Greetings!

So I have rammed into a roadblock in the form of 2D art, I just can't do it... So I wanted to ask that if I ask my sister does that disqualify me from compo as I did ask for external help?

I was traveling to Israel this month when the war started here and then my flight back to my country got canceled and Ill only be able to go back home after the jam ends.

I'm in a safe place now, but without my computer and only my iPhone. So Im wondering: is it possible to still make a game with it?

My initial idea is to use pygame and then ask someone to export my project to web once Im done, since I do have experience with that and I know it runs on mobile. But I don't know which iPhone app Incould use to do the programming... does anyone have any tip to help me?

War is not an excuse to not join Ludum Dare!

Some tiny creatures, some flora and some fauna - got a good start so far :3

In Paco's Tiny Animals, players battle tiny creatures to collect materials like bones, water, and coins, which are used to create more animals. The goal is to capture every tiny animal and complete Paco’s collection log.

Not the worst place on earth to participate. I wish you the best ++

...But somehow we managed.

this is my 2nd ludum dare and i have a gaming pc this time im gonna use ue5

For my game I'm attempting to have 16 kinds of creatures (with 4 "classes" like in an RPG and 4 variations on each of those classes).

I wanted to try to get as many of these done on the first night as possible, as I know that, for the compo, it is basically mandatory to have the game "done" by the end of the second night (minus maybe some music and sounds, but even that can be pushing it).

Still not sure if I will be able to implement all of the content I need to really make this pop, but I do have the opportunity to use the Jam instead of I feel like it.

For now, though, I guess it's time to go to bed!

As I said in the previous post, Im stuck in another country for a couple more days due to the ongoing war in Israel that got my flight cancelled, so unfortunately I won't be able to arrive in time to participate. I'm considering a board game, but honestly it's tough to do anything here where I am.

So what about the extra? I'll only be at home after day 8, can I make a game and submit for extra after that? How does it work?

ok we will see that ;) do you remember this night?

Je ne sais pas vous mais perso je suis dans une équipe et on as quasi rien fait depuis 9 heures. la plupart dorme et ne se sont pas connecté pour parler après la sortie du thème

I wasn't sure if i should start a project, as with 3 kids it might be hard to finish the game. Anyway, i just made a tree and thrown some into a scene. Added a character controller and started running around to test it. And you won't believe it, look what's hiding in the woods... Let's see if i could get some better images from it later :smile_cat:

Decided to make something a bit out there and unique compared to video game entries. I'm trying to make an app similar to iNaturalist, where you can identify species around you. To differentiate it, I'm implementing the ability to identify rocks and minerals as well.

In again! Tools I might use:

• jgame.js (https://github.com/borisvanschooten/jgame.js)
• tinyspriteeditor (http://tmtg.nl/tinyspriteeditor/) (https://github.com/borisvanschooten/tinyspriteeditor)
• animated character generator (http://tmtg.nl/ludumdare/ld53-charactergen/)
• gimp
• audacity
• jsfxr (https://sfxr.me/)
• LMMS (if I get round to music)
• Pytorch or tensorflow.js - in case I include AI like last time

A little plug for my animated character generator: here are some sprites generated with it.

as the old saying goes: "Don't go towards the light"

After so many people were encouraging me in my last post I put my brain on maximum work capacity (aka had a coffee), and ironed out the 2D art dilemma, so this little sneaky peeky is dedicated to them (and well for everyone to look at this heavily obscured image of a creature lol)

Theme is fiting with my idea to use boids so made a basic setup

I can already see that performance will be an issue so i may try to keep scope very low.

Having fun so far but i may have to stop for a few hours, hopefully i comeback with some ideas.

A tiny jellyfish with a lust for adventure.

Is it actual info: https://ludumdare.com/resources/guides/embedding/?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQXa7KJfyHU

I have now most of the things I need to start the actual game development in my PS1 framework. - Double buffered rendering - Input - Reading files from CD - Playing music for CD - Playing sounds for SPU - Adding textures to VRAM - Rendering vertex colored 3D data - Rendering texture mapped 3D data - Animation system for textures - Rendering text - Debugging tools

I still need to add tessellation and clean up how I handle memory and then I can making gameplay and level systems.

Not gonna have time to make a 3D model importer, so the game will most likely just be textured quads!

Jam started very late at night in my timezone, so i'll go do some brainstorming

Good luck everyone :smile:

So much more progress than I usually make by this point. I'm often struggling to come up with /some/ idea.

Instead, not only do I have an idea, I have a primary model and a weapon done with animations. After a short break, tomorrow I'll start importing things into Unity and create a basic character controller. Then figure out the terrain.

come hang https://twitch.tv/alexrosegames

This time I’m participating alone.

Here’s my choice of tools for this occasion:

Project Documentation: Google Drive

Kanban Board: Odoo

Game Engine and Editor: Godot 4

Programming Language: GDScript

Photography: Phone camera

Art: Krita

Image Editing: GIMP

Digital Audio Workstation: Bitwig Studio Essentials

Audio Editing: Audacity

And it's time to start...

I'll work on a game with bees, with a gameplay similar to an airplane game on mobile I remember. My tools: * Haxe / HaxeFlixel / ESpir (custom ES framework) * Inkscape * probably 1bit dragon

It's the moment I open Inkscape ! (But I didn't prepare myself before so I'll setup the new beta version before anything)

Time to start jamming in earnest over in the UK. Desk is a mess, but we move!

I am starting to fear my own creation.

The rat moves, the background works... now we need to SIMPLY code in the story... I think the rat is a bit not visible, but you see it very well when it moves

I got basic hazards in! This is shaping up to be a very fun game, but I have a lot of work to do to make it compelling and feeling good. Oh, and giving it its soul and personality, too!

Background and character sprite + controls ready, now the story...

After lots of brainstorming I think I accidentally decided on making the first phase in spore. I'm not sure if I actually have time for a game jam this weekend, but here's my "I'm in" post for accountability!

Was going to work with Unity, but it's my day time job's engine, where's the fun?

Going spartan mode with c++ and emacs lol, time to get things rolling

Alright Guys! Lets Jam! We're (@wouter52) off to a good start! starting around 10 (GMT+2) and never made a game plan this quick!

I, uhh, kinda overslept though... and I have Pokemon Go Community Day to attend... so this is gonna be dicey.

I do, at least, have a solid idea: a top-down puzzle game where you control three "tiny creatures" and have to safely get them through a series of levels, using their unique abilities. My usual yardstick for progress is to have a working prototype of some description by Saturday lunchtime, which gives me two hours or so. Let's see if I can knock it out!

Поздравляем всех с началом людума!Хорошей работы и продуктивности!

Can't wait to see what you guys make, but we are sitting this one out ourselves. The theme killed it for us, we had things planned for the other potential themes, but this one just leaves us stumped.

On a positive note, we are using the time we allocated for the jam to work on our own passion project. Good luck to all of you and see you in April!

One of my earliest Game Jam games was Medic Mayhem. I have been wanting to make a sequel for it a long time and now that the theme suits it little bit, it feels like perfect opportunity. However using a "ready" game as a starting point this feels like little bit of cheating. That is why I am thinking about the Extra format.

What do you guys think?

A few years ago I made the game in the picture in UE4 for Ludum Dare 38. It was many years ago that I joined but I felt like making something in Unreal Engine 5.5 and see how far I've come with everything I've learned and to try out the new features they've added.

I'm also streaming for the first time in my life. I hope everything goes well.

www.twitch.tv/david_simonsson

And an idea of the view of the game.

Inkscape 1.4 rc1 works perfectly good. I can't say the same for my mouse. It's time to open Vim.

I'll start by trying to make a tiny creatures crawl across a mesh.

Thoughts?

(It wasn't meant to resemble Kirby, I'm just a terrible artist and the best I can do is blobs)

Working hard on the theme ! Our team is currently finishing the overall concept, next is Level Design and Programming

I've ended up with one of those strange times where I've done a lot of code without anything particularly gif-able, so...

have the tiny Godot code minimap instead! I love looking at it every time I make something in Godot, it's such a joy to see all the little shapes and colors.

Anyway, I went from "i should take a nap, but I can't stop coding" to "My brain is as dead as it can possibly be and nothing makes sense anymore" so I guess that's that for day 1 for me. 12 hours of doing more work than I have in a year, even if a lot of it was super distracted and a lot of writing in my sketchbook to sort out my thoughts on code structures. I'm having an absolute blast with this LD, and that's really something I've been missing. I was worried I'd never enjoy LD again!

Good luck and goodnight, all! :smile_cat:

(also as a minor engagement: to those who publish their games page early when the game isn't made yet, what's good y'all??? you're missing out on the boost you'll get from followers being notified that you published when the game actually exists lol)

Should I change the font color?

The goal is to crawl into the nose or ears of a sleeping person.

My first time Ludum dare! Wanted to make art for video games all my life. Started a little late but oh well.. So excited to be part of this!

This will be the story of a blob protagonist. The final boss will be a tardigrade, fought in an MMA (microbe martial arts) arena.

Hi Everyone, First update for today. I've been wanting to do another Ludum Dare for the last couple of years, but i keep missing them or have other things on when they are on, so this time i planned months ahead of time and of course after all that planning i get sick this weekend. We're working with a team of 2 programmers and 1 artist (myself). The theme was the 1 theme I had spent the least time thinking about, so that was a bit of an unfortunate curve ball for me. We discussed a few ideas, but ended up settling on a wave based game where you play as the tiny creature Mr Wallace the mouse fending off all sorts of creatures. So far I've spent most of today setting up the mouse model and a few additional props the player can pick up.

I've included some of the WIP shots from the art side. I started with a very basic block-out, i then moved onto the head first and built out a very basic grey box version of the mouse. I then went back over and added the details like hands and shoes after i had the main block out done. Once the general shape of the body felt right i started giving the mouse some clothes. After a bit of discussion we thought the face could be cuter, so i made a few adjustments to the face to make him look more friendly. I did the textures and set his colour to a yellowy brown, after a few revisions i settled on white looking more friendly. Hoping to get a couple more tiny creatures done tonight, then fingers crossed i can get some sleep. Looking forward to seeing everyone's entries.

Baby jellyfish Ephyra is ready to start exploring the ocean! After some animation assistance that is.

It’s my first time animating sprites this way. I’m working on a 12 frame animation to be ping ponged. So made a quick gif to see our progress and how it looks. Hopefully it works in the game too!

Amazing how much time goes into making something very crappy and making it just a little bit (!) better

(6 hours for some art and 'only' 3 hours for all the code so far)

First day of work on my Ludum Dare compo entry is done! It's not a game yet, but it's running and building just fine. Editing and working entirely in VR for hours like this is a fascinating experience.

Very impressive of the Quest 3 to be able to keep up with this. It's 256 individual physics objects, each are about 5k tris. Terribly optimized, with each one having ~4-5 draw calls. Only a few dropped frames when the largest section of the crowd is in view!

This is my second jam, and the first one I am doing solo. I don't have the full weekend this time, have to wrap up on Sunday afternoon, so my goal is to make something simple and not to overshoot with the scope. I think I am on the right path, just need to make those creatures a bit smaller :)

Living in UTC +2 I went to bed after having read the jam theme. When I woke up I got this idea of making a Snake game where you move between apples in a tree, and if you miss you fall to your death. :snake: :apple: :deciduous_tree:

My main approach for this LD though is to have a clear goal in the game. I thought that just eating apples and getting longer felt uninspiring, so the idea evolved into a dungeon crawler. You would start in an egg, move about as a teensy larva, get bigger and more agile, form a pupa and then finally becoming a butterly or something similarly beautiful! :sparkles: I've always been drawn to dungeon crawlers so hopefully I can create something that at least feels like one.

So far using Godot 4 and Gimp. Aiming to make something pretty in Procreate. :paintbrush:

I haven't worked much with terrain and polygons in Godot, so this is good exercise.

Putting ideas on paper usually helps.

We just had a fun brainstorming session for LD56! Check out some of our quick sketches and ideas for games about tiny creatures.

Welcome to my garden, I'm your new god

We've got a smaller team than usual so we're going with a less game-y submission. Rocky start, had to switch engines, but things are back on track! Just trying to have some fun with compute shaders and an ECS-like structure.

Your tiny new friends love to climb windows!

https://i.imgur.com/D8TtiOm.gif

Goals will be things like 'crawl up this person's butt'

3 hours in - so far so good

I decide to limit myself to pico-8 colors 🎨.

Graphics are not my main competence but that is starting to look like something 😊

Now I must focus me on gameplay 🕹️

Hi everyone!

I'm doing a little coffee break, so I guess it's time to keep you all in touch with what we're doing. So at midnight the event started and the theme was unveiled, and 43 minutes later we've had our idea and basic plan.

An hour later, the idea started to feel really nice. But it was time to go to sleep, don't want to be exhausted on the first day!

This morning, the work on the game began for real. Bouteille has made some progress on the basic structure of the godot project, and started working on particles. During this time, I made some decisions about graphics, the scale of the world, etc. We don't have a lot to show for the moment, but you can always look at some drafts I made just before lunch:

Because yeah, we need sleep, but we also need food. Eating is nice, and we feel ready for a full afternoon of work.

“Rice is very precious” — Divine Child of Rejuvenation

Hope everything is going well for you all, I can't wait to see and play your games. We're having fun, and we hope you are too!

I may post another update on our game this evening, stay tuned!

Well, I sort of managed to achieve my usual aim of getting a prototype done by Saturday lunchtime.

There's just one problem: it doesn't actually work. I can switch creatures, but I can't move. I think the collision detection is broken (of course it would be, it's always the f---ing collision detection) so I'll have to sort that out after I've eaten lunch and done what I can for PoGo Community Day.

It's gonna be one of those weekends, I fear.

I am creating an ecosystem simulations. Currently, the creatures brain uses a neural network to decide whether to eat food or not. There are herbivores and carnivores. Offspring share the DNA of the parent. There is a chance for mutations for the brain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oka4uzWcW70

Not really a fan of the theme but decided it might be a good time to try and tackle a 'cozy game', something a bit different!

Also using the Odin programming language in a jam for the first time and trying to add as much juice as possible, gunning a jam entry this time around!

I always take the ultimate decision to the last minute. Last night, couple hours before the theme was out, I thought about doing it in Godot, but was having some hard time to setup a good environment in Windows using Neovim in WSL. So I decided for Zig+Raylib. But took me a while to setup stuff. Then the theme was out and I was like... huh, I started working on a swarm fish mechanic some time ago, in an unfinished game for JS13K 2023.

So I decided to use the boilerplate code I created for that project and also the fish mechanic and make a new game with it. So far that's how it's going:

Although there's a extermination of fish in this gif, your actual goal is save them rather than kill. Of course some casualties will be forgiven. :)

The idea is make all the graphics procedurally, I'll try to stick to it.

So here's my technical overview:

• Platform: HTML5/Javascript
• Libs:
  • Three.js: mostly for post-processing, graphics are procedurally created in Canvas
  • Pizzicato.js: for music
  • jsfxr: for sfx
• Editor: Neovim
• Music Editor: Reaper

Have a good compo you all!

Got to bed almost at 6 am, woke up in 1 pm, dazzled. Time zones bro

I have three enemy types and two airstrike codes mostly implemented, now its time for more!!!!

Running out of steam a bit here, but no matter how things turn out at least I made this lovable tiny creature that I'm sure will spawn a franchise and merchandising line, eventually earning it's rightful place along side Sonic, Mario, and Pac-Man...

This will have to be a pretty minimal game... I also don't have any great ideas yet. I'm probably gonna go for some idle game about having pet fish and feeding them or something. :thinking:

How is everyone else doing?

Drawing the outlines for readability and using real images for the texturing. Its quite fun - like doing many tiny collages.

Our brains were on the mental treadmill since the theme was announced.

After almost 2 hours of brainstorming we finally figured out what to do.

So far we got French themed mice, should we do revolutionary French mice?

What tiny creature(s) did you go for? Is it an existing creature? An animal or something else?

We went full potato who gets help from animals :stuckouttonguewinkingeye:

Follow burchyn and togis on this site. They are the couple I'm working with :smiley:

teaser

Still trying to win the Ludum meal award that no more exists since probably 500 years.

I go back to programming, with a hot water bottle, because my windows are all open to try to capture a fly and being able to record its flying noise.

Just nailed down the idea, I think, but it might be a bit ambitious :laughing: I began composing a piece for the project last night cause music always inspires me and it's my way of brainstorming! It has a creepy circus vibe so far haha!

I think I'm gonna try to make an orchestra of tiny creatures or at least get a song modulation system working cause I've been wanting to make that for a long time. By that I mean a system that can introduce variations to the same track as you play (basically stems and parts of the song rendered separately and then mixed and modulated in-game). We'll see how that goes. I'm happy if I'm able to make a good foundation for that type of system :smile:

How are you all doing?

This Sterket is the final form of Tadcoal and Firog. Even though the fire has spread to most of its body, it has learned to ignore the fact that it's on fire. A youth of nonstop pain has taught this Sterket to regard any situation, no matter how dire, as perfectly fine.

Bold to take a 7 hour sleep, but I wager the mental refresh will pay itself off. This is the only day for the double shift in compo, so the bulk of the work is at my doorstep, and tomorrow is just the final polish. Being my first LD, I'm naturally encountering every blind spot in my workflow. Blind spots that conveniently remained undetected during my practice jams in the past few weeks. I didn't get as far as I had hoped, but I did the very basics in place. I have a character and a monster, and we can attack each other and it can perish. Game over screen is on the agenda today, as well as polishing up the currently abysmal combat. And I still need to create some tiny creatures. Good skill to you all. Luck has no power here.

The ducks are already waddling around the placeholder level. Despite trying our hardest not to do the same thing again, we ended up with another idea for a tile based puzzle game.

I had a way over-complicated idea about a management game. So I went with this infinite runner instead! Next step is to add cacti that will hurt the little kopengs. Can't wait to draw all the sprites!

Here at Quasar Shrine we've been thinking a lot about ideas. We think we're heading to a good destination :) And you ? Here's a lil' question I asked to my teammates, it may open some good discussion among all of you :)

A creature is something that is living. How to let the player understand that this... thing, is alive ?

Let say you only have a square (colored or not) on a blank screen. - You can't add text - You can't add texture/sprite/polygons - You can't add sounds...

So...

How to show the player that something is alive ? How do you make it "alive" ?

Hope this will help you to get you unstuck (if you are stuck) on the game ideas phase or to toughen you ideas

Good luck for now !

Been focusing on sprites this morning while pondering ideas. Think I know what I want to do now.

https://youtu.be/Dqcc5fK3FuY

The initial idea.. something involving falling eggs and gnomes with a trampoline catching them before they break open and release .tiny creatures! Clearly an idea formed late at night!

so i'm making a game where you became smol and you're seeking for a method to become big again. here's one screenshot: i'm gonna use this -> http://tmtg.nl/ludumdare/ld53-charactergen/ and this -> https://datagoblin.itch.io/monogram bc i'm bad at making sprites.

...between chill and insane mode. no panic yet.

concept is readyyyyyyy we start hard working

It's brutal...but why is this so fun?