Ludum Dare 52 January 6–9, 2023

Canabis Farmer

Try my game "Seed your weed" made in UE5.0. https://ldj.am/$314966

You are farmer who wants to seed weed and take care about his marihuana field. Your goal is take care about your fields and flowers. If you don´t want to download the game, you can see full gameplay on youtube video below. ;-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV-NXLktvwo

ENJOY!

Yes I need to get ratings for my game.

Try our game !

Here is our game : Cosmic Sweep ! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/cosmic-sweep You are a spaceship and you have to clean the space ! Bring debris to your planet and improve your business! 55255.png

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Did you win the award? Help Robotnik get his, today!

Check out our, relaxing and challenging platformer/logical game.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/robotnik thumbnail.png

Dont forget about balanced harvest and reach that one million shrums :)

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New Game Modes!

I've been busy pushing updates to my game the past few weeks. After receiving a lot of feedback from people, I added a handful of optional game modes that give you a chance to try some new features out.

Check the game out and play it here

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How I reduce the number of bugs during jams

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Sound that my game does not have any visible bug.

Some insight on how I achieve this: - I'm used to "pure code", no engine, for 35 years. This game is C# + Monogame, and I do not use any "already made" design pattern from Monogame, just my code. I use Monogame only for drawing textures, play sounds and get inputs. - I'm used to scripting langages for years, with no safety net, so I'm very careful with what I code, even using a compiled langage like C# (used for this project) - I learned on 8bits computers: no IDE, no completion, a bug can freeze the computer... best school ever. - I use simple code, no useless optimisation, my code "tells a story": I prefer 5 lines with detailled steps than 1 crappy unreadable line with a bunch of instructions in it - I always chose the simplest solution to resolve a problem - I never copy/paste code from someone else - I never use external lib, except in extreme needs

In a nutshell: Keep your code simple and learn to work without safety net.

Play my game there and drop a vote ❤️: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/the-gluten-farm

Character Design Retro for "Pulling Teeth"

If you haven't already, please check out our game "Pulling Teeth"!

Hey all! My name is Heather (Deprecat) and I was the lead artist and writer for our submission "Pulling Teeth" - a game where you play as a tooth fairy seeking to speed up his path to retirement by maximizing his harvest of teeth through cavities and gummies.

I wanted to take a moment to talk about my process for designing our main character for the game. This was my first LD working in a team, so I had extra time to focus on building a character and environment and really solidify the overall look of the game.

First sketches

When the theme was announced, the three of us got to work in brainstorming an idea that we would feel comfortable jumping into, while also trying to find a unique spin on the theme itself, as I believe we all felt the collective concern of not wanting our game to be too related to crops or farming. While there's definitely nothing wrong with a literal interpretation, it wasn't the direction we found the most fun.

If I had to offer one major tip for finding a fun idea in a jam, it's this - your first idea is probably the same as everyone else's, so don't settle for your first thought. Humans think pretty homogenously at the start of an idea, but you can diverge from those initial thoughts if you give yourself a little more time to think things through. So if you want to take a little risk and try a take on the theme that not many will have thought of, just write as many of your initial ideas down as you can. Eventually you'll get the low-hanging fruit out of your system and just have the weirder ideas that take some time to conceive fully. It may make brainstorming take a little longer, but you may find the effort worth it!

And even if you do just go with your initial gut instinct, you'll feel more confident in that choice if you explored other options.

So a few idea pitches in, we started to explore the concept of a tooth fairy.

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I had made the point that - for this to feel in the spirit of a harvest - that you couldn't just focus on collecting teeth. At that point, it just feels like stealing, not harvesting. A harvest implies effort put into the creation of the resource. You reap what you sow.

That's how we arrived at the idea of two separate gameplay cycles, day and night. This also meant that my character would have to appear in two different forms. He'd be disguised as a "human" during the day while managing his shop and luring in children with sweets, then at night he would remove his disguise to collect his bounty.

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What an innocent face! You'd trust this man, right?

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You can see some early concepts here, such as security signs and dog houses signifying the difficulty of the house to break into, and being caught would be a lot sillier

In my sketches I wanted to lean into a much creepier tooth fairy, which isn't an uncommon trope in most creepypastas these days, but since his actions are so morally questionable, I didn't think making him too cute would suit the overall vibe.

Disguised Form

I got to work in Affinity Designer (A similar, cheaper tool to Adobe Illustrator) and started shaping out the character. no eyes.png

I wanted his face to be toothless, since it seemed like a tooth fairy shouldn't have any teeth of their own. But I wanted the sharpness to the face, similar to depictions of kappa's in Japanese myth with their beaks, but also inspired by the pointed mouth and large eyes of Momo the ubume.

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I wasn't originally going to give him pupils, just large eyes like a fly, but found that white pupils worked well to both add a little spark of life while also being creepy on their own, since light pupils have a very strange quality to them, without feeling like they're piercing you as dark pupils might.

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Oh lawd

I started with the naked human form first as I knew it would essentially be his fairy form forced into an upright position versus his normal fetal-position stance. The long fingers and uncomfortably slumped shoulders started feeling like Salad Fingers, which I thought was a nice visual similarity without feeling too close. Once I had a good idea of his overall shape, I dressed him up for his new job.

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True Form

Now that the day-time form is done, I needed to make his true form. This was easy enough as it just took removing the clothes and scrunching his form into a little ball. I accentuated the rib-cage and gave him some big, taloned feet that I felt would lean more into a demonic or bird-like appearance. Overall though, I just wanted him to look like a "silly little guy"

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I don't remember if it was my idea or another's on the teams to make his wings look like teeth (y'all can correct me if I'm misremembering) but it was brilliant either way. The blood stains added some color to the otherwise flushed body colors, and kept with the red and blue color scheme of the day cycle, only now the balance was more shifted to the blues.

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Once he was all done, I broke his body up into pieces and got him ready for rigging! I'm grateful I had time to animate this boy since it really helped to bring him alive.

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Thanks for reading!

Streaming your submissions!

We are a bit late to the party but we will be streaming your games at https://www.twitch.tv/offdutyextractors at 7:00pm MST tonight. If you want to submit your game early you can do so here: https://discord.gg/m8mvgz53HZ

We look forward to playing more of your games and hopefully hearing what you have to say about them!

Congrats on another great Jam!

Here is the Devlog for my entry Asteroid Rush :) I had such a fun time and can't wait for LD53. Thanks to everyone who stopped my by live streams. Stay safe out there!

https://youtu.be/bhrlMW5CSf8

Much love -Aarimous

Updates on Harvest!

Hello!

Harvest has just been Updated to v1.1!

Thanks to all your feedback, there are some bugfixes and new features!

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Check it out here!

If you have any interest, let me know what you would like to be added!

One week left

Hello beautiful people!

Only one week left until the results. I hope you had some rest and some feedback on your projects.

Answer me if you didn't get your 20 ratings, I'll try to test your games before the end.

On our side we had almost 30 ratings. Can we go further? Feel free to test our project and give us feedback.

LINK HERE -> https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/celestial-wheatfield

https://youtu.be/qsjpWK4bYpI

Have a nice week everyone and may the odds be ever in your favor

Harvest Hewn

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Its harvest season. I wonder what the gnome has for us today?

Thanks to everyone who has played and rated our game. I'll be trying again to rate games this weekend for those of you who leave comments on ours. 50+ hour work weeks got me like😴

Thank you all!! You rock!!

Our game page is here and the Itch.io page is here!

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