You've got a game that needs some votes and feedback? Leave the link to your game down in the comments and i'll play it

Before the jam: 1 hour after start: 2 hours after start: After finishing the jame:

https://www.twitch.tv/pomothedog

For some reason this LD I'm getting notifications for every game I commented on. It means almost every time I enter the websites there are >10 notifications but almost all of them are just comments added to random games (that do not tag me). Anyone her seeing this? Is there a way to make it stop?

At this diner, we only serve up the freshest ingredients - grown and harvested right here in the kitchen! If you want this job, we hope you’re ready to pick, smash, torch, and freeze up tons of fruit in the pursuit of culinary greatness. And I haven’t even mentioned our alien customerbase... They can be a bit, er, odd with their tastes. Are you up to the task?!

You're hired: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/macrogreens

Will rate and comment.

With WEBGL version 👍

PLAY HERE

Q. Why do the bales look like primitives?

A. I could ask the same about you.

My main responsibility was coding, but you all know how there jams go. I'll talk about some of the hurdles and challenges we faced during these 3 days.

The Start

I knew nailing the player controls and feel was essential. So we spent a bit more time on adding walking animations along with sway and bobble. https://youtu.be/nqmT_lSBAgc

Later on, when implementing the shooting AI, I added a bunch of juice like a camera shake and particles.

https://youtu.be/SvnAmwoWUx4

Architecture

We had planned at first to have a lot of enemies and bullets on screen, but I knew going with something like ECS won't be feasible in 3 days. So I just decided to use some of its strengths and utilize unity's way of doing thing as much as possible. So we went with a very atomic and modular components. Each having as little responsibility as possible. Here is the enemy prefab for example:

With this architecture we could quickly add almost anything we thought of, for example, plants that spawn minions that search for enemies, that was easy to do, just slap most of the components that enemies have, and change their target mask to enemies.

Performance

I suspected some of the biggest performance hogs to be the target searching, as I wanted it to be constantly updating so that enemies can find better targets not just stick to one. One quick hack I picked up for getting some free performance, was to add a random delay between each update, to stagger them since not all enemies would, for example, have the same delay and wouldn't all update at the same time causing lag spikes.

Design Troubles

Me and Nani (design) had a disagreement on what the best approach to the gameplay loop is, he was adamant about going for plants hurting the player and them doing all the work, you don't even need to shoot. I was more into shooters and tower defense, so I put my foot down on shooting. We did go with plants hurting you in the end though and he did prove me wrong, the whole plants hurting you turned out fun, once he balanced it properly. But I still wanted some more relaxed gameplay and given the modularity of the architecture we went with, including using Unity's prefab variants I added a quick mode where plants don't attack along with a new plant inspired by plants vs zombies that straight-up aims and shoots enemies and called it zen mode. (It is now the primary mode of the game, as jam players don't tend to stick too much with hard games).

The Sharp Shooter Plant I had to draw using Gimp and a mouse :neutralface:

Last-Minute Additions

With all the commotion and juggling multiple features we kind of forgot about the pause menu. The guys were like "Don't worry, players can just press Alt+F4 to quit", and I was like, "screw that, I'm adding one". During the last 3 hours, I rushed to make it and just copied the main menu and quickly cobbled together one at the last minute. After all, it does help with polish and avoid making people frustrated when they can't change their volume mid-game or exit :neutral_face:

Play Our Game

Play our game on itch in your browser: https://ernani.itch.io/infernalgarden

With 30+ ratings on day one this is the fastest any of my LD games have ever surpassed the 20 ratings mark. Of course @Rincs streaming all day helped, but I like to think that this is one of the best entries I have ever worked on. And it looks so good!

(There may also be a hint in this picture)

Play as Harvester Stalone in his new gory yet wholesome story, were he tries to bring himself out of poverty, going from carrot harvester to bounty harvester, in order to provide for his familly :cowboy:

Play it there: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/far-vvest

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

So I decided to code in some saving features to our game this jam... I initially used it to save data between scene trasnitions, but with several more lines of code, I made it so the player can return to their game instance if they want to come back later! (I used unity's built in PlayerPrefs functions to accomplish this).

Check out the game (Play in your browser)!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/astral-aberration

Control multiple drones to harvest minds from the Martian colony. Be careful though, if the colonists see you, they will raise their alert level. When their alert level reaches certain thresholds they add more defenses that make your job harder. Fret not, if you harvest enough minds you get cool new physic abilities. Can you harvest enough minds before the colonists find you and kill you?

Play Here

Martian Mind Hunter

Thank you all guys for supporting us and for your reviews, we've given a lot of hours and effort to our project and we appreciate, that almost all people liked our game and we appreciate those people, who wrote us some critical reviews! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/farm-on-wheels Here are our stats for now:

It is my first LD submission and I passed 20 ratings for achieving a score! I'm really excited about it. Thanks to everyone who are so kind to try and rate my game! To those who wants to try it and give feedback: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/shred-a-bunch

test

I passed 20 votes thanks to you all :)

A game about a fisher robot that have to harvest fish in a online lake.

Play to Hooked

Time to harvest wheat, but in space!

Check it out here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/space-harvester-1

Just wanted to share some progress gifs from our demake of classic Tony Hawk games. I think it's cool to compare where we got to how it started!

First experiments with 3Cs - making a third person camera and the controller was the scariest thing, so it was the focus for the majority of the first night, while the rest of the team was asleep after brainstorming.

Early attempts at making grinding work. I've gained massive respect for THPS devs doing this. Very tricky to get right, and even then there seems to be an unending supply of edge cases. The final version still has at least a couple of known bugs we couldn't fix in time...

Getting a non-placeholder model usually means it's time to play around with anims. I tend to do several passes throughout the jam, but it's good to establish the general feel of all actions and timings.

Pictured: kill animation was made to be played immediately after any collision with an NPC. From experiments it was clear it'll have to be fast and good for frequent resets - something I kept in mind when animating the final clip later. Both placeholder and the final version start part-way through the swing for that reason!

The coolest moment for the jam is when several big parts come together. We're a little bit past half-time here, and several core elements are in place: the 3Cs, level blockout and the combo system. Getting to a point where a minimal version of the game you wanted to make is playable always feels really good - it's proof that you were on to something with the idea!

From this point the main focus was fleshing out quality(animation, audio and FX, graphics) and fixing tons of bugs. Also spending a lot of time playing the game, which is never a waste! You get a better idea of what is truly important to do next that way.

Just one more from a little later on, because I really like how the scythe-driven blood gush VFX has turned out. If you're interested in seeing more, I recommend playing t the game. :D It should play nicely in the browser, so it's quick to check out!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/tony-crows-pro-scyther

Only one Dollar for a amazing show! Please Visit Clown's Booth. Right Here!

Only this month on Ludum Dare 52, free for all you guys.