Also don't forget to pay Slim Reaper https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/slim-reaper

Hi everyone, we’re Cosmic Adventure Squad and we’ve been doing game jams for over 10 years! You may have seen or played some of our previous games such as Deepest Sword and Game Name. We’ve been asked by a few people to share some of our processes and thoughts for how we made It Was All For The Tuna, our LD52 entry.

It Was All For The Tuna is a chill fishing game where you play as Toro the cat and you’re tasked with catching Tuna to feed the citizens of NekoTuna.

Play the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/it-was-all-for-the-tuna

This is part 2 of a 3 part post-mortem taking a look at how we approached developing the game. In this part I’ll be talking about the art and modeling. Thank you for reading, please leave a comment if you found this informative or helpful!

You can find part 1 here!

Art

I have to admit I was one of the people who disliked the theme going in; I wasn’t excited about making a bunch of vegetables and dirt! Fortunately we brainstormed several interesting ideas such as a castle defender where you harvested skeletons from enemy knights, an AI that harvested user data by solving captchas, and finally a game about harvesting fish. We unanimously agreed on the fishing game, primarily because it reminded us of a manga one-shot called “It Was All For The Tuna” (where we also got the name idea from)!

I started with a quick, 10-second sketch to ensure the team is on the same page with the same general vision. The final game ended up looking not too far off from the sketch, including the cat in the boat, fish silhouettes, and minimap/radar!

Next I made a moodboard to help inform and inspire the final look of the game. We took some lighting and shading inspiration from A Short Hike for the relaxing first half of the game, while the environment would gradually become more dark and moody as the environmental damage started building up.

As part of my continued research, I decided to dive a bit into different tuna species, their conservation statuses, and their general usage as a food source. I initially wanted an encyclopedia of your caught fish to show some facts about each type of tuna. For example, The Southern Bluefin Tuna, which can grow up to 8 ft long and weigh up to 570 lbs, is on the brink of extinction due to overfishing for sushi and sashimi. Many other species of tuna are fished in unsustainable methods and can go extinct if we don’t change our eating habits. Very difficult to hear for a sushi connoisseur :slight_frown:.

Now onto the game screens! I painted a quick idea for the start screen first to start getting into the mindset and color schemes for the two game sections.

My typical next step is to draw up a concept image that represents the main gameplay to help influence the music. However, I couldn’t quite grasp the feel I wanted so we swapped up our usual steps – this time Tenki created a quick music sketch first which then inspired this image and set the tone for the gameplay. This image ended up being used as the cover image on both the Itch and LDjam pages!

Day 2, Saturday, began with me needing a refresher on what all was needed in terms of art, so I made a quick storyboard showing what some of the major mechanics could be: a radar, boat and rod upgrades, NPCs, multiple towns, tuna stats, gradual pollution, and a dark, depressing ending. Now I could list out all assets, their priorities, and get to work.

At the beginning I was debating between making 2D or 3D art for this game, on the one hand, I was quicker with 2D, but on the other hand I wanted to practice some 3D. After some discussion with Strega we felt that 3D would allow for more experimentation with shaders and terrain generation. So I gave myself simple tasks for Saturday to just model a tuna, a boat, and the cat – as I hadn’t used Maya since LD47. I quickly painted some top, side, and front views to load into Maya as image planes for reference, and started modeling.

My first model is the tuna. I underestimated just how long it takes to model organic shapes from scratch, and struggled to remember all of the tools and techniques. I was able to skip the UV unwrapping and texture painting steps by utilizing vertex face colors and assigning materials per face. It also achieved the poster-like style I imagined in my sketches.

Animation however, was a whole different beast. I remembered how to make a basic skeleton and skin, but thought I’d be clever and use a fun sine deformer to get this smooth fish wiggle. Unfortunately, Unity doesn’t support deformers! So I spent hours looking for a solution (probably could have just hand-animated it in the same amount of time) and found a workaround posted on the Polycount Forums which involved applying the deformer onto rivets placed on a thin rectangle above the fish and using constraints to have them correspond to certain joints on the fish… And it worked. Now I have an animated tuna!

Next is the cat, Toro. I absolutely loved modeling and animating them, and I made sure to keep the geometry simple this time. And no fancy deformers for the animation either.

And lastly, the boat. With each successive model I spent less and less time modeling. These models were going to be fairly small on the screen and there were other art tasks that needed to be done. I exported all three as FBXs and checked them into the Unity project for Strega to hook up.

Yeah, just these three models for day 2. I started the third day, Sunday, scrambling to get variations on tuna as well as all the upgrade levels for the boat modeled.

For the various tuna, I originally planned to keep the tuna species accurate to reality and include some flavor text about each one’s conservation status, but that was out of scope, so instead I had three real species (blackfin, yellowfin, and bluefin) and a few fictional ones (peep the Cosmo and Wanda reference heh).

There was also a brief point where we thought, “what if you can purchase growth hormones for the tuna, which causes them to gradually evolve more and more grotesque” and here was the sketch that came out of that idea. That would have changed the mood completely!

So back to the model, I simply swapped out one of the materials assigned to the fins/stripe to create each of the species, and had them gradually increase in size for the rarer species. Done!

For the boat upgrades, I went a different route. The models, inspired by fishing vessels such as dinghies, catamarans, and trawlers, would all share a similar shape and add on additional basic geometry: center units, smokestacks, and life rings. Overall no more than a couple hours for these.

It was down to the last 24 hours and there was still so much art to do! I did some lazy kitbashing to slap together towns and their upgrades. Each of the 4 town levels were built with these 7 pieces, which themselves were mostly basic primitives and some extrusions. I really wanted them to feel like a gradual evolution from a small rural Japanese village to an industrial complex, showing technological advancement from the tuna trade. There were going to be some particle effects to show smoke coming from the smokestacks and pollution flowing from the pipes into the ocean, but we ended up cutting this part of the story due to time.

Fortunately the UI needs were fairly minimal this time. I made a simple scroll texture for text boxes and buttons, a tuna cutlet in both 2D and 3D to indicate your tuna currency, an NPC for tutorial dialog, and found a fun font called “Cutesy” by Arty Crumbs.

Now that most of the core art assets were done, I wanted to tweak Strega’s water and ripple shaders to meet the color scheme and mood I set in the beginning. Strega had also set up a terrain shader with one or two test islands, but I was tasked with creating the whole game world itself. I did find this neat online map generator to give some inspiration for edge shapes and island distribution. I then filled in terrain coloration for sand, grass, mountains (with simple repeating textures on each) and some smaller islands here and there to break up any monotony. While doing this I placed clusters of tuna around the map in a natural distribution based on proximity to the starting island; 100 blackfin tuna near the start, 60 greenfin a little outside of that, 40 pinkfin, 25 yellowfin, 10 bluefin, and finally 5 elusive godfin in the farthest reaches of the map. I worked on this well through Sunday night, only resting for a couple hours in the AM.

I didn’t end up getting much sleep Sunday night, as I wanted to have all of the terrain and fish distribution throughout the world ready before Strega woke up. On Monday in the wee hours before submission, there was some art downtime so I put together a little map with some town names generated by ChatGPT. This map isn’t in the game, but I felt it added to the lore!

Last but not least, in an effort to at least have some of the original message of ecological collapse due to tuna depletion, I painted a sad end screen to really bring it home-- well you're going to have to play it to see!

~ Ouroborose

Hello everyone,

We're planning to turn our game Doki Doki Ninjin into a :star: full game :star:. So we decided to make a demo / postjam version of our work.

You can play our updated version here :rabbit2: https://wobblyhorse.itch.io/doki-doki-ninjin-game

You can find the jam version here :carrot: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/doki-doki-ninjin

Hope you enjoy the video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FnIABnTfng&lc=UgwZbTNXVplZuX1vTud4AaABAg

Today is my birthday ! For this special day - maybe you could try out our game Crap Circlz. That would a perfect present for today !

PLAY CRAP CIRCLZ HERE

Thank you to everyone who has played The Dealer so far!

It's been so fantastic to read all the comments and reviews, it's always a pleasure. I'm behind on playing games as I ended up in hospital for the early part of the reviews (falling off a mountain bike does that) so seeing positive comments definitely lifted spirits. This was definitely a project where I pushed myself to do something a bit different, and whilst some elements lack some polish, I'm really proud of what I put together. Had some time and some requests for a Windows version as well as HTML, so it has now been put together and is live! No changes outside of simply adding an author on the title.

Check out The Dealer if you're interested in resource management, and questionable ethical decisions!

Thank you for those who answered the controller poll.

Hi all. I didn't stream last week as I usually do because of AGDQ, so I'm making up for it now! Drop by and I'll play and rate your game!

https://twitch.tv/nardandas20

https://youtu.be/3G7u51XxaT0 Wanted to share a time-lapse of the work done on Deep Harvest VII during the jam weekend! While this does not include a lot of the hard work done by the others on the team who did writing and audio work, I hope it will be an enjoyable little watch nonetheless. We had a great time with our first Ludum Dare and are having a fantastic time playing everyone's games!

Final Harvest

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

With a very special thanks to @macaroni-dev, we finally figured out how to package and release our game, on Windows and on Linux.

You can play Where's My Chicken Man here!

This was my second compo entry in a row recently, and my eighth participation in Ludum Dare so far. Most of my old submissions were way back when it was the old website, and I wasn't able to participate in LD again for about five years because they always conflicted with finals. For Ludum Dare 51 I used Pico 8 for the first time and had so much fun with it I decided to use it again this time.

Aiming for Simplicity

I was really set on making a simple game this time, to try and cram in as much polish as I could. I thought of lots of ideas based on the final round of themes and came up with lots of ideas that I still want to implement. Harvest was the tough one though, and I wasn't able to think of a good idea until after it was announced.

The concept was to plant crystals and have the choice to either harvest them or break them, scattering fragments nearby that grow. On paper I wasn't sure it would be fun, but it seemed unique and interesting enough that I went with it.

Unlike past Ludum Dares, this time I wrote out exactly what I wanted the game to be before starting. This definitely helped with feature creep and while there were still things I didn't have time for, I was able to implement the majority of what I had designed.

Gameplay Programming

Things went much faster than last time because I was able to start with a decent amount of utility functions I've built up over time and from the last Ludum Dare. By the end of the first day I already had the planting and growing working.

I knew I basically needed to have the game done by the second day, and save last minute polish for the third day. After adding the different crystal colors the MVP was basically complete and I went on to add player animations, sounds, UI, and overall game feel additions and ended up with a pretty solid gameplay loop.

What went good

• The mechanic turned out to be fun and more strategic than I thought it would be

• I'm happy with how polished the core gameplay feels

• I was able to do much better on the art this time by locking in my palette at the beginning

What went bad

• My title screen art was so rushed and I think it just looks really bad.

• I ran out of time to add any kind of juice to the game start sequence and results screen

Conclusion

Overall I think this Ludum Dare went better than last time. I'm getting the hang of working with Pico 8 quickly and my goal is to keep using it for jams to build up a good toolbox of utility functions and get faster at making polished games.

If you want to try out the final result, you can play it Here

PLAY PSEUDO-HARVEST HERE

As a poor farmer in A TOTALISM COUNTRY

Here is a TOUGH PROBLEM

On the left, it is your ACTUAL harvest.

On the right, it is your production quota scheduled by National Agricultural Production Department, it's your MISSION.

To survive, what you have to do is to fake it up! deceive the eyes of The Big Brother!

PLAY PSEUDO-HARVEST ! Bring us a bump harvest!

Hey awesome people 👋

So my game, Lullaby Farms is all about playing music on your keyboard. It grew organically a turned out to be a kids game, so if you're looking for something simple and child friendly, I would love it if you gave my game a go :)

Be sure to look at the key map on the game description page!

Please and thank you to anyone willing to give it a little feedback

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

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

I spent half an hour on a short 5 minuet live action intro and it ended up being the best part of my game :D

Throughout the Jam I worked on quite a few different mechanics before I settled on this Ammo combination thing which was cool but I think I was getting diminishing returns. The intro works so well cause it flavors the rest of the game which I wouldn't have time to flesh out otherwise. The level design is pretty bad so you don't get a good experience after 30 seconds of gameplay. When LD53 comes around I think I will stick to a few goals:

• After the first day, the gameplay concept doesn't change(unless it REALLY needs to)
• If it's going to have levels I need the level design tooling done by the end of day two or there is only going to be one level
• I want to avoid combat games(unless its funny)
• Before the jam starts I want to do a Mini jam either by myself or with a team. I spent the first four hours getting re-acquainted with godot after taking a long break.

Last Jam I felt an existential dread for failing to capture the heights of our imagined vision, this year I felt at peace when it was over. I have a good feeling about the next Jam. I want to do something musical or 3d but... I will see where I am when we get there.

Hi everyone!

So I've been spending the last week continuing to work on my wave-based first person horde shooter called Stalk, and its been really fun working on it! I'm happy to announce that I am almost done with it, there are only a few things I need to sort out (playtesting, polishing, level rearrangement stuff, and one more system to add) but i'm almost done. I'm in the home stretch, and the game looks absolutely fantastic! It's honestly incredible what UE5 is capable of, even when I'm just using a mixamo character and quixel assets. I'm currently trying to fix a nasty UI bug, but I can't wait to show you guys more!

we uploaded the game to Newgrounds so more people can enjoy it!

Come and tell us how the game turned out: Play Hermesh!

As usual, we know many people prefer web builds when trying out jam entries in Ludum Dare! Since we develop our games in Unreal Engine - we can't easily publish web builds - so here's a narrated Let's Play that should help people get an idea of how our game plays.

In a nutshell, it has an orbital building system like Frostpunk, with some Dorfromantic feels, some strategic resource management, and a hint of Match-3!

https://youtu.be/hEIoLHRa6jk

Did one of these last week so I'll do another one.

Post your games below and I'll play and rate them when Im able to. (If I somehow missed your game from last week post it below)

My entry: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/crowings-do

Hey all! We made...

"Harvest season is contest season here on Furious Farm!
Get your ass in the combine and let's see some mayhem!"

Play it here and please give us some feedback! We've already started working on a premium version of this game so all feedback is welcome!

The game was made for the jam category with Pentadrangle doing the soundtrack, Benjamin doing the title screen and sound effects, and myself doing the design, code, and graphics! We're also the team behind PUNKCAKE Délicieux, we release a new game every month, I guess you could say gamejams are more of a lifestyle to us! :smile:

We hope you have a fun time on Furious Farm! Have a lovely day! :sparkling_heart: