Play & Rate: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/unstable-stick

I thought I would do my usual post jam breakdown for Burning Ravager my entry to LDJAM49.

Dawn of the First Day

So having not done a LDjam in over four years I told myself to take it easy and actually sleep... Did I do that? Of course I didn't. Anyway, the theme comes in and for once I didn't overly mind it, wasn't fantastic but it wasn't totally awful. Originally and for the first couple of hours I was prototyping an RPG system as I fancied doing something different, however after two hours of this I just knew I wouldn't get it completed in time so I scrapped that and went straight to something I'm familiar with. Old 8bit NES styled shooters.

For about two days this is what I was staring at.

I needed to get a basic concept down, so I decided on the same gameplay I had for my RPG, the more spells/magic you had the more unstable your character/player got and could randomly explode. I took that and made it so the more equipment you had attached to your character, the more it's "core" temperature would raise and if it's too hot it would become unstable and you'll explode eventually.

So the first day (first 18 hours) I basically did the barebones of a platformer engine, collision, enemy stuff, camera, items, weapons, menus and so forth. I decided to skip out on stuff like ladders, slopes and (reluctantly) bosses due to time. I just knew if I added those in, I would just run out of that sweet precious time. I also was toying to add controller support but sadly again, that would of took up time which I'd rather spend polishing and bug hunting. I had it in mind that the game would be about going around "worlds" and collecting the planet's gem and escaping before the planet's core becomes unstable. With the money you collected and banked, you could buy extra weapons/equipment/cooling tanks to make the later levels more easier. However in day three this "worlds" idea turned into one big planet.

But anyway that was my first day. I tucked myself into bed, went to sleep to prepare for Day 2.

Dawn of the Second Day

So the second day started at 3am at night. Sleeping is wasted time, so I got up and made the first of what was to be several coffees. In my half awake state I decided to sprite out the main character and an area so at least I wouldn't be staring at blue and yellow blocks all day.

I very quickly sprited this lil' mech in about twenty or so minutes. This is the beauty of 8bit or low-bit games, the art assets take very little time. This is the main reason I decided to go 8bit Nintendo to really ease on the work load. After this lil' mech was created I started creating all six weapons and all twelve enemies in the game. At this current time all I had was a basic block shooter and one static enemy. This took a few hours to do, actually took a lot longer than I was expecting. When I started to get bored I opened up my music software and created a track for the game. (This takes about about half an hour per track. I didn't go true NES style because Famitracker would of took far far too long, cheap 8bit synths to the rescue!)

After about what I would say another 8-12 hours I had all the enemies completed, a couple of music tracks and the tileset for the first area all completed!

Yes the boulder is actually classed as a enemy

I really wanted to do a boss and a handful more enemies but I just knew if I did that I wouldn't be able to add the polish I desire in these games. I had to just face facts and scrap it.

About now I decided to do all the menus, because usually I leave this to last and really skimp on it. I made it a mission to really polish up the menus, and with the fact you buy things from shops it was necessary to make it pretty decent. I always find this really really boring so I made sure I was armed with potcasts and coffee. Lots of coffee!

Now it was approaching the third day but did I sleep, the answer is no.

Dawn of the Final Day

It was now, where I actually designed the whole world map and all the three "areas" you see. The original plan was that there was several areas you'd warp down too, each with its own gem. However when I was designing the first "map/world" I just knew this would of taken way, way too long so I condensed it all into one big world. There was a few oversights with this, as I had designed some areas to be re-visited with an item, which now in my new concept made some areas just a pain to navigate. I didn't pick up on this until it was too late, so my apologies if some places are an pain the ass to get through.

Anyway, basically the next day (20 or so hours) I just spent making the whole area, which included three more tiles sets, bug hunting, gimmicks (lava heating up mech, rain, conveyor belts, lasers, unstable rock floors, six gems, spikey spikes,) exit portals, the lot. This was prolly the most fun I had during the jam, even if I was very tired and lagging a lot. When I started to lag too much I would, again, open up my music software and churn out the remaining tracks needed.

Hours went by and a few times I didn't think I would make the deadline but I carried on, hitting a couple of brick walls of fatigue along the way but by 8pm (UK time) I had it basically finished. All was missing was a title screen, some ending screen and general tidying up here and there. At this point I decided to take a nap but for some reason I just couldn't fall asleep, as usual.

So I just got back up, finished off a quick title screen, some really naff and cheeky credits, polished a couple of menus up (forgot to add a volume adjust, which I've now plopped in an updated version,) posted to itch.io and here.

It was done. I replied to my twitter comments and went to bed.

I've not missed the stress I put myself through but I have very much missed that moment when you looked what you've made in under 72 hours. And then the joy to play and rate other's games!

But for now it's rest time for a couple of days and then it's off to rate and play some games!

-Joel

Play/Rate Burning Ravager here on LDjam: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/unstable-wip

LINK: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/office-novice

Games can be submitted with the "!submit linktoludumdarepage" command Lets do this :smile:

https://www.twitch.tv/yellowkamel

Good day all

Congrats to everyone who took part, there looks to have been some great ideas and fun little games come out of LD49! I'll be doing my usual LD feedback stream tonight (Friday) at 18:00 BST (that's 13:00 EST).

I'll be prioritising some regular viewers/subscribers, but otherwise I'll be using the raffle bot I'd made for Elysia Griffin to choose who's game to play next.

You are able to submit your game here and you can see the submitted games here.

Tame the unstable climates of barren and inhabitable planets, then colonize them!

https://fenderbate.itch.io/solarcolonies

Hi, so I managed to make a very basic prototype during the jam. It's barely a game as there's not much to do (the gameplay was thrown together during the final 3 hours). But I think I have "something" and I want to develop the idea further. That's were all of you come in :)

I want it to be clear that I'm not fishing for ratings (I haven't yet started rating others myself)

I am just looking for some feedback and ideas that you guys might have.

The game is a kind of auto-battler where you try to keep your units alive for as long as possible.

What I'm planning on adding in the upcoming weeks is different kinds of units with their own skillsets, and maybe some enemies/threat to give the player a challenge.

You can check out the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/circle-simulator

What do you guys think? All feedback is welcome! :)

BRUTEFORCE is a terminal-based, sandbox, hacking game with an intricate story involving four suspects in a criminal case. It is up to you to find out which of the four is guilty, and to have them dealt with.

If you like detective novels/shows, or terminal-based games, you should really give our game a try!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/bruteforce

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/bruteforce

Play & Rate: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/elemental-slime

Here are a few comments I got regarding my entry :

"Wow… That was done amazingly"

"Very nice game - especially the audio."

"This is VERY cash moni"

"This game was AWESOME."

"Crazy gameplay. Short, sweet, and to the point. Pulls no punches."

"Huge bop"

"So far, my favorite in “Audio” category!"

"Incredibly well polished game, great music too!"

"Bravo. That was awesome. The synergy of all the game elements was mind blowing."

"Very polished, fun to play, and I was impressed by how it kept layering in new features"

"First time I rated 5/5 for audio."

"An awesome game in so many aspects!"

"The best LDJ49 game I played so far."

"Man, that’s a game well done! Absolutely enjoyed it!"

"So good! Such attention to detail with the soundtrack and visuals"

"came for the game play, stayed for the sound design"

"An impressive compo submission. It’s gorgeous, well balanced, and has an incredible soundtrack."

And here's the best comment ever : @yellowkamel headbopping to the rythm while playing

Get a good pair of headphones and go play TECHNUCLEAR right now !

A rather verbose postmortem of my compo game, The Unstable Zone.

I was really happy to be able to do Ludum Dare outside the house again. I tried doing game jams while isolating at home, and I just can't get into the spirit of it. A jam is a bit of an altered state, and it's hard to get into an altered state if you're sitting on a sofa at home and the dishes need doing. Without resorting to drugs, I mean.

So I did Ludum Dare at the local gamedev incubator thingy I co-founded, Swiss Game Hub. About eight people turned up at various points, working on around five games, rather fewer than before, probably in part because there was a big games event going on at the same time. (And yes, we were all verifiedly vaccinated, that's why we could do it in person again.)

I believe I voted for Unstable in the preliminary round and then against it in the final round, so I had mixed feelings. But that's how jam themes always work: the moment you find out, you are convinced it's the worst possible theme and your brain refuses to come up with any but the most obvious interpretation. In this case, stacking shapes on top of each other.

We spent a bunch of time at the hub discussing the theme, enumerating things that could be unstable (buildings, people, prices, the ground, reactors, relationships, reality...) We also chopped up the theme in a number of ways. One of us suggested "Unstab Le", a game where a guy called Le has been stabbed and you have to uh unstab him. We couldn't find a good mechanic for it, but I still love the idea.

In the end, I picked the idea of an unstable economic simulation that would spiral down into a collapse over the course of the game, as a kind of antithesis to the usual build and progress style of economics games. Here things collapse and all you can do is survive. An interesting idea that I want to revisit, but after making a few notes, I realised that it was an order of magnitude too complicated. Just making the basic economic simulation would have taken me two days, never mind any actual gameplay.

So we broke for lunch, sat outside, and talked about our progress. My fallback idea was to make a game about unstable reality, an expedition game best described as "Curious Expedition meets Annihilation". You'd crawl around a map with your expedition and weird, horrible things would happen. After lunch, my friend (and previous co-jammer) Kay came by and pushed me to actually figure out the plot of this thing. We ended up playing out maybe half of the game's plot as a pen and paper session.

Things started to come into focus. I again scoped things down to the relevant parts, getting rid of the idea of being able to move around a map, and instead going for a branching narrative game.

Having played through the first half of the plot, and mostly figured out the second half, I outlined the game by placing passage stubs in Twine. I started writing some of the interactions and thought up some stats: stress, wariness, tiredness, and knowledge.

The next day, I continued laying down the game's interactions, mostly sticking to summaries in the writing. By the early afternoon it was possible to play through the game, so I inflicted it on my partner, who was at the hub to hang out and write. Playtesting quickly resulted in adjustments in balance and details, but the overall plot was already solid.

After more writing and playtesting, I had a more or less complete game by dinnertime.

After dinner, I determined that I had enough time to make a soundtrack, so I got out GarageBand and my little MIDI keyboard, and started hitting buttons. I started out with some slow classical guitars to suit the game's setting in Argentina. Later on, the music switches to a creepy droning synth underlaid with slowed-down insect noises. The soundtrack could clearly use some more work, as the transitions and pacing aren't great, but it brings across the game's mood.

I uploaded the game with 24 minutes to go before the end of the compo. As you can tell from the above, I worked at a moderate intensity, which, well, I'm not in my 20s anymore.

(Note that it's spoilers from here on, so if you haven't, do play the game first.)

The game chronicles a dangerous expedition into the "Unstable Zone", a remote area that plays tricks on people's perceptions and memories, and is inhabited by strange insects that rapidly mimic anything they come across, including binoculars, tape recorders, and people. The player explores the zone, balancing the expedition members' levels of stress and tiredness against acquiring enough understanding of the place to know how to deal with it.

The bridge the expedition uses to enter the zone collapses or vanishes, and they are forced to take the long way back, which brings them into potential conflict with the mimic insects, who have started to emulate the shape and behaviour of previous expeditions, including a deadly curiosity and potentially violent behaviour.

The structurally clever thing I wanted to add was a flashback with decisions that would change the state of the world and the available solutions once you flashed forward again. So as your memories get more muddled by the zone, you flash back to an expedition nearly a decade earlier, where you can choose whether to leave behind useful equipment for your present self, and how you interact with the mimics, which is then reflected in their behaviour towards the expedition in the present day.

Ultimately, there are a number of ways to escape alive, and yet more for at least some of the expedition to escape. The overarching plot is fairly linear until the final decisions about how to escape, but there's a lot of different paths in practice, because your decisions affect what happens in detail, and what is possible later on. This is a technique I copied from Choice of Games, whose (much longer) narrative games avoid having early branches by having the player set up details like stats and relationships through most of the game before branching heavily towards the end of the game. This way, player choice matters, but you don't have to write a million words of branching plotlines.

As for the plot and setting, it's obviously heavily inspired by Annihilation. Another influence is the lesser-known The Sick Land. I hope I did a decent job of making it not entirely derivative. All three belong to a genre of "strange zone" literature which also includes Roadside Picnic, Alice in Wonderland, Heart of Darkness, and so on.

I tried to improve on Annihilation in having a clearer underlying relationship between the core weird stuff in the zone and the way it presents itself to the reader. One of the weaknesses of Annihilation - which I generally greatly enjoyed - is that while there's a lot of cool weird stuff happening, it doesn't really ever tie together in a satisfying way. In my game, there are two core strange things: the distorted perception of the expedition members, and the mimic insects. This isn't perfect, as I think the perfect strange zone story would have a single strange thing at the center of it, which, once revealed, perfectly explains all the many weird and terrifying things that happened. (And that isn't "aliens/a wizard did it for unknown reasons".)

Except that in the comments, The Lame Brain suggested that your party are actually mimics, but as part of being mimics you also have mimic-memories from the original party. Which I think is a great twist - and it reduces the number of weird things to just one. The discontinuities in perception are because you aren't human. You're an insect imitating human behaviour based on a jumbled set of experiences.

I might end up making a post-jam version with more content and an improved soundtrack, but for now, I'm pretty happy with it.

First thing first Thank you all for amazing feedback, your feedback was so perfect that we decided to commit to our game and make it into proper full lenght game.

We would like to kindly ask you to post any desired features in comments, in order to do not miss anything that players want. After all game is made for players and what it would be without them.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/acidium

Save the Reactor

Can you build your tower of ill-advised power generation solutions Three Miles High?

Please give it a shot, and tell us what you think!

And don't worry too much if it doesn't quite work out the first few times.

Good luck!

Please comment your game links so I can play them!

Also, remember to play our game! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/yielding-motherboards

Cheating Simulator: Unstable Relationships :broken_heart:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/cheating-simulator-unstable-relationships

Hi friends! Thank you so much for submitting your games for me to play this LudumDare, I had a lot of fun seeing all the unstable games you created 😂

Even though Im done with my LudumDare streams and will be spending the next few days making timestamps & finishing up rating, please be sure to check out these Twitch streamers who will be streaming LudumDare games between now and results day!

HonestDanGames: https://www.twitch.tv/honestdangames

MarcMagus: https://www.twitch.tv/MarcMagus

PomoTheDog: https://www.twitch.tv/PomoTheDog

Outfrost: https://www.twitch.tv/Outfrost

ColeSlawski: https://www.twitch.tv/ColeSlawski

Simpathey: https://www.twitch.tv/Simpathey

JavaSaurusStudios: https://www.twitch.tv/JavaSaurusStudios

DanaePlays: https://www.twitch.tv/DanaePlays

EsKooh: https://www.twitch.tv/EsKooh

Polyrogue: https://www.twitch.tv/Polyrogue

Juliestrator: https://www.twitch.tv/Juliestrator

Yellowkamel: https://www.twitch.tv/Yellowkamel

XekeDeath: https://www.twitch.tv/xekedeath

Potkirland: https://www.twitch.tv/potkirland

You can also check out the Ludum Dare tag on Twitch for more streamers: https://www.twitch.tv/directory/all/tags/c8d6d6ee-3b02-4ae7-81e9-4c0f434941cc

Live now, come join: https://www.twitch.tv/justcamh

Add your game to the queue: https://forms.gle/huyTguj2Z5o7oGw98

Had a great time last stream, I'm hyped to try more of your games!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/untrailed

Check it out and share your games, I want to try them!

Hey! Going to go live in around 45 minutes from now. https://www.twitch.tv/leokrechmer Suggest your game in comments! (Web builds, please!)

Yes! We have a cat!