and I'm done. Not much more to say about that, but how did I come up with that name?
For the name I wanted something related to the saying Vox Populi, because I think it sounds cool, and it was relevant to the game. But it's not the people's voice you hear, it's that of the king. So the name became Vox Regis (The king's voice). Because of this title I decided to use more Latin in the game. The factions also have Latin names ([Animal] [Color]), and at the end of the written speech something is written in Latin.
In rege veritas, et ego sum rex.
The text means "Truth is in the king, and I am the king." In other words: The king always speaks the truth, so believe me when I say that a faction is the cause of this problem. Shoutout to my Ludum Dare colleague @AlexRose for helping out with that one. When you see him, pronounce Ludum Dare the Latin way for me, will ya?
Finally, we hear Latin spoken whenever the king gives a speech.
Originally I just wanted to make my voice sound mumbly and distant, so that you couldn't clearly hear what was being said. But that was weird, because you play as the king, so you should hear your own voice loud and clear. I tried pronouncing the Latin phrase, or the names of the factions, but I just couldn't. It sounded horrible, and I wasn't sure what to do. I figured I should use a placeholder, and what better to use as a Latin placeholder than Lorem Ipsum? What followed was the idea to use common Latin phrases. This way I give the game a bit of humor. I was afraid that it might feel out of place, people have said that they think it's funny, and that it lightens the mood a bit. It was very tempting to pronounce Ludum Dare they wrong way, but Alex would have rated this game, and all my future games, all 1 stars for it, I am sure.
The audio of the town I took from Youtube. I did consider going to the city to record my own sound, but I'm fairly sure that it would have sounded shit. Now, officially the rule is that you are not allowed to use third party assets, unless you heavily edit those like I did with the art (see derivative work in the rules). In my case it was more a lack of resources rather than a lack of skill. Being bad at music is not a good excuse to use 3rd party music instead. But if you have a game with a chainsaw, and you have no chainsaw, what should one do? Mimic the sound with something else? Simply don't have a sound for it? Compo is a test of skill in multiple areas, but lacking resources is not the same as lacking skill. I would find it silly if we were to punish participants for it by forcing them to make their game worse. Though I will say I could have done an attempt at mixing multiple sounds. That's how the audio that I copied came to be. Instead, I opted out of the audio category.
I'm not interested in making a post-jam version of the game. I don't think there's much to scale. But that doesn't mean that there aren't things to improve. The game is really easy in that you can keep spamming the speeches without problem. An easy game isn't necessarily unwelcome in Ludum Dare, as games often tend to be too difficult as a result of bad balancing. And an easy game can be fun as well. The problem with my game, however, is that the easier you make it for yourself, the longer the game takes to beat. The game pauses during a speech and fight, so if you have lots of speeches, the game's duration can extend to over 10 minutes, instead of the expected 7 minutes. You can challenge yourself by trying to beat the game with as few speeches as possible, but perhaps I should've made it so that you can do no more than 10 speeches. That way you don't need to make up the challenge yourself; The game gives you a challenge to beat. Post-jam I've also checked what it would be like if you can destroy factions. Meaning that if a faction has no members anymore, it is removed. It makes it more difficult, as the other factions will grow faster, if it weren't for the fact that you could still just spam your speeches. So perhaps a combination of the two is what is needed. Another problem is that you lose on the exact moment a faction hits 30 members. This makes it very dangerous to wait for a faction to grow, as they could suddenly gain a bunch of members. It would have been better if there was a minimum time of like 5 seconds before you are actually game over. So definitely not perfect, but not enough to motivate me to make a post-jam version.
I'm really a happy with this game. I'm happy that I was able to come up with this idea, and that I took the gamble of continuing this game even though I wasn't sure how it was gonna play out. I still think it's a great visual for a videogame, and I find it to be a creative use of the theme. The graphics were a matter of improvise, adapt, overcome, and I overcame.
In ove veritas, et ego sum ovis.
Keep playing and ratings games!
... And if you are already here
Hi everyone :)
Just started this week end to work on a post version of my game Tiny adventure :
What would a zelda like be without push and grab mechanics?
I didn't have time to do it during jam, so I decided to start with this.
This first version highlights the next steps :
* Manage layer in order to avoid sprite overlapping.
* Add action of launching wearing objects.
Hello again!
SO today I make a post about the highlight of Bermuda: The Music!
So the music of bermuda came out actually really good compared to myself and that's because I swapped to a new music software (1BitDragon) and I been loving making musics for my game since then, I occassionally check my youtube to see how the music videos are doing and I do see a few views here and there which makes me happy some people enjoy these tiny music video things, probably will keep doing it for other releases/updates for previous entries!
Anyways you can play my game here!
Or better yet just listen to the tunes in this playlist!
https://www.twitch.tv/xpmonsterx
Yesterday was short due to issues on my end. Sorry about that, but hopefully all will be good today.
Games played count: 39
Last games: 1. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/the-blueberries-dawn 2. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/sweet-home
Come, play, and rate Pot Life, I am still missing a few votes! Pot bugs need your support. :heart:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/pot-life
I'm posting this again because it seems that many of you missed this feature, and it's really helpful. Like you, I too kept a list of the games I played and rated. No more!
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
Can you save as many ants as you can in this survival swarm racing game? Go fast and drive your colony to victory in Traction Bugs!
Play and rate here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/traction-bugs
If you are, try our little game "Cyber Critter". https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/cyber-critter
I hope you have fun and have a nice Ludum Dare discovering plenty of good games! 🦆 :)
This first-of-its-kind game is all about the fascinating process of learning a "new language". It inviting players to master communication from scratch. Dive into the challenge of deciphering a completely new linguistic system and unlock the secrets of language in a fun, interactive way!
Hello there !
As usual, it's been a blast to test your take on the theme !
Did you have a chance to try ours : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/midnight-parade-the-light-chant ?
For this fourth LD teaming up with @kaijiro , we've decided to try something new. And by something I mean a new engine. Until now we used Unity, and this time we went with Godot ! We've learned a lot during those 3 days, and are eager to dig it for more projects !
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.
So kick some here!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF0GVc2vVuM
The first development log for our game, "Right To Bear Fins"
Hope you enjoy!
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Help a little mouse get to the cheese!🐀🧀
Hi everyone,
For those interested, here is a small video of my entry "Mini Running Ant" running on real hardware, the Pokémon Mini console. It's arguably the smallest Nintendo console, and maybe one of the tinyest handheld that remains quite comfortable to play.
Of course you can also play my game on any Pokémon Mini emulator: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mini-running-ant
But if you use the real console and its tiny 1-bit screen, now you'll be playing with "tiny creatures" :)!
🧀🧀🧀
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Then you have a keen eye. My game is also based on cellullar automata. Can you find some spaceship patterns?
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/multimorph
I created my game with Godot 4.3 and experienced massive frametime spikes (>100ms on the Render Passes) if a Node first comes into view of the camera. After that it runs smoothly. On Godot's GitHub I read, that it's most likely caused by the shader compiler, which compiles the shader for the newly visible material.
I tried the following things to fix it: - Place all Nodes with different materials at a single spot and have the camera look at them. - Use the ShaderPrecompiler-Utility from GitHub.
Unfortunately, nothing worked, so in the end, I decided to let the player character automatically move through the entire level to trigger all stutters while the loading screen is visible. This "solution" works, but it feels very hacky.
Has anybody had a similar problem? And if so, how did you solve it?
Hi all! We've been working on an updated version of "PEPE's wall of pride". This version has some fixes that should make the game more fun to play. If you have not played the game yet, and you would like to give it a try: please rate the original version first! It is clearly marked in the main menu.
When you're ready to play the post-jam version, please press "P" in the main menu and the post-jam version will start instead. These things have been changed in the post-jam version:
Please note that all highscores that are achieved in post-jam mode, will get a blue tag in the highscore table
Thanks many much @lizz, @kr4ft3r(most patient player), @pious, @mrs-wheelsx, @snory, @kanity, @shreemp, @skvader-418, @wheelsx(current highscore-holder) for the wonderful and honest feedback. @everyone else, please check out their games too!
Hello everyone, we are live! Last LD56 stream before we move on to our main project.
See you! https://www.twitch.tv/tobugis
Aaaaand a war later (literally a war), my game is finished. I had to go for the EXTRA this time and I explain it a bit better WHY (and why I meant WAR) in the description of the game, so rating aside, I think that it will be an interesting story to read anyways if you want.
Check my tiny game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/david-the-shepherd
For me, every jam is an opportunity to focus on something I felt that I missed last time. This was also my return to solo-jamming after four team jams, and I had to acknowledge that I couldn't do everything on my own. But it also felt like an opportunity to focus on the things I wanted to. I really wanted to focus on feedback: how the player knows they are doing the right thing. For that, the designer needs to know what the right thing even is.
was a tile laying game similar to Dorf Romantik, except you would be laying resource tiles and road tiles to expand a network of towns trading goods in their own "tiny economy". The features I planned were: 1. Tile placement in a hexagonal grid. 2. Collection of resources from nearby tiles. 3. Connection of towns by roads. 4. Trading of resources across towns.
This seemed like a decent enough framework to me. I assumed the objective would appear somewhere in the amassing of resources. Not to mention the UI and sound.
was that hexagonal grids are a lot of work. I began with some guidance to start, but then realized I would be better off lifting someone else's solution. I came upon Catlike Coding, which had a really robust platform -- more than I really needed. I spent a lot of Saturday understanding what was there and what I needed, and building my own tiles from Kenney into it.
It wasn't until after the first 24 hours that I had the core mechanic (Feature 1) implemented. I was way behind.
was ditching the "stretch" features and instead forming the game around what I could get done. Generating a starting map, drawing from a deck of cards, counting resource tiles, and a basic UI was all done in the next 24 hours. I even gave up one of my labors of love (music), knowing that I needed to support the experience rather than my own pride. To focus on what you want, git rid of what you don't need.
I felt good about this pivot, that I had salvaged something playable.
Here's a snapshot of the build progress from hour 24 to hour 72. I had to work on Day 3, so I didn't get to put in so many hours. But by the end of it, I felt like I still had something playable and polished. But was it ... fun?
was that a mechanic does not equal an objective. When you have to pivot, make sure the game's objective wasn't tied to something that got cut. I got so wrapped up in doing that I forgot to revisit my design framework to see if what I had still met the criteria for a "game".
Really understand the differences between the "mechanic", the "challenge", and the "objective". This is what was unfortunately missing from my final entry. Sure, the mechanic was there, but what the player was supposed to do with it (the objective) was just missing. Something that underscored this was the lack of an end screen. How did the player even know they were done?
I'm not being down on myself. There are reasonable explanations for the final result. It's just a good reminder of the aspects of a game that might go overlooked: feedback and measurement.
So if you've made it to the bottom, reading all this, and you are still interested in seeing what I made, please stop by!
Play Tiny Economy
_ -Hawkin_
Hey all! I thought I would share a few entries that I came across that deserve shout-outs! Please also share your highlights in the comments :)
Battle your patchwork "pocket monsters" against each other. This one claims to be a tech demo, but it feels like an excellent cut to me! The style and theme are really inspired, and the battle mechanics are solid (even if the UI is an early draft). I would love to see an evolution of this one!
Play Tailor Arena by @deercat
If you are worried about ~~gnomes~~, there is absolutely gnothing to worry about here. You can rest easy gnowing that there are gnone here! Gnone whatsover! In-jokes aside, the comical artwork and musical composition bring this simple manic-clicker to life. Seriously, it was a joy from start to finish.
* Play G-News by @kahn, @mackelvin, @aune, and @furano*
Build your tiny tribe with warriors, archers, mages, and more to protect your fire from waves of eldritch, blocky horrors. This is another solid design with straightforward mechanics. With some more polish, this could be a great release!
Play Tiny Tiny Tribes by @james-wilson
** Tiny Apple Dispense the grumbling and spread the love. This is a charming "idle" game that proves AAA art is not required for an entertaining experience.
** Play Tiny Apple by @docgeraud
That's all for now! It's been a shorter week for me. See you all in Week 2 of ratings!
_ -Hawkin_
Any support is massively appreciated :)
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/love-bugz
Thank you all for the great feedback.
I released a post LD version on my itch.io profile! You can still play the compo version as Desktop version.
Would love feedback on the patched version, feel free to also play the compo version!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/no-my-creatures
Play: https://rhewid.itch.io/no-my-creatures
https://youtu.be/ow8LHb8VY5g
I finally uploaded a video of the gameplay.
Some statistics of the game:
1800 lines of code! I reused some code I had made for other games, but still I don't think I started with anything longer than 500 lines. That's quite a lot of code. But yeah, since everything was in code, even the level data, procedural graphics and everything, I think that makes sense.
Want a puzzle game? Check out my entry!
What game did you play that was shrimply the best?
... And if you are already here
https://www.twitch.tv/tiger_j
We're all graphists... So we'd really appreciate your feedback about our game design :wink:
