It was a lot of fun to develop NINE LIVES - Harvesting of souls, especially since one team member had hardly any experience with game development and we also encountered some technical problems.

Furthermore we had to use a lot of tools we had little or no experience with. :cat:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/nine-lives-harvesting-of-souls

Overview

This is a quick postmortem about our game called Rollin’.

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

Rollin’ is a fun arcade game made in the spirit of Katamari Damacy and other old-school platformers.

You play as a cute hedgehog who carries food on its spines:

You can upgrade your hedgehog to become a harvest-machine:

Below is the story of how we came up with this idea.

Theme

We've just learned that the theme for Ludum Dare 52 is going to be Harvest and started brainstorming.

Initially we had an idea of a game where you would control an agricultural combine, but we decided that it would be too obvious. Besides we couldn't come up with any unique mechanics or anything to make it stand out.

We also had an idea about a game where you harvest organs from people. This idea had a lot of black humor about it. The invented setting seemed pretty fun to us, but again, we didn't have any idea about how to make a unique gameplay in time for the jam. A random game from Google on this topic

This just wasn't it.

A game about a hedgehog!

Finally we came up with the idea of a hedgehog named Hogsworth who could roll around like in Katamari Damacy and collect food in the forest. (User @budaniel came up with the name Hogsworth, which we thank him for!). Katamari Damacy

Initially we planned the setting to be a gloomy autumn forest.

Hogsworth was supposed to have children who needed to be fed. And you could choose what to do at the end of the day – give the food to your children or upgrade yourself for the next day.

We also planned to place a grave of your hedgehog-mother somewhere in forest, who didn’t live to see the last winter.

Overall: melancholic music, vibes of This War of Mine and Papers, Please. This War of Mine

The first problem

As it usually happens, our plans turned out to be far more ambitious than our abilities were.

We didn't have a 3D-artist, and we didn't find a suitable autumn forest asset on the Internet. We only found a summer variant.

We decided to repaint the textures in yellow-orange color and correct some models, but then remembered that we still didn't have a 3D-artist.

A 3D model of Hogsworth was eventually made by our programmer. And so he became our 3D-artist.

Well-fed hoglets or upgrading

The choice of either feeding your children or upgrading yourself had to be removed.

We realized that we wouldn't have time to program and implement the logic for this choice, wouldn't be able to properly show the consequences of the player's actions. And properly is our only way of doing things.

As a result, the “existential crisis” from the choice of upgrading yourself or being a good parent was cut out.

Hedgehog’s dead mother

The model for mother-hedgehog stayed in the game until the very last second.

But then we realized that her presence at the level caused a bug with triggers for the character. There was no time to fix this so we decided to take her out (of the game).

And so the last thing that was making our game gloomy disappeared from it... Hogsworth's honest reaction

So when you're rollin’ around in our seemingly tranquil forest always remember that the cute Hogsworth the hedgehog carries a huge baggage with him.

And that baggage is not food…

I might have missed an update, but is there any way yet to change your username? I'm stuck with something I made almost 8 years ago in high school and would love to change it if possible. If not, I guess at least it's not the worst I could have :sweat_smile:

Please, share your games and I'll play and rate them.

So this game jam i got beat down by WebGL. :cry: We submitted our game on time with a macOS version that had been working during development so in the last hour of the jam we built WebGL because usually if standalone works its works in WebGL. This was our biggest mistake. Unfortunately we had converted alot of our common code to use async/await in Unity and guess what - that doesn't work in WebGL. :face_palm: So on Friday after work I set out on the task of "unconverting" the code to just coroutines so the build would work.

So I'm writing this today to let everyone one - it finally loads in WebGL! :tada:

So please come play "Root Guardian" - A 3D Dungeon Crawler where you harvest the plants to craft better equipment and upgrades. Thank you!

https://redowlgames.itch.io/ld-52

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/an-apple-a-day

I am not comfortable with modelling organic shapes much, so when I needed fluffy trees for this project in such a limited time I fretted. But knowing max, I played around with modifiers and found a very easy way to achieve the result I wanted. There are lost of ways to achieve one result in modelling but this felt very fast and easy to me.

I just wanted to share the process. :sweat_smile: In very brief, it is a process of adding and re-adding retopology and openSubdiv modifiers one after the other.

In details:

• Started with primitive sphere shapes.
• Joined them using pro-boolean under compound objects tab in modifiers; which resulted in terrible topology.
• Now, that is the part where I discovered how to model these trees using retopology modifier.
• Adding retopology modifier cleaned up the topology but also increased the polygon count.
• To decrease the polygon count, I added a second retopology layer using either the QuadriFlow or InstantMesh option with a lower polygon count.
• This created low poly version but unfortunately with quite sharp edges. To smooth it out, I added the OpenSubdiv modifier.
• To decrease the polygon count further, once again I repeated the retopology process using the reForm option.
• Voila! There we have the fluffy trees.

Patch 1.0.3 for Seven Favors has been released, with a couple fixes and tweaks regarding the ending cutscene and exit portal.

We also reached 60 votes (almost) not too long ago! Thank you all for playing and enjoying our game, it really means a lot :)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/seven-favors

A few things I've noticed this jam that has frustrated me (and likely made me go rate someone else)

1. Don't compress with a tool that isn't built into operating systems (7zip, winrar, etc). EVERY operating system can decompress .zip files by default, use that instead
2. Make a web build! The amount of Unity/Godot games I see that don't make a web build is sad. Those engines make it incredibly easy to do so (and you'll get way more people playing/rating by doing so)
3. If your game does need to be downloaded, take care to clean up your project so the compressed build isn't half a gigabyte. Also consider posting a video/screenshots for those who aren't able to download

Looking forward to playing some more games! If you are in need of ratings leave a comment and I can try and get to yours :smile:

Well, let me introduce you to our take on the ~~reaper~~ harvest theme :)

If you feel like a cute hack and slay game with 10 waves and an upgrade shop with silly items, we'd love for you to check out our entry!

We have an alpha version, untouched since January 1st 9 p.m. for a fair rating, but would appreciate it very much if you'd also wanna give the Postjam version a try, where we continue to add bugfixes, balancing, tweaks and features 🤗

Will play and rate in return of course <3 (working through my play&rate backlog right now ;D)

Play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/dead-end-job

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/earthworm-bob

Final Harvest

The world ended years ago.. A winter storm is coming quickly, find all the food you can before it hits.

There is a post-jam version now! With 10 new plant types :smile: Activate “Post-Jam mode” in main menu by pressing P

(Remember, do not rate this version. Only rate the jam version)

========

Full changelog:

• Post-Jam toggle added (do not rate post-jam version). In post jam mode, the following changes:
  • Post-Jam tag in highscorelist for everyone who achieved a highscore in post-jam version
  • Starting plants are a little younger (not as big)
  • Bug fixed where player could walk away with a piece outside of the inventory
  • Better controls, WSDA is used now, so players don’t have to move their hand away from the mouse
  • 10 new plants! You can unlock them one by one by scoring at least 100 points at once. plant the newly given seed to find out what plant you got.
  • Issue where magenta pixels are seen around plants: fixed

In regular Hivesters gameplay you control up to a couple hundred hungry insects.

However, we made this system to support as many units as possible. We ended up not knowing exactly how performant it is, so we went back and checked.

Turns out, it holds its own pretty well.

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

Is anyone else having severe regret about stuff they didn't get a chance to implement during the jam?

I keep coming up with new things I wish I'd implemented, like UI tweaks, new levels, new mechanics, and ideas for the soundtrack.

Oh well... that'll teach me to prioritise better during the jam next time around!!

Anyway. Screenshot tax, here is a screenshot from my game, please give it a play if you want something that's easy and calming as a weekend break!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/shape-orchard

Take care of a talking tomato for 30 days...or let him die I guess. Are you really that horrible of a person?

EVERY CHOICE MATTERS - 3 DIFFERENT ENDINGS

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/$319413

Today I'd like to share about the (not) engine I used.

Despite its retro aspect, I coded all my game with pure C# using the Monogame framework.

This is not made with any engine or a virtual console. (the pixel aspect is a design choice, and I used a virtual console to create the gfx and export as PNG)

I like pure programming, and state of the art game frameworks with just a gameloop, some API to draw textures and get inputs from the player.

I invite you to test, use and support Monogame (https://www.monogame.net/) which is an amazing game framework, cross platform (I'm currently working on a Nintendo Switch project) and providing high performances!

I'm stuck with 27 votes for my game. And I got amazing feedback!

So please consider to play, explode chickens and vote: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/the-gluten-farm

Hey there! So, we have BEEn off for a few days and now we're back! Here's some facts about bees:

1. Did you know that bees not talking? They're dancing to connect with other bees.
2. Bees can fly up to 12 mph.
3. Bees are known to raid other hives and steal honey!

And now here's some facts about our bees:

1. The boss have a megaphone.
2. One of the bees is terrifying smoker.
3. New tie = promotion!

Check out our BEEautiful game and make sure that you saw the credits! We were working on this game just like bees, hard and persistently!

enjoy classic rts features and gamejam bugs in my freshly released Strategy Game (LudumDare Extra), and write about your experiences in the comment section of the submission page.

Have Fun :dvd: :dvd: :dvd: :dvd: :dvd:

Thank you so much!!

For your support, your kind comments and feedback! It is really warming to know that you've had fun playing it!

So… What is Buzzy Business?

In Buzzy Business, you are a mosquito whose goal is to harvest a certain amount of blood by biting people.

Easy? Not so much as you will have to dodge annoyed hands trying to smack you and hungry frogs.

Will you opt for a strategic approach or be a reckless mosquito?

And if you liked playing the game, you can check the post-jam version i've made a few days ago HERE!

It features new enemies, a difficulty system, some stats as well as some improvements here and there, and i'd love to hear your feedback about this version, but please make sure that you've played and rated the original game first!

Thank you for reading this, i'll stay quiet for now and play/rate some more games!