Ludum Dare 54 September 29–October 2, 2023

Return to the survival horror of the 90s - terrible controls and all!

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If you're a fan of classic Resident Evil games or looking to torture yourself, you might enjoy this small taste of panic and frustration! While you scavenge rooms for keys and weaponry, a demon lord works behind the scenes to destroy rooms and leave you stranded with no escape from this nightmare.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/ld-54

In the meantime, we're playing your games - did anyone else make a survival horror-esque game?

[Ludum Dare 54] Hidden gems by Anton Potapov

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Amid the avalanche of submissions, a collection of exceptional games remained undiscovered by many. In this post, I'll be sharing my personal selection of hidden gems - games that, in my eyes, dazzle with unique ideas, polished experience or creative brilliance. Join me as I celebrate these unsung heroes, offering a spotlight to the creative innovations that make Ludum Dare a remarkable showcase of indie game development. And the best part? The voting for these games is still ongoing, giving you the chance to play and support your own favorites, which might be entirely different from my own.


Puzzles

Mini Mason is an elegant little game about completing matching patterns with a randomly generated queue of elements. What sets it apart is its remarkable level of polish and addictive gameplay, all the more impressive considering it's the creation of a sole developer and runs on Pico-8.

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Stingy Seating immerses you in the role of a European school bus driver, guiding a large and cumbersome vehicle through narrow, winding streets. Despite occasional clunky controls, this game boasts enough content to provide you with an hour or two of engaging gameplay.

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Hexle would work best for the fans of Sudoku-like games. It looks and feels remarkably polished with its minimalistic graphics style. It's hard to believe this is another submission made by a single developer. I think the learning curve could be slightly smoother. It would be noticeable for the players that are far from bit math. On the other hand, this game could be a fantastic opportunity to broaden your knowledge in that area!

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Compress(space) has the potential to be a new Portal. The main idea is quite simple: reach the flag. But just like Baba Is You, this game adds an impressive complexity to this. It makes you think out of the box and use a single mechanic to avoid various obstacles and dangers. I hope the author will continue to support it and add more levels to play because now it ends too soon.

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Simulators

A Parking Story is a game about parking. That is an understandably widespread setting this year because squeezing a car into a tiny space is an everyday challenge for many people around the globe. I love how minimalistic yet polished this game is. A vehicle feels heavy and stiff, nicely imitating a real one, and a variety of levels can keep you entertained for a while.

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Packing and Unpacking deepens the player into a short but cozy story-driven adventure. With some added complexity, this game can be a fantastic puzzle, but now it feels more like a charming dive into a person's life journey.

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Ventory's Inn offers you the opportunity to step into the shoes of an innkeeper, catering to the specific demands of your customers. Your task involves attentively perusing their requests and ensuring you provide everything they require for their impending adventure. I strongly believe that by introducing additional item variations and potentially integrating a language model to generate diverse yet accurate item descriptions, this game has the potential to shine as a prime example of seamlessly blending modern technology with traditional gaming mechanics.

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Management and tactics

Diminutive Dungeon is a compact yet expertly crafted roguelite dungeon crawler. With its intriguing resemblance to Lost Vikings, you control two characters, each with a distinct skillset, as you venture deeper into the mysterious darkness. I believe that adding couch cooperative gameplay and expanding the content could greatly enhance this game's excellence.

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Greasy Justice is a very complex game to be made in two days by a single engineer. It took me some time to understand the mechanics and fully appreciate the idea that lies behind it. Comments give the impression that I haven't been the only one having problems understanding it. It's a nicelooking, polished, and fun game with a steep learning curve, making it slightly less accessible than it can be.

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A Little Bag Story is a simple but adorable game about fighting various monsters. It has the ambition to be another Backpack hero, making inventory management the essense of the game. But for now, it lacks the variety of effects different items have. I still enjoyed it mainly because of its memorable art style and warm humor.

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Finale

I've also participated in Ludum Dare this year. More to say, this is my first game jam ever! Toys Wars is a game I made with the help of two other creators. You lead your toy army to victory in this exploding mixture of turn-based combat and battle royal. It only features a couch coop mode, so grab someone to test it with you or play against the most powerful enemy - yourself.

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Thanks everyone for your support! Each of you makes this event so special and welcoming for everyone. :slight_smile:

We made a drawing game

Play Commission Hell! (It's multiplayer too, all the drawings you see are made by other people!) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/commission-hell

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Help support my game!

Hey there! My game needs a few more ratings to be qualified...consider checking it out! It was a game I made for my first game jam. Here's where you can play it! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/red-zone

Bug Fixed!

Please visit our game's recent version: https://applenorshypnos.itch.io/magic-trials

Bug fixed: Items will not be in a weird position while being hold.

Trailer Release!!!

Just released the trailer for our game!

↓↓↓↓↓↓↓Click on the video here!↓↓↓↓↓↓↓

https://youtu.be/1g2i_pui53w

↓↓↓↓↓↓↓Here is our game↓↓↓↓↓↓↓

https://applenorshypnos.itch.io/magic-trials

Magic Manual

↓↓↓↓Game Here↓↓↓↓ https://applenorshypnos.itch.io/magic-trials

Read our magic manual before you go: Descriptionem-/em02em-/em1.png Descriptionem-/em2.png Descriptionem-/em3.png Descriptionem-/em4.png Descriptionem-/em5.png Descriptionem-/em6.png Descriptionem-/em7.png Descriptionem-/em8.png

Get your payment!

Welcome to Generic Postal Service!

Your job is to fill the trucks with boxes in time without damaging them too much, so do your job well or you will face the consequences of your actions... But don't worry I am sure you will do just fine! ...probably.

So get to work right now!!

try the game here

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Try to keep your sheep alive in Skyway 2 Heaven!

My team of university students made a silly 3D sheep herding game in Godot 4! It was most of the team members' first time using Godot, and I'm super proud of what we managed in 72 hours! I hope you embrace the chaos and have a good laugh playing.

Play here: https://raddishradish.itch.io/skyway-2-heaven

(I think I've gotten through the main snags people ran into trying to play the game at all, though it still has its bugs and performance issues.)

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If you want some action try Hardcore Overload ! We'd love to get your feedback

Try it by clicking here : Hardcore Overload

Feel free to test our game and send us feedback, try to reach 1000 points and send us your score in comments !

Also a big Thanks to all the participants for their exceptional games, there are really lots of excellent games to try out !!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa6hATjpWAY&ab_channel=AdrianPokojny

Play Burned Out, Shut In

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This is my first solo game where I learned how to code a little bit in Godot. It's small but I am very proud of it!

Click here to play: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/burned-out-shut-in

https://youtu.be/ty4m0wZhy5E?si=7wWVbDG9C77FOM7o

Playing your games on stream

Yooooo LD stream time!

Come join in, and if you've got a game, toss the link in chat and I'll heckin play it! https://www.twitch.tv/justcamh

Stream finished, thanks for chillin! :v:

You are our motivation!

Almost 60 Ratings for our Last God's Bidding and loads of awesome feedback. Big thanks! :star:

Your feedback is our fuel for continuing game development. We're fully committed to implementing the tips you've given and improving the gameplay, cause our aim is to transform this into a complete PC game! :desktop: :video_game:

As a little bonus, check out this timelapse of how our planet has been designed! 😁 planet.gif

Please rate my computer game!

I seemingly can't get 20 ratings on it despite rating other games even tough this is how its supposed to work???

ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/hardcore-packing-simulator

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Looking for two more ratings! Grab a friend!

As a two player game I appreciate anyone who is able to be able to try the game with a second person. I am so close to my goal of 30 reviews here only need a couple more. So if you have a friend and a couple of controllers, challenge them to a duel and appreciate any feedback!

Play Pixel Wielders! Here

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Back to the 80s with -Lockdown 1986-

Hey there :sparkles:

Remember the lockdown? What would you do if the lockdown would have taken place in 1986? :smiley_cat:

We hope you enjoy our Point&Click adventure! Click here for the game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/lockdown-1984

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We already received some really cool feedback for our game Lockdown: 1986 - Thank u!

Only 4 days left until final result - good luck everyone!

Black Hole Shader Tutorial

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*Smooth youtube edutainment narrator voice*

Quite a few people have asked us "How did you do the black hole effect in Godot?". Well, here it is.

The black hole shader is actually quite simple at its very core, but there are a lot of details to pay attention to. We'll cover some of the things we did for our game.

To make ours, we followed this tutorial for Unity. Here's the link if you want to read through it.

Basically, the shader only does the following: - Take the camera view from behind the the mesh and flip it upside down. - Draw a black hole in the middle.

That's it.

So lets get started.

Setting up the Environment

Start with an empty scene and add a world environment. Without this, you won't be able to see the distortion. 2.png We'll just load ours. 3.png Once you're done with that, throw a sphere in the middle. This will be our black hole. 4.png For this tutorial, we'll make a visual shader, but you should be able to easily replicate this in code. Visual shaders are just a bit more accessible to everyone. So create a new shader material, create a visual shader for it, and set it to VisualShader. 5.png Once that's all done, set shader flag Unshaded to true 8.png We'll now proceed in the visual editor.

Flip Effect

Let's do the flip effect. Hooking these two nodes together will make the sphere invisible by redrawing what's behind it on top of it. 9.png This sequence of nodes will apply the flip with heavy distortion along the edges. 10.png We now need to smooth out the edges to make it less jarring.

Godot now has a Fresnel node, which makes this extremely easy compared to previous versions.

These nodes essentially shade the edges of our sphere. 11.png You can see this by hooking it straight to the albedo output. 12.png Changing the power values in the fresnel and the floatop will change the look of the fade, experiment later to see what works best for you. For our game, we hooked the fresnel output to a shader parameter. 13.png Adding a multiply before adding to the screen UV lets us gently ease into the flipped look.

And with that, the flip effect is done. 14.png

The Black Hole

The black hole is incredibly simple. All we want to do is to black out the middle of the sphere. And for that, we already have a fresnel effect. 15.png if we multiply the fresnel, we can adjust the size of the black hole. and by rounding, we'll send it to either 0 or 1. Again, we can preview by hooking it up to the albedo. Increasing the multiplication factor (which we've hooked up to a FloatParameter) will decrease the proportional size of the black hole. 16.png Finally, if we multiply the end results of our two branches together, we'll have a black hole! 17.png

Caveats

Once that's all done, you can throw on an accretion disk mesh and you have a cool looking black hole! 18.png But watch out! Due to how the shader works, there are some limitations.

Do not enter the black hole

Entering the black hole will make everything disappear. 19.png For our game, we added a script which would detect if the camera was inside the black hole or not, and swap out the shaders. (Due to how Godot works, it will recompile the shaders on run time, you'll notice the first time you get close to the black hole in our game, it will lag briefly)

Transparency

Due to how transparent objects are shaded (after everything else), the distortion effect will not render them. 20.png The solution is to change the draw order of things to have the black hole last, but the fastest way we found was just to apply alpha scissor to our transparent objects and deal with the sad looking edges. 21.png

Things in front of the black hole

Things in front of the black hole also render funny, since it just does a screen space warp. 22.png It's possible to fix this by being clever with the draw order, but in our game, we just made sure the camera was never in an angle that would let you see any of these glitches.

Summary

There are many ways that you could customise the behaviour of this shader, many of which we would've loved to have put into our game, but alas, we ran out of time.

So, happy programming, it would be nice to see this out in the wild, perhaps in future game jams? :smiley:

We hope this was useful, and sorry for taking up so much space with this looooong blog post.

Play "Out of Spacetime" in Browser on itch.io!

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