Here in Manila, my birthday is currently ongoing, so it's time for me to share some interesting bits and pieces for my LD entry, Bittersweet Harvest.

As stated before, I was struggling with what I will be making in accordance with the theme. Harvesting crops is old-hat, harvesting souls is also old-hat. I then decided that harvesting bad memories is unique enough, and the story took off from there.

As for the UI design, I wanted the entire UI to be as sleek and readable as possible. One good accessibility rule for visual novels is to make the UI simple enough, but also unique to fit the game's theme. As for the font choices, it's also a given that I use sans serif fonts, and make the font size as large enough to fit on my 1366 x 768 screen.

While I had a breeze gathering ideas for the story and writing them down, gathering assets needed for the game was something I struggled with. With my current hard-of-hearing condition, I had to hover the speakers close to my ears to get the feel of the music I would use. But one area I had great difficulty with was with the backgrounds, since I didn't want pictures that would be used for the backgrounds to clash with the text. I even had to employ AI-assisted tools to make custom backgrounds out of the photos I took years ago, but they didn't stick. On the other hand, gathering sprites was easy, since I eyed a scrapped project by @mad_scientist92 and used the sprites from that project, since I didn't want the artist's efforts to be wasted.

And now, I wait for the Global Game Jam to start and give this game a much-needed conclusion using the theme that will be unveiled there.

Play my game here, as usual: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/bittersweet-harvest

We are playing your LD52 games on stream right now! https://twitch.tv/offdutyextractors

If you want to see how your game is played by others, or need a few more ratings on it, submit your game and we'll check it out!

To submit your game, join our Discord and post the link to the game in the #ld52-submissions channel. You can also join a voice channel to talk to us on stream about your game.

Do I need 20 ratings in the audio category to get scored/ranked for audio at the end?

Cheers

We are considering extending the gameplay and publishing it perhaps. But we need Your feedback and ideas to make it better!

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

You can be the one! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/void-walkers

I'm curious if anyone knows why someone would avoid eating certain categories, in my entry ratings like mood/audio has way less than others like overall and fun. Why would you choose not to rate

We are 11 ratings away from 82 ratings, which would make this game the most rated game I have ever made for a LD!

Anyways, here is a cute screenshot!

Also we are hard at work on a PostJam Version (Yes the screenshot is from the postjam version), which adresses a lot of the issues people had with the game. Maybe you have some complaints I can still address!

She said this morning that she would like to make a game of her own next time. She does not have any experience with programming (I tried to show her, but it is not her interest at all), she's a big story teller though. Do you all have suggestions for game making tools where minimum or no programming is required?

I have noticed that nobody has beaten my boss "The Mage". And only one person has entered his second phase. That's all out of 12 players that played my game.

And because of this I wonder, what can I do to motivate my players to defeat this boss? Do you know any good practices for that?

Find the correct route, irrigate your crops and harvest them but don't forget, too much water is bad for the crops.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/enough-is-a-feast

We would really appreciate it, if you take your time and test the game, leave a comment and maybe some rating. Don’t forget to read the tutorial!

And thanks to everyone who already tested it. We really appreciate your feedback! :hearts:

Play & rate our game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/ld52-moonlight

Best regards @nivbeth, @fis & @fluffymadness

PLAY IT NOW

I was excited to participate in the LD52 game jam competition. I didn't do much preparation as my head is always full of ideas. I did let my family know that I would be busy and that I wouldn't be available. I formed a team with two of my friends, Simeon and Adam, whom I had known for a while. I also called a friend of mine, Raindrinker, who is an amazing artist, and he agreed to help me out with the art for the game.

As the competition began, we all bonded well and started working on our game. However, there was some friction ideawise, but in the end we went through the storm together. The art that Raindrinker created was simply amazing, it really brought our game to life. We realized that the game was a bit too hard and thank god Simeon created a Zen mode beforehand. We turned Zen mode into regular mode and that was a great call, the game became more enjoyable and accessible.

As the competition progressed, we started to get a lot of comments on our game page. People seemed to be really enjoying our game and we were getting positive feedback. Simeon and Adam were thrilled with the progress we were making and we all felt confident that our game would do well in the voting.

In the end, the game we created was a success, but the biggest lesson I learned from the experience was that people matter more than the product. The competition was intense, but what mattered most to me was the bond I formed with my teammates Simeon and Adam, and the fun we had working together. Even though we faced some friction ideawise, we went through it together and that made the experience all the more rewarding. I would love to jam with them again in the future, and I am grateful for the memories and the lessons learned.

~~I still need 2 ratings in the humor category, but unfortunately somebody went and liked a bunch of the comments on my game, tanking my smart score by at least 11.~~

~~So, I would love to do some rating trades--if you play & rate my game (and leave a comment, so I can find your username), I will play and rate yours, probably by tonight.~~

EDIT: Nevermind, whoever hearted all those comments seems to have unhearted them, so my smart score is fine again.

We've gotten quite a lot of feedback in the past two weeks of ratings. In fact, we were able to "harvest" some good reactions during livestreams (see what I did there?).

https://youtu.be/elRahw1XwVg

Major thanks to @elysiagriffin @krassenstein @pomo @coleslaughter @rincs @lomby @jitspoe @coderah for playing our game live and providing clips!

Want to see for yourself?

Play They Hide in the Fields

by @hawkin | @kingpotatocannon | @tempest-smh

For the last few LDs I've been making NES games. As most people don't have an NES emulator laying around and probably don't want the trouble of installing one, I've been including an WebGL emulator for running them on itch.io.

But these days I saw a project called NesTek which apparently allows one to put everything needed for running a single NES game on Windows in one package (the intended purpose is for someone to publish their original NES games on Steam).

My question is: For Ludum Dare purposes, is there a scenario where one would rather download and run a Windows(ish) version of a NES game instead of playing the Web one (or just using an standalone emulator)?

(shameless partial self-promotion: btw you can find all the NES games people have made for Ludum Dare on this page: https://ldjam.com/tags/platform/nintendo-famicom)

Hi everyone! I forgot to mention this on the day I submitted it but Stalk: Blood Harvest has been finished, and you can play it right now! I'd really appreciate it if you could rate it as well, I'm currently working on polishing the game and eventually releasing it on itch.io, so any and all critique is welcome!

The tournament will be on January 21, 2023 at 17:00 GMT!

These games were voted on by the competitors, and they are:

Carrot

by itsBoats (@itsboats)

Click on Fish

by Pomo (@pomo)

HarvesTurnip

by Colisan (@colisan)

Adelie - Water Under the Bridge

by Meep (@meep)

Come on and chill and stufff~ Check out the twitch stream here!!!

Or, if you haven't yet, play (and rate) our game! :3

I finally have a stretch of free time, so I thought I would use it up playing and rating some games! If anyone has a game they would like me to give a go, just respond with where I can find it's page.

And if anyone is interested in checking out my game, about a worm harvesting buildings to make a city, you can try it here.

test