Also looks like I'm running behind schedule...

As someone who's done this a few times before and made all of these mistakes, some things to keep in mind:

1. Don't stay up for 48 hours straight constantly working in an attempt to squeeze out the most time. After a few hours you will lose steam; this is a great opportunity to take a few minutes to eat, make a blog post, discuss with your team (if you have one), etc. You will keep thinking and solving problems in the background and usually the main factor of solving those problems is giving yourself enough time, not working constantly.
2. Remember to stay hydrated! Always have a mostly full glass of water available. If you run low, go refill it; the trip will give you a brief break and may give you space to help solve a problem.
3. Start polishing now. If you're doing the Compo, you're already basically out of time for adding new features. For every hour you spend adding a feature, know that at least 2-3 will be spent polishing and bug fixing.
4. Scope down throughout the jam. Every 12 hours evaluate (with your team) where you are and if you'll need to cut anything. If you wanted to have 3 levels but don't have 1 done yet, maybe just make 1 level. Wanted two main systems that play off each other but aren't completely finished with the first one, maybe cut the second system and just make the one you have really good.
5. Enjoy the experience! This is supposed to be fun. If you find yourself stressing out about the deadline or a bug you can't squash, take a breath and remember that in the long run, Ludum Dare doesn't really matter, and that's kinda the point. It's ok to fail! It's ok to not know how to do something perfectly your first try!

Our NES game is starting to look like a video game.

BLOOD IS FUEL (for plants)

I caved in and decided to go with a farming game, my original idea was a bit too complicated and I didn't really want to stretch the theme so I opted to go with something a little more simple

Basically you kill the infected and harvest their blood, and then use the blood to water your plants and then harvest them

Finished the first version of my game! Yay :-)

This Sunday I already have a lot of other stuff to do, so I wanted to try to finish it in 24 hours.

The game is quite simple, but it has everything that I wanted: Gameplay, graphics, music, menu and game over screen, a decent challenge, and you can even try for a high score!

Play Harvest Tataki - whac-a-mole!

Let me know if you think it is too easy or too hard, or if you have any other suggestions - I might change the balance a bit before the compo deadline.

Our first Ludum Dare :)

I got really far my first night, this morning I don't feel that motivated. I don't know why. Maybe my game idea sucks. I don't know. I'm going to take a break and come back in a couple hours and see how I feel about it then.

Here is a screenshot of how far it is now.

Anyone have any suggestions on helping with motivation?

harvesting with a gun because why not

More in my twitter — https://twitter.com/Skigfx

Just a little cairn signifying my progress on this dreary Saturday morning in the Pacific Northwest.

Our graphics guy getting feisty over here

@hartvichio @sprotex @osel13 @sipfindel

A little sneak peak :)

Well it's Ludum Dare 52 so it seems there's only one option for me: My game will feature a standard deck of playing cards.

My usual process which seems to work pretty well for me for both creativity and life balance is to read the theme announcement, think about things actively a little bit, and then have a normal evening watching some TV with my spouse while my creative brain turns over ideas, thinking about things as I fall asleep, and sitting down in the morning to start actually manipulating objects and see if I like what my brain has been turning over.

For which the answer this morning, as it often seems to be, is no. I've been chewing over a solitaire card game which takes a pretty literal interpretation of Harvest, using cards in a multipurpose way to represent soil, cards, and actions, and . . . so far it's both overly fussy and not gelling into anything interesting.

So now I'm casting the net back open and my brain keeps coming back to how Keith Baker added a crops-and-seasons theme to the traditional card game Casino with Illimat, and some of the other stuff that interests me, and I might have something in that vague direction that I can get behind. If this pans out the only thing I owe to Illimat is the theming, so I'm comfortable with that.

Or maybe this also won't pan out and I'll be on to another idea, or back to the first one but better. That's happened before.

This earlier schedule may push me into Jam rather than Compo; I'm not sure I'll be able to get everything I want done by 3pm tomorrow, but so it goes.

Making a game for my toddler using a ridiculously heavy process... with acold, taking care of a toddler... and I only found out about LD52 about 5 minutes before it started. I LOVE repeating this process, though. It's getting so much faster. I've never completed this much game design in under 10 hours.

I've spent all day learning the basics of 2D Isometric art and how tilemaps work. Never used either before so these are totally new skills. That's why I love Ludum Dare!

"I was so busy today that I had to meditate for 2 hours instead of just 1" - Ghandi

I don't know who needs to hear that but there you go :)

As my games are usually multiplayer, lack of bots was naturally the #1 complain last time.

So, I decided to invest some time to build some AI.

And now... 2h later (so half of my allotted time) I finally have something that is .. okayish. But still mediocre :face_palm:

Anyway, passing to some other polish.

and

Dr. Fang :hammer: Progress Update

Here's what we have accomplished in the past 7 hours (joined late because of the time-zone difference):

Programming & Unity

I've been working on the programming and unity side of things.

Assets

Meanwhile, @orinta, has been working on modelling.

Here's what she's been working on recently

More on the game premise and story will be available later, with the game submission, when the jam ends.

Good luck everyone!

Some progress. Not the most unique idea, but we have fun.

Collect all the golden objects to offer to the gods of harvest!

The frog prince doesn't seem to want to part with his crown...

I've drawn a little inspiration from the descriptions in the original Elite to add some (slightly silly) flavour text.

It's getting there! I think I'll have a working prototype with 24 hours to spare.

there aren't 36 methods to grow up your veggies

Everyone is doing that thing where they send what their game looks like at a certain time in so I might as well too

Did you know that Sin and Cos helps UFO to fly around the planets:)

22 hours in, the game is looking pretty mint!

In starting the music for my second game ever, I somehow stumbled my way into a mode I previously had not heard of. For the music nerds out there, you may know the dorian mode, but do you know the Ukrainian dorian? Also called the Ukrainian minor, altered dorian, and Misheberak scale. It's mostly the same but with a raised 4th note (T-s-T+s-s-T-s-T). My university music theory prof would be so proud of me writing a song with tritones everywhere.

Almost 1 day in... wasted all my time

Something like combine harvester... Now let's add some chickens.

With this weekend's jam fully underway, I'd like to share some of the long-term progress I've made on my project from last Ludum Dare: Battle Lines!

Battle Lines is a "tower offense" autobattler similar to a hybrid of TFT and Advance Wars. Each player buys unit cards from a common pool using harvested resources (so it would go with this jam's theme as well haha), then places them on the map where they periodically attack and cast abilities like tower defense towers. However, instead of playing defensive like traditional tower defense, the goal is to build forward and destroy the opponent's Keep while defending your own, much like an RTS!

https://streamable.com/lfq4rm

Follow me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/wingman_gaming to keep track of progress and get the fastest updates on development progress and release news!

Currently aiming for a public Beta release on itch.io in late January and a full Steam release in March!

My day 1 progress so far

And some basic data structure, also the game design in PowerPoint.

I'm satisfied with my progress since I went to a concert today so I couldn't work on the game for 9 hours lol Then I didn't feel like I'd like to write codes, so I decided to work on the character... That was a good choice, it was at least very fun. Tomorrow... at least a basic gameplay will be done, even though I don't know how much advanced stuff I can apply.

You can find me in my YouTube if you think anything interesting https://youtube.com/@MonohBehavior or Twitter https://twitter.com/MonohBehavior

I wish all of you luck for the Ludum Dare 52!

Not sure if fishing counts as harvesting but we are going with that so that is what you get. Hopefully the code gets done in time I don't know I just do the art. Bit late to change it now so full steam ahead!

Have a title screen.

This has to be the earliest I've ever completed a Ludum Dare entry. Going with a super-simple idea has really paid off. The only things left to do are the music, the "how to play" screen on the main menu, and refining the bounce mechanic -- you should be able to control which direction the fruits bounce in, based on where they hit the trampoline, but right now it seems to be almost random, so something isn't right with the code. I need to figure that out.

If I can get those done by the end of the day, I can spent tomorrow on polish and release it at my leisure. Here's hoping!

Set my fish to be trained before going to bed for the second day

It remains only to add gameplay with sounds)

Wowie we've had a fun and productive day! A lot of work making all this so far but ready to pull it all together tomorrow!

We felt like some fun action-packed farming was in order :))))

We got the base foundations done, tomorrow will be adding all the cool things >:D

And some of the concept doodles that helped guide us so far, thanks to @avian!!

On to tomorrow for another fun day! Everyones progress is looking amazing, can't wait to play some games >:D

Hey! I tried to make a game this LD but found myself without good ideas for my expected scope. So I wanted to ask if someone is searching for music and wants to team up!

If you want to check some of my work, I have this track uploaded to spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/5WlPZfM78qJhRI8dnkkSdD?si=926f0ee0ba244f16

And also some work for a farming game I did in Roblox, haha, what a coincidence: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1hKV3YgVW1iJeCyuFRv09W5p4dXPh6cn?usp=sharelink

I play keyboard, bass and guitar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG6DYZfSsDI

DM me on twitter: https://twitter.com/therodel77

okay next idea you are a fox and u have to catch chickens what you think

This is a card game. Can you guess what type of card game?

It will have some special rules in addition to the customary ones.

I've been meaning to try out Pico-8 for some time, and this will be my first game jam using it. So far, I love it. The constrained environment is really helping me prevent overcomplicating things like I usually do.

The idea is building a fruit/veg processing plant.

Try out an early build here: Froot Processor

Lost a bunch of time at the start to conflicts, but I'd hate to completely miss an LD! Too much of a streak going to break it. I have a basic skeleton of something as we approach the midpoint, so I will hopefully have something to submit again for compo.

Firt day, got a lot done, big spritesheets done, smol stuff done, bg done, so tommorow time for some extras!

with the help of youtube and after a week studying game maker, I'm creating my first game, headache but it's been amazing, I hope I can finish it at least

With the narrative of our game finalized we’re now prioritizing the design of our sprites, animations and environments!

Still no name, still WIP, just 6 hours on it, I'll continue tomorrow.

Sources codes are on https://github.com/DeveloppeurPascal/LDJAM52-Harvest if you want to see something in Pascal / Delphi from scratch.

But it's ugly, very ugly...

Good night Good code Good jam !

• ✅ procedural trees
• ✅ spawn fruits when punching
• ✅ collect fruits
• thrown them at other players or trees ⚙️
• player with most kills at the end of the round wins
• polishing (map design, juice, sounds, etc.)

With this my game's core features are more or less finished :)

Quite a bit of progress made today. Not bad for missing the first 12 hours. I MIGHT have set my reminder to Friday 13 instead of Friday 6. Ah well, seems to go alright anyway.

A first sneak peek at the project temporarily titled Plant School

Despite the kinda limited theme, we think we came up with something that makes so little sense that it's a good project for us:

Meet "Combine Carnage"

We envision a Neon space retro vibe game where you race your combine over a winding track, harvesting crops left and right. All set to a retrowave soundtrack.

So far we have a running application with a lot of assets, including some great art by @MinThaMie and music by yours truly. @Miranda made an awesome looking menu and @FrozenCow made some fancy semi-oldskool 3D magic work. As I'm writing this @FrozenCow and @MinThaMie are working on adding more gameplay and better texturing. @Miranda is taking a well deserved break by making tea for everyone :smile:

Stepping out of my comfort zone trying to do some art (besides my usual basic shapes and barebones pixel art). My respect for all the beautiful art posted here is growing by the minute while I'm realising how easy it is to sink hours into a basic sprite or animation. Going to have to cut most of my planned features, but I'm having fun and that's what counts right? :)

Anyway here's another one for club soul harvesting!

Keep up the hard work everyone :tada:

We love radish... But not when they decide to run away.

The goal will be to catch this mischievious little guy !

Yeah, things can definitely go wrong.

After the first 24 hours of LD52 have passed, here's a little reflection of it.

I was working on the idea of pulling objects out of the floor and using them as weapons, something like Super Mario Bros. 2.

And Unity was working just fine, but then, at 7 pm on the first day (the jam started at 3pm for me) the internet decided to die for a several hours. So, I was left with no docs, no help, no nothing, and I'm not a programmer, so I was basically left in the dark.

But......what I decided to do turned out way better. I started to use Gdevelop, an engine that I wanted to use for quite a bit just to see how things work. And in a couple of hours, I had it! Both the gathering of items and the attacking enemies is done!

It's definitely not much, and there's still a lot of work to do, but the main mechanic works and I'm super happy with it!

Turning HARVEST on Its Head

You need to protect your furry friends! You're all they have in this hostile world.

We All Hate Escort Quests...

... but how could you hate befriending these adorable lil guys?

A Scary Situation

Full disclosure, the game itself isn't even close to the scariest part of this process... 2 days remain to the minute as of writing this, I'm in the early stages of a cluster headache attack, I've yet to finish any of the enemy designs, and many core features are still missing!

Still, I'm a fighter and I'm confident that I can pull this together! I doubt I'll have any time for bug testing before the deadline, but I call that an occupational hazard 😅

I seriously cannot wait to have this finished and available for you lovely people to play!

With 24 hours left. Here is my current progress for the Harvest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV3C8HY-oYQ

I came up with a decent design last night for an point and click adventure game themed around harvesting that would merge in deductive elements of games like Obra Din. However looking at it all this morning I realised the scope wasn't gonna work, I'm not going full out this weekend as I've got a lot of other things to be doing as well. It would be a crunch I don't have time for.

However I don't want to break my LD streak at the moment so I decided to pivot to something simpler. I'm going to be a text adventure! I'm still working on the design of it but my code work today was getting z-machine interpreter running nicely inside Unity along with getting an inform z3 compiler (PunnyInform) working.

Pretty happy with how well it's going. I'm trying to get the game designed by end of day today so tomorrow is just pure content and puzzle implementation.

this is best grafix.

Due to "reasons" I've had less than 8 hours to spend on my game so far.. Hopefully I'll get something done tomorrow...

I make the game as usual in the old gloomy style with rain)

I wanted to do something unusual, so I decided to make a game about the harvest, where time goes back. Let's see what I get out of this.

Almost done with all the mechanics after 24 hours. Then I can finish up the art & sound. And hopefully some time left over to polish the game up a bit more.

This is a little preview of the character design we've been working so far :smile:

Her name is "Loomie" - hopefully you like her as much as we do.

Best regards @nivbeth, @fis & @fluffymadness

More GMO vegetables coming to life

@hartvichio @sprotex @osel13 @sipfindel

Well well well

What we got here: - models done - part of texture done - some sound effects done - MVP of game done

You even can play in prototype https://temporary-name-team.itch.io/ludum-dare-52

Waiting for your comments =3

See you later calculator!

So today started very slow. But I managed to get some stuff done. The theme is extremely difficult, but from what I see in the community is that there are interesting ideas that manage to slip through. With this LD Jam I wanted to push my self to the limits and try and develop a game out of my comfort zone. So I decided to develop a dungeon crawler where you need to protect a tree that if you harvest the fruit will give you power ups or health. Below is my progress for day 1.

Maybe for the first time ever, I do have the feeling that I approached this jam the right way =) Clear idea, small scope. I am really enjoying and most of the logic are completed.

I still need the "buy upgrades" screen, a few more enemies and the boss battle, then it will be done.

With one full day ahead, I am super happy!

PS: all the art was created with a mix of gimp and AI. I am very amused by what and how fast things can be achieved.

Ok we now have a tractor harvesting wheat... although admittedly the tractor is pulling a plow, and it should be a combine, but so this is a jam so inaccuracies are allowed, right? Using Godot 3.4

Theres nothing here :)

I'm going to have to go chill for a bit, eat and rest up. Feels like lots to do but I'll see what happens when the art starts coming together. The hotbar is working great, the foundation for implementing farming is ready to go. I'm going to end up with something very similar to my last entry but hopefully it's better and with more polish. This time I've been mostly focused on better quality code, organisation and trying new features which has been taking longer but I feel it will benefit me in the long run outside of this jam.

Hope everyone is making good progress on the games!

I've been having issues with the godot tilemap but I'm learning ways to do what I want. It turns out you can't find which exact tiles are overlapping an Area2D.

Right now I have nearly all of the core gameplay done. I expect I'll have it finished by the end of the day and I'll be able to spend tomorrow on presentation.

Well I finally finished some game logic! Got stuck on physics and collisions for about 2 hours which wasted so much time. But now i'm on a roll and thinks are looking up. The longest part is definitely going to be the art. For now i'm working on the actual logic and programming and using scribbles as the art, just to make sure everything works properly. Even if I finish the logic, and then rush the art, things aren't looking good for audio however. Once we get closer to finish, i'll share some more details about the actual gameplay and game idea itself! Good luck everyone :)

I really want to make it to the Compo if possible.

So we're 24 hours in (more or less). How's everyone doing?

So far, so good on my side. I feel my idea is not unique, but I wanted to have a shot at a card game. Here's a WIP screenshot. There's gonna be a lot of change with the graphics (a lot of the elements don't fit to the theme as I changed it half-way through), but the game code works, so this is good.

We came up with some great ideas last night but I decided I needed to have a moving camera so I spent a few hours last night adding that to the my engine only to realize that that totaly broke the way it handled mouse and touch inputs so instead of actually working on our game I have spent most of my time adding basic features to my engine.

Here's my work after a day as well...Take care of a plant. The tomato graphic is a free use asset...will hopefully change before finishing.

Most productive first day we've had I think! Second bug game in a row... hmm...

This time I'm out. Its been over 24h and I dont even have a prototype or an idea that I like. Hope all of you are in a better spot :D Keep it going, cant wait to play and rate some games soon :) !!

okay so new idea you are a penguin and u catch fish from water what u think

I hoped I can finish the game in one day, but I need one more day for sure. Athough, I made some decent amount of progress today.

Here's small preview!

This time i decided to exit from my comfort zone and try to make a 3D game

Started very late.. layout of level 01 farm/ garden