Play in Browser and Rate!

Try to stabilize Nuclear Reactor and survive untill 8:00PM!

First, I want to thank everyone who played our game and left us some feedback! You guys are awesome :heart:

We had a lot of nice comments about the art, so I want to hightlight some of @Tayteus' creations :pencil2:

It was a challenge for him to deliver pixel art over the week-end, as he's more used to producing Bandes Dessinées (also known as comics in English speaking countries :wink: )

He's an example of his usual style:

(stolen from his instagram account)

In UNSUSTAINABLE: a god job, he drew every piece of art by hand using a Cintiq pen display, over a canvas of 288 x 162 pixels :sparkles:

Here's the sprite of the cat we included in the background of the game:

Yes, that is the raw sprite!

Here's a larger rendering of the drawing, so you can look at it in details, and the 8 animated frames:

Finally, here's the in-game rendering, thanks to the wonderful Unity pipeline:

Once again, thanks to everyone who already gave us a review! For everyone else, you can find the game right here.

See you soon!

I'm running a few days late here, but Ludum Dare 49 has ended with just shy of 3000 games submitted!

Congratulations everyone that took part! :smile::thumbsup:

For roughly the next 2 weeks, we'd like to encourage you to play, rate, and give feedback on games submitted by your peers. The ratings and feedback you give is how we determine the results, so please, make your voice heard! Visit the homepage or the games page to get start.

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

Tip: Leave and Like (:heart:) good feedback

In Ludum Dare, we have a system prioritizes your games if you participate in the play, rate, and feedback process. Currently the system is heavily weighted towards feedback, so make sure you're leaving feedback!

Also, keep an eye out for good feedback left by others, and give it a like (:heart:). That's how we know someone is doing good job with feedback.

Did you not finish? Were you unable to make time for LD49? Stay tuned!

Times have changed. For some it has become harder and harder to make time to do Ludum Dare. From family, work, and school obligations, to our schedule just not working for you.

We've heard you loud and clear, and we think we have a solution. :smile:

We'll be making the announcement next year, ahead of Ludum Dare 50, of our new flexible event: Ludum Dare Encore.

Sign up for our email newsletter to stay informed, or join the discussion on Twitter at #LudumDareEncore.

Results Awards Show? Sort of! Do you want to make one?

A lot of people assume an event as prestigious as ours has an award show at end. If you've taken part in Ludum Dare, unfortunately you know that we don't do that. Results day can be somewhat anticlimactic: Play and Rate closes, and a few hours later results go live.

We can do better, but today I'm short on the manpower necessary to organize and pull something extravagant together.

I had an idea though.

For Ludum Dare 49, we're going to try this: Instead of "flipping the switch" when we're ready, we're going to live-tweet a countdown of the Top 10 games from the event (Jam and Compo). The winners will be spaced out several minutes apart to give everyone time to download and play them. I'm still working on the specifics, but expect this to take place over a 2-3 hour period, giving each game (or pair of games) 10-15 minutes in the spotlight.

Why?

Well this way anyone can play along, but my hope is we get some talented streamers and YouTubers covering the results, which means more of your games get time in the spotlight (not just the winner).

Reaction streams and videos are popular, but I don't think anything exactly like this has been done before. I'm extremely curious to see how this goes.

All results will then become public shortly after we finish live-tweeting.

GameMaker Community Showcase Competition

Our sponsor GameMaker asked us to let you know about their latest contest.

Opera and Game Maker are hosting a competition with a $45,000 USD prize pool to celebrate all the wonderful games made with GameMaker Studio 2. The Community Showcase Competition is aimed at creators of existing and free games made with GameMaker.

Whether you made your game for Ludum Dare or not, you're eligible to enter.

Opera and GameMaker recently launched GXC, a brand new online portal for games created in GameMaker. You can use free version of GameMaker Studio 2 to export games to GXC, and share them with your friends.

Here's how to submit.

Core games need your help!

We're thrilled to see that at least 9 of you decided to give Core a try this past Ludum Dare. I think it's a really fascinating tool, and encourage more developers to check it out.

Anyway, the downside of making a game in Core (or Roblox) is that you need Core installed to actually play the games. Core is currently available as a free download on the Epic Game Store (Windows only).

https://www.coregames.com/download

Manticore Games really helped us out by sponsoring the event, and I would really appreciate it if you could help us out by installing Core and checking out the games built with it. Sponsorships go a long way towards helping us improve the event, and I really want them to have a positive experience working with us.

You can find a list of all Core games submitted here:

https://ldjam.com/tags/platform/core

Thank you!

Ludum Dare 50: LD's 20th anniversary, coming April 1st-4th, 2022

Wow, 20 years! Did you know we're older than Twitter? Older than YouTube? Older than Facebook?

Yup! We started this crazy thing back in April of 2002.

Be sure you come back April 1st-4th weekend, no joke, that's when we're holding Ludum Dare 50.

Sign up for our email newsletter and we'll remind you.

Wrap-up

That's it for now. Go play and rate games! :smile::thumbsup:

Come and submit yours!

We just update our new version of our game! hope you guys will enjoy it! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/$263129

Fellowship Manager 1021 is a game where you manage a fellowship - keeping them alive out of combat and choosing strategies for their simulated battles! The game is a management sim that pays tribute to Football Manager, a game about looking at the stats, micro managing, and watching the results in a simulation with text commentary detailing the action.

The end result ended up being a bit overwhelming - with no tutorial, a lack of user-friendly tools on the UI, and features that were rushed to get in on time.

However, in this 20 minute play-through, we hope you'll get better idea of how to play and understand more of the mechanics we implemented. Thanks for watching!

https://youtu.be/MrjQuZ9B2WU

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/project-s-l-i-m-e

We've been playing and rating other games but we have 1/3 ratio on received/rated and it feels sad.

Anyone want to burn some sick trees ?

Thanks to everyone who played our game! Do not hesitate to test it and send us your games! :D

We had a lot of fun doing this jam, we hope you'll like it aswell !

Drunk Fist is inspired by the retro first person era where you'll have to fight an army of cockroaches in a mall ! Use your fists and drink some beer to open the exit !

link : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/drunk-fist

Enjoy and have a nice day ! :)

Here is a new version of Danub: Potion Packer, fixing some nasty bugs and undesired behaviour of the game!

Thank you all for playing the game and giving us your feedback. And if you haven't tried it yet, why not give it a try now?

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/danub-potion-packer

Play Perilous Potions on HTML5 and PC!

Part 1 - Art Design

Part 2 time!

Prepping the art assets

So we left off on Friday night where I finished the bulk of the art assets. Now we gotta animate some stuff to make the art not feel so static.

I took the art assets of my witch character and broke her down into pieces to prep for animation. So her head, neck, shoulders, arms, etc, all had to be broken up into individual assets.

I also created multiple heads with different faces I can swap between

Character Animation

There's lots of ways to animate a character, but I opted to rig the character as a puppet and use tweening for the effect I wanted. If you don't know what tweening is, it's essentially telling your computer that an image will be at multiple keyframes at specific times, and the computer fills in the gaps to move the image from one place to another in that time. This is an alternative to traditional frame-by-frame, where every frame is a hand drawn image.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqsdbOptKKk I found this video that shows the visual differences between the two

There's pro's and cons to this approach. The big con being that it can just look ugly and robotic to use tweening without some extra care. But this is a game jam and time is ticking, so it's fine.

So we open up After Effects (Which btw, I got a free trial to do this jam cause I usually get these apps for free at work. Goddamn are these apps expensive, it's disgusting)

But we need something to actually rig this character, which After Effects doesn't really have natively. So we need a plugin like Duik Bassel 2. This is an app that will let you rig humanoid and animal characters so you can easily animate them.

Dem Bones

Now she's all rigged up and ready to animate. I made multiple versions of a lot of these animations for different emotional states. These emotional states are meant to help indicate how well/poorly the player is doing while playing. This was easy enough as the heads are identical, so all I needed to do was swap out the heads for each render.

Wiggle, wiggle

I also turned the framerate waaaay down. Only 8 frames per second. This was for a couple reasons: 1. Smaller file size, faster performance 2. Looks more "anime". Anime is often animated on "twos", meaning they only show one drawing every 2 frames. It's cheaper to produce and, at this point, is iconic.

Effects Animation

Let's skip ahead to effects animations, which was MUCH simpler.

My effects animations are all around the cauldron, and at least one fills up the entire screen, so I decided to make my composition the size of the game window.

Then, I took some simple shapes that represented the different potion types I wanted players to create. I used basic tweening to scale the size, opacity, and positions of these shapes at different times in the timeline.

I laid this animation over a screenshot of the game so I could see how they would look and check the positioning. So far, so good!

I made all of my assets for effects animations white or shades of gray. This is because I planned on drawing these sprites in-engine with colors overlayed - so starting with white means my colors and values will look exactly as I expect them to.

What I would do different

A big issue I ran into was the scale of my animations. I had my images scaled to (what I thought) was way too large and was causing me performance issues. By this point I was adding my sprites in-engine and noticed issues. I ended up re-rendering my animations over and over, scaling down, scaling down again, scaling up one again. It ate up a lot of my time.

Turned out the performance issues I was having was due to a memory leak from bad code. Whoops. Spent all that time trying to fix a problem that didn't exist. Oh well.

Thanks for reading! Let me know if these dev-logs are helpful at all. If you want to see me actually do some animating, I recorded myself on stream doing the bulk of it!.

Thanks for reading!

Deprecat

Thanks to everyone who's played and rated my game so far - only need a couple more ratings to get into scoring territory!

Please play and enjoy :D https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/crate-tris

Hello everyone! I will start streaming LD games in the next 15 minutes or so, anyone live on my stream can request to have their game played!

https://www.twitch.tv/ladymistleaf

play now! https://michaell308.itch.io/deathrail

Main appeal is a fun gameplay loop and nice music. (and cute girl of course)

play now! https://michaell308.itch.io/deathrail

(some dev notes) I can't think of a longer post to make, so I'll just give some quickfire facts. The scarf took way too much development time. It might have been hubris or determination, but damn, too much time got spent on that cool looking scarf. Board is only 3d because we wanted the tilting to be readable by just looking at the player and doing that with frames, seems a bit ambitious and not the better option. I wanted to do more lore for it to give the world a more solid sense of thought being put into it, but ultimately the lack of development time let that get pushed aside. I also am interested in releasing a short free full version of deathrail just so it can be a complete package, but that's uncertain at this time.

Anyway, thanks for playing our game, it does mean a lot to us.

Will you beat this 8-level platformer thriller? Or will you give up? Probably the latter.

This game is a rage game inspired by the likes of Cat Mario that will surely make you punch your monitor if you play too much.

The main concept of this game is that any progress you make is unstable. Every time you fail a level you go back to the previous ones, which means a particularly unlucky string of mistakes or a momentary lack of focus could send you all the way back to Level 1. Be careful!

Here's the link if you enjoy torturing yourself. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/unstable-ground-2

Here is the 2D shooter / platformer game we made for this Ludum Dare :)

Play here ! (HTML5)

It includes a comic story, chihuahuas and demons ! Try it out and let us know what you think !

Cheers and congrats everyone !

Uranium-236

Keep on shoving those neutrons to the Uranium-235 core and see what happens!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/uranium-236

Hi, it's ARDSKAPE with a hinge on mosquitos.

And we actually learned something from our previous LD.

We were rookies back then. I mean, we're not experienced in working with the engines. But the writing, the art, the music, aye, we are the 'rescue rangers' in that stuff.

Anyway, this time we came prepared, meaning – experienced. Studied, day-jobbed in gamedev, polished skills, worked on our projects (7DEEPS is making progress, yay!). Still two 'lames' of a coders... yet we tried to storm some audio-bouncing coding in our game! Well, even using Wwise was a long shot, so it was up to us: either deal with the deadline, or buzz (unFstabley).

The thing is, if we're in, we're in. Even if the world is bonkers, the project must be released on the deadline. Thanks to the experience with crunches in the ad buzziness (not a misspell).

To manage our time and do better, in this JAM we cut most of the ideas and features, aiming to make work at least just one action, followed by the power of our narrative, art and audio skills. A hypercasual visual novel, bitey put, we led to the release.

The essential part in working with the theme was – in our case – to get rid of obvious ideas, like: piles, potions, minds, mechanisms, shapes, horses, tables. We had quite a pool, but eventually the story led us to some period in Balkans, where I was working on VR game (very muddy)...

Then one actual Mosquito got my Brain!

Have a bite of our game!

...more bitey to be...

I know the game is hard, but can you beat it nevertheless? Give it a try, or more :smiley:

Drive as fast as you can to your Safe House and avoid the abysses. On your way, collect as many golden coins to spend on later, after the earth quake.

This game is made with the Godot Engine, i am happy to play other Godot titles, just leave me a comment :smile:

Play here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/the-escape