After missing the deadline for ~~Extra~~ the Jam, I decided to instead spend some time polishing my game idea further. "Book Packer" is a working title, can anyone suggest something better? :)

Edit: Typed Extra instead of Jam lol, this will be posted to Extra :)

Gridlock: A Tiny RTS
For this Ludum Dare I decided to make a Real-Time Strategy game. While this may have been a little bit ambitious, the end result ended up being a lot of fun. If those types of games are your thing and you want to give it a try, feel free to do so! Also, do not hesitate to also share your feedback, that is most welcome!

Click here to play Gridlock

Need ratings?
Tonight I will have plenty of time to play and rate other submissions, so please place your submissions in the comments for me to play!

Hey everyone :v: I'm playing ludum dare games once again on stream. If you want your game played live join me! (I don't play horror games though, sorry).

Here: https://www.twitch.tv/yellowkamel

(our graphics guy forced me to see this and now you have to see it too)

Play discreetly in browser on itch.io!

This is basically a post compo dev update, if you don't like these, you can skip this one.

It is getting closer to how I wanted the game to look when I started it! Feedback is appreciated! Decided to learn Aseprite to draw the tiles, pretty cool tool. Even if I still have a lot to learn on pixel arting, getting happy with what I got so far, but still need to redraw the buildings, these are still placeholdy.

How it was:
How it is now:

Added graphics, particles, even smoke builds up on the foreground, made the cars transit the way I wanted (note how they can pass side by side on the street now huh huh pretty cool - I just translated the sprite to the right a little bit while keeping the center and let the rotation magic work :stuckouttonguewinkingeye:)

Big things missing: Feedbacks in general (points, deaths, etc), better menus, HUDs, and SOUND which I'm saving for last

You can play both versions here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/canals

(If you are on a Mac, the game will take ages to load, and will freeze your browser for a couple of minutes, sorry about that, this is a Browser + Engine interaction issue I could not fix)

Like to present to you the result of 3 days of work with the team at this game jam, thank you very much to everyone who tried our game for comments and activity, we will keep it up, and we wish other participants of the contest success in the future

Hey everyone, thanks for all of the feedback - I'm continuing development and aim to release a full version of this small game by the end of the year.

If you haven't yet played, I'd love some more feedback regarding the puzzles, how you interpret the theme, and what elements you find the most fun!

Cheers, Arran

🎮 Play now 🎮

...unless you think competitive multithreaded assembly programming sounds like fun? (edit: AND you have an hour or two to spare...) Slight optimization "spoilers"/hints later in the GIF below.

I've spent way more time playing this particular Ludum Dare game than any of my previous entries. Can you beat my (and the other competitors) crazy optimizations in QPCA-77B?

• Fixed broken audio sliders
• Fixed saturation levels across the project. No more blinding green grass!
• Fixed fade at the end not transitioning correctly
• Final quest marker now correctly shows
• Removed the ground floor window-ledge skip
• Implemented shadows into the main shader
• Adjusted player height to be more consistent with environment props
• Added options menu ingame (accessed via Escape key) to change volume and exit game
• 15% increase to player movement speed
• Added an extra line of dialogue to help explain the bell puzzle
• WebGL is closer to completion, but still some significant bugs to iron out

Thanks to everybody who left us such detailed feedback. We've actioned everything that seemed consistent, agreeable, and not out of scope to amend on a Ludum Dare entry without significantly altering our intention.

Voting for score chasers has ended and the competitors have voted on the 7 games that will be played in the tournament! Here are the 7 games in order of when they will be played.

#1: Cyber Serpent (around 4:15pm UTC)

A score based game where you need to collect pickups from the ground while avoiding and shooting enemies. Every pickup you get increases your score multiplier and score is earned based on time survived. Both you and enemies can run into your tail as well to destroy the enemies or yourself respectively.

• By @camden-obertop, @zrandolph977, @mr-sun, and @picross

| | | | --- | --- | | | |

#2: Adelie - Someone Like You (around 4:45pm UTC)

A score based game where you need to keep baby penguins on the field while dropping seals into the water. Every seal you drop gives you a point and every baby penguin thats still alive gives you bonus time to do actions in. If theres no more baby penguins or a seal gets to your igloo you lose.

• By @meep

| | | | --- | --- | | | |

#3: Bit Golf (around 5:15pm UTC)

A game where you have to compress text as much as possible. Compressing occurs from highlighting a sequence of letters that occurs multiple times in a piece of text.

• By @badcop

| | | | --- | --- | | | |

#4: The Big Crunch (around 5:45pm UTC)

You need to complete a series of microgames that continually get faster and faster. Score is based on the amount of microgames you can complete and each microgame makes you do a different task such as landing a spaceship or dodging asteroids.

• By Team Auboreal (@ategon, @ghayoub, @vulkaara, @coeur, @nny)

| | | | --- | --- | | | |

Intermission (around 6:15pm UTC)

#5: Cosmic Cursor Capture (around 6:30pm UTC)

A score based game where you need to dodge projectiles with your cursor. Score is primarily based on time survived with you also being able to do various other things on the field to increase your score.

• By @nondev

| | | | --- | --- | | | |

#6: A Pawfect Date: Pomo's Cozy Romance (around 7:00pm UTC)

An undertale fan game where you dodge a random sequence of attacks as the timescale keeps increasing (in the endless version of the game).

• By @pomo

| | | | --- | --- | | | |

#7 Rafty Crab (around 7:30pm UTC)

A battle royale between crabs on a raft. If you die then you become a seagull and attempt to hinder the other competitors.

• By @kuviman

| | | | --- | --- | | | |

Interested?

Score chasers is a tournament where people compete to get high scores in games submitted to this Ludum Dare. This includes things such as completing a game in the lowest amount of time, getting the most score in a game, or other ways a game can be competed in. The tournament is taking place on Saturday, October 14, 2023 4:00 PM UTC at https://twitch.tv/ategondev.

Qualifications for joining is still open until 24 hours before the tournament starts. In order to qualify for the tournament you need to submit an impressive score in any game submitted to the jam. To submit you can join our discord at https://discord.gg/FhP4jaZ7KS and post a screenshot of your score in the entry submissions channel.

Hope to see you there!

Future of Blockies

We want to continue developing Blockies after all the amazing feedback we got! We would love to hear more fron you to get a better picture of what the game will need to improve upon.

We updated the game a bit more 🥳

New changes: - Online Leaderboard to upload your score to. Play the game and upload your score at the end to get a place on the board! Try to get the highest score possible! - Fixes a few minor bugs where the reset after gameover would not work properly.

Play Blockies here

JAM GAME by JuicyBrucey (@juicybrucey) , and Mr_Field (@mr-field)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/f-r-e-d

Hi all,

Was rating some games and went to check on my own only to realize that the graphics category was set to opt-out, I've reactivated it, but now my progression toward 20 ratings has dropped, so if anyone has some free time and is looking for something to rate I'd really appreciate it.

here's a link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/skyisle-td

Rolling Over It has been a success! Many of you have played it and I know that many of you have sent the game to your friends and they have also played it. What a pleasure when someone likes the little game you have developed. That's why I want to continue developing Rolling Over It and release it early next year on smartphones and Steam! I'm completely open to recommendations! Thanks to all of you!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/rolling-over-it

For those of you who haven't played it, I encourage you to give it a chance and vote it. I think the learning curve is very satisfying and that's what people like. Give it a try!

🎮 Calling All Gamers and Adventurers! 🎮

We invite you to join us in the spooky world of "Chemical Rakoon," where adventure, friendship and alchemy await! Rakoon need to save his friend from the terrible Dr Punk, a crazy scientist in his creepy laboratory. I personnaly enjoy making the designs, and work with a great team during the entire week-end of the jam. Thanks for your support and 📣 spread the word !

Have fun & enjoy !

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/chemical-rakoon

Defeat the enemies by kicking and punching them like an expert in kung fu :stuckouttongueclosedeyes:

Play it here: [https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/kung-fu-alien]

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/super-cube Now With steamer mode with own icon/logo this is an idle mode of ~10 min perfect for a random timer :v:

First of all, I'd just like to reiterate how awed I am by the amount of praise that Six Seats Left has gotten so far. It's currently my highest-rated game ever on Newgrounds, sitting at 3.94/5 (scene creators don't count). I'm truly grateful to everyone for their kind words and honest feedback. If you haven't played it yet, please do!

With that aside, it's time for my customary post-mortem, looking at what went well with the game's development, what didn't go so well, and what I can improve upon for next Ludum Dare.

What Went Well

• I've always preferred to make narrative-driven games for Ludum Dare, but my last three entries all veered away from that in favour of more arcade-style experiences with minimal plot. This time around, I was able to return to my strengths, and it's paid off, with the narrative being the most consistently-praised aspect of the game.
• In line with the more story-focused approach, I was able to incorporate cutscenes and dialogue of a greater technical complexity than anything I've done previously. Even in my thirteenth jam, I'm still learning and expanding my skillset.
• There's some minor jank here and there, but nothing that seems to have ruined the experience for anyone, and the only real glitch was one that was found and fixed during the submission hour. My track record is spotty when it comes to bug-free releases, so it's good to get another one under my belt.

What Went Badly

• Due to a combination of overscoping and ADHD-induced time-wasting, a lot of things had to be left on the cutting room floor. I wanted to include dialogue trees, letting you get to know the candidates better, and a ten-minute time limit before the asteroid struck, providing a sense of urgency and meaning you wouldn’t be able to talk to everyone in a single playthrough. Both had to be left out. I also wanted twenty candidates, which I had to cut down to fifteen. As a result...
• ...the actual gameplay is very bare-bones, which is something that a lot of people have complained about. You just walk up to people and talk to them, and there's only so much you can learn about them from those brief conversations. It needs additional depth, but there's not much room for me to add that depth because...
• ...in a sense of meta-irony, the PICO-8's own limited space has constrained the game's current and potential features. I'm already using up 72% of the cart's compressed capacity, and there's not much scope to compress it down further. As much as I want to add dialogue trees to the game, there's simply not enough room on the cart for them. If it were a TIC-80 game, then I could add them, but the reason I didn't go with TIC-80 in the first place is because I feel like the screen is too big for what the game requires. It leaves me caught in an uncomfortable middle ground: I need the screen size of the PICO-8 but the cartridge size of the TIC-80.

What Happens Next

Once the rating period is over, I'm going to try and put out a post-jam patch with a few tweaks, such as more detailed cutscenes and improved sound effects for some of the characters. There probably won't be much in the way of extra content, though, for the reasons I just outlined. I'd like to try remaking this in a less restrictive game engine, giving me scope to include things like dialogue trees, but I don't want to commit myself to it. I'd like to try and resume work on Prism Warriors instead, as it's months behind schedule.

In the meantime, good luck to everyone who entered! Don't forget to get some rating in, and I hope you all do well!

Will rate and leave a comment, drop the links here.

Why is the balance so close to zero even though we've rated almost double the amount of ratings we've got?

Compared with the games currently displayed on the front page: