Slow progress on my Extra entry, but I've finally finished most of the basic systems on my simulator of a mighty but stranded witch.

Any other construct users out there? Has anyone else come up with a more elegant solution for pushing contiguous lines of tiles ?

Are you using arrays , or just collision testing within a loop?

Am currently working on a system to assign all tiles a binary # based on possible tiles that allow movement , testing if blocked or not, then another array to test move vector against that. Any that have input velocity impart that down the chain, and once a tile without anything blocking it is found, the entire set moves..

Am probably under/over thinking it. :upside_down:

Can share the .capx if anyone's interested!

Relates to this isometric ratburger cake pushing cat game:

Drillydown by @peter-jonsson

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

A minimalist puzzle game with smart level design and fun mechanics.

Fruit Pick Tricks by @toomblercazz

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/fruit-pick-tricks

A brilliant set of first person puzzles and excellent, intuitive level design.

Straight Line Farming by @kastaff, @hiku, and @drawrunner

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/straight-line-farming

A great concept that starts simple and gets very fun and interesting as the game progresses.

Hidden Tales by @zubspace

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/hidden-tales

A relaxing, zen experience with fantastic music and art.

Olive Harvest by @reivilibre

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/olive-harvest

A zany, fun game where you're an adorable kiwi who runs an olive farm and sells oil to duck truckers.

How about something spooky? Can you make it out of the cornfield?

Headphones are recommended to play this short, retro-style horror game.

Play They Hide in the Fields

by @hawkin | @kingpotatocannon | @tempest-smh

Hey can I get one more person to read and rate my humour please

The funny README file: http://ld52-webhost.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/README.txt

The game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/lullaby-farms

I would love to know someone read the README before playing the game

Check out our entry for LD 52, a very handsome bee! If you leave a comment on the game's listing i'll be sure to check your game out. Just got done playing everyone's games tonight :)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/charles-the-bee

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/farmtown-mowdown

For each camp there are 2 types of humans you can harvest with a 1/4 chance, and one type with 2/4 chance. There are 4 votes needed for this game to get a rating. And there is 5 days, 12 hours and 24 minutes until the deadline. This cannot be a coincidence.

Pls play my game and consider rating.

A simple and relaxing game about “harvesting” ⭐stars⭐ using real constellations♊♌

Play now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DVOYRuTZb4

I have finally edited the development stream to a more manageable size. 11 hours of development sped up to 20 minutes!

(BTW, feel free to mute the video and replace with your favorite music! I like the music of the game, but it was not made to listen for 20 minutes in repeat)

It was fun revisiting the game creating process: - setting up centering of the maximum score up to 9999 (in the end it is very hard to get a score above 70...) - trying to create the music, failing, and sitting down to watch a tutorial on youtube :joycat: - spending a lot of time adjusting the difficulty :gamedie: - deciding to add the setting sun at the very last moment, just before submitting the game :sunrise:

Follow the rabbit to play Harvest Tataki! :rabbit:

A lot of others did!

It was created to make Hellgate Harvest

If you want you can check out MuGen - The Music Generator yourself!

Click to smash meaningless mortals and get their souls!

The Pets Over The Innsmouth

You wanna play this GAME? Come this page! and give some vote for us!

Help Hermesh, the reaper apprentice to harvest escaped souls from possessed ducks!

Play Hermesh!

I still have some rating to do, which I'll try and get done over the next few days. For now, though, it's time for my traditional post-mortem, examining what went well with my game, what didn't, and what I can improve upon for next Ludum Dare. Speaking of my game, if you haven't played it yet, please do!

What Went Well

• Of all my Ludum Dare entries, this is easily the least complex, and one of the smallest in scope as well. By scoping down like this, I was able to really take my time with it and make sure everything looked and felt okay, rather than rushing it. This led to a much more relaxed Ludum Dare experience than normal - which was helpful, considering it kicked off on my birthday.
• As a result of this smaller scope, this is also my first bug-free game in a very long time. I haven't had to put out a single patch or big fix for the entire rating period, which hasn't happened since my collab with @alanxoc3 for LD46, and hasn't happened in the Compo since LD43. Turns out there's not much room for bugs when your game has less than 9 KB of code - who knew?
• The inclusion of Color-Blind Mode has been highlighted in several reviews. I'm proud of myself for realising that accessibility would be a problem with the game, and it's something I'll continue to think about in the future.

What Went Badly

• This is the second Ludum Dare in a row where I've played it safe, without really attempting to push my boundaries or try new genres or game mechanics. Again, this was a birthday jam and I wanted to take it easy, but I still don't want this to become a pattern in future jams. I'm not going to learn and improve that way.
• I feel like I did a poor job with the level scaling. It scales smoothly up to Level 20, and keeps scaling indefinitely after that, but by all accounts it becomes impossible at Level 10. I think it should have scaled more slowly.
• This is one of the few LD games where I've been able to add a background, but the result feels rather rushed and simplistic. I could (and maybe should) have tried to put a bit more detail into it.

What Comes Next

This is also the second Ludum Dare in a row where I've abandoned my usual story-heavy, narrative-driven approach in favour of a simpler arcade-style game, and it seems to have worked out well on both occasions. I'll be taking this into account for future jams, and continuing to mix it up rather than always trying to do story-heavy games.

I'm not sure how much scope there is to improve or expand Fruit Fall, so that'll probably be it. I've already shifted my focus back to developing Prism Warriors, as work on it has slowed to a crawl recently for various reasons. However, one thing I'll be carrying forward into future games is a slightly revised splash screen, with the Altrix logo written in a custom font. It's a minor detail that makes the splash screen look a bit nicer.

Thanks again to everyone who's reviewed and rated Fruit Fall, and good luck when the ratings come out!

Hi jammers!

I had a lot of fun with this past jam, and one thing I like to do to extend that fun is by making a video breakdown of the development process. Feel free to ask questions if there are further details you'd like to know about. Or if you wanted to try to dethrone @miltonnh25 from the top spot, Cyber Shapes does have an online leaderboard.

https://youtu.be/CoHJnH5_OnY

I'm planning to catch up on ratings today, so please leave a comment below if you haven't reached the 20 ratings required to receive a score at the end. Otherwise, head over to the Danger Zone with me to make sure nobody gets left behind.

Hi there, who wants to review my game Harvest of the Corn?

Hack and smash through some corn thieves and obtain mighty corny :corn: loot!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/harvest-of-the-corn

First game jam? Yeah me too!

Well at least it was the first game jam I have completed and submitted! I’m sure some of you know what I’m talking about. Game Jams are HARD but also a whole lot of fun if you allow yourself to enjoy the process!

It goes without saying being a solo developer in a jam takes a special kind of skill, which I don’t believe I have yet, but if you are one of those unicorns that can juggle all the aspects of making a fun game in a weekend alone then I tip my hat to you sir. Keep up the hard work!

So let’s talk about teams.

As a somewhat anxious and introverted person I found it hard to find teams in the past and always reverted to trying to become one of those unicorns, which I do think if you put in enough hard work and practice you can get to that point but you need to be okay with failing along the way.

This is where friends come into play… I am lucky enough to have work mates that are far more capable than I am when it comes to game jams so I think I got lucky here, but this same rule applies for all of your other friends who might be interested in making a game for the first time, especially if you wanted it to be more of a learning experience. If like me none of your out of work friends are interested in making games it’s a lot harder to form a team that you feel like you fit into and I understand how you feel here.

If that sounds like you, here's my honest advice… Just join a team, any team it really doesn’t matter, what matters is getting used to working as part of a team. Having discussions, sometimes arguments or disagreements, listening to other ideas, taking ideas and incrementally improving them even if just a little. If you are a programmer like me then this will benefit you in the long run, it’s easy implementing features and mechanics you have thought about but it’s harder to nail what others had envisioned and deliver on their expectations. This will make you a much better programmer in the long run and you will much more easily integrate into teams in the future.

So before I talk about some of the things I did, here are some key things I picked up this jam;

• Listen to the whole team! You might not agree with what they are saying but they are still providing a perspective you don’t have. This is good, try and find the good things in what they are saying and if you have one, counter with a better solution that also takes their concerns into account.
• Quickly find the things that are not fun. It’s a lot easier to adjust your design on day one than on the last day. If you find something, bring it up with the team but also try to add something to the conversation, don’t just say “This is terrible” or “This isn’t fun” try to help out by suggesting what would make it fun or less terrible.
• Modularity. I’d love to take credit for this but Simeon (our coder extraordinaire) was the one who charged head first into the project architecture and code design. He made a well informed call and he was right. Make everything modular! This made so much stuff faster and easier to extend and change.
• Set two release goals. You should have two release goals, first the MVP; this should contain everything needed for the game to be fun and enjoyable. Aim your sights firmly at this as you most likely only have enough time for this. And second, you want a “Perfection/Full” release goal where you have all of the extra stuff that you think will really push the game into the major leagues. Once you are happy with the MVP and the polish, start fleshing out the extra content, go nuts!
• Polish, Polish, Polish! Taking into account the point above this should always be done no matter if you have time for the perfection/full release candidate or not. This should be the next step after completing the MVP. Polish will benefit the game a lot more than an extra enemy or feature. Players notice this ALOT!

Okay so I talked alot about the team and how to best ensure you work well in a team, let’s talk a little bit about what I actually did and what I could have done better. A little retrospective if I may.

Most of the jam I worked on these little guys

First off, Don’t try to be clever, be reliable and competent. I thought it would be ‘clever’ to handle the enemy behaviours in behaviour scripts with Interfaces so the main enemy script can pick up any behaviour and it just works, this was not entirely the case and a simple base class inheritance would have done the job perfectly fine, in fact we ended up adding a base class anyway to handle a lot of the logic and references that were the same for all plants, which my original approach ended up having a lot of copy pasted boilerplate code in each behaviour script. Not Good!

Simplicity always wins! If you feel like you are being clever then you are probably being too clever for your own good. Scale it back a little, think about what you are trying to solve and solve that problem, you don’t want to be creating problems for yourself or more importantly your team later.

The Blackthorn Bush! Probably my favourite plant in the whole game!

This was a great example of “keeping it simple”. The spikes effect could have been another opportunity for me to overthink and complicate things but I think I made the right choice this time round. So how do they work?

Well as I suggested, it’s pretty simple. I used a particle effect that emitted spikes with colliders in a circle, three of those, add a little delay for each one and you are good to go. The behaviour triggers the parent effect and subsequently emits all child effects. The collision detection is handled by each particle which fires the usual OnCollisionEnter unity event on anything that touches it. I set each spike to be destroyed on collision so they are not too overpowered and that’s it.

Oh and also I almost forgot, Prefab variants!! You should try and make use of them where it makes sense, this can really speed up iteration times when dealing with multiple prefabs for many enemies etc.

That’s really all I have to say, I hope this benefits someone and helps them become a better game developer. Godspeed.

Did you enjoy this devlog or learn something new? Please check out the game on Itch.io and rate it on ldjam.com!

https://ernani.itch.io/infernalgarden

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/infernal-garden

Thanks for taking the time to read this blog, I hope to see some more awesome games next jam! Keep up the good work guys!

Adam Normoyle. Programmer

As a composer/audio designer, I'm always on the lookout for great sounding jam games and love to see what my peers manage to make over the course of such a short period of time. In that spirit, please share any great sounding games with me and I'll be sure to give them a play/listen!

My team decided to make game themed around various animals and their fight to survive during harvest season. This for me evoked childhood movies/TV shows like The Animals of Farthing Wood. I decided to make an orchestral soundtrack, inspired by the classic chase scenes in children's adventure films of the 80s/90s (and beyond). With less time pressure I would have gone deeper into massaging the samples to get an even more real sounding orchestra, but I'm actually quite happy with the results.

You can listen to the track here: https://on.soundcloud.com/bRPk7

Of course try out the game here for context: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/flee-the-farmland

And please link me to any games or soundtracks I should be checking out!

These guys are still 2D but are now made up of 3 sprites

Here they are controlled by the mouse All randomly generated and animated through the shader. I also added more textures now for the generation. In total its now 5 per head, body and face.

Lets try our chilling game with Arabian vibes. Game page