🎄 🎄 Merry Christmas everyone! 🎄 🎄

Image from Semiautomatic — a short story based on Star Crossed, our entry for LD47.

Hello everyone! Just wanted to let you know that my latest Ludum Dare Post Mortem will premiere today in ~hours on YouTube, so if you happen to see this, please drop by and enjoy the show! 😊

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7E9xi64NJI

And here's the poster

Hi guys. I've made a simple game during LD40 and I loved the result. It is a game about refugees inspired by true stories, including my grandfather's.

So, I've decided to turn the LD40 prototype into a full published game on Steam. I'm feeling very happy now and I think that will honor their memories and their struggle.

Take a time to view the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi9YmXuKMBM

I used to use this https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/dungeon-buddies/check-out-your-old-ludum-dare-entries

but looks like it doesn't work anymore. Does anyone know if it's possible to retrieve my old games? Teenage-croze wasn't very smart about keeping projects in one place.

Hello everyone.

When we made our game for LD49 we received a good amount of interesting feedback. We saw players being stressed out by it but also having a lot of fun. Some were swearing during the peak moments of the playthrough and some were sweating after completing it. We saw wild mixture of emotions from those who played so we decided to keep making it and see what's going to come out of it.

We made a story campaign with 10 levels, tripled the amount of interactable panels, added a bunch of gameplay mechanics, like panel being set on fire or colleagues that distract you from your work. Spiced it up with funny and over-the-top dialogue and characters. Right now we are working on hidden secrets that you can discover while playing by interacting with a room.

In a nutshell, we want to combine fun, stress and satisfaction from overcoming stress.

Recently we made our Steam page and plan to release in March.

Here's our trailer and thank you for reading.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o10IxYS_7oE

Those of you who played the smash hit Star Crossed (1,548th overall) during LD47 may remember the short story introducing the game. That story recently inspired another project, a picture book titled "Edge Detection." See it here:

-----------> Edge Detection <-----------

I just want you to meet the new additions to Clay Boy

Twitter

My LD48 game, the Reverse of the Summit, has now been uploaded to itch.io with new features! The Reverse of the Summit is an twitchy endless runner game about skiing down a cave. Now featuring a shop to buy custom skins, and an online leaderboard! Download for Windows here!

Hello again everyone! We're still working on our Ludum Dare 48 entry. We're hoping to launch it this year and we're super excited about. This is our second commercial game which means we've learned a lot and are excited to use that knowledge for a more successful launch. If you're interested you can check it out here : https://store.steampowered.com/app/1626280/Explory_Story/

I am proud to announce that my Ludum Dare 48 game Duggy will come to switch very soon.

It is now on pre-sale here: US : https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/duggy-switch/

EU : https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Duggy-2166152.html

After the Ludum Dare and after many monthes i decided to improve the gameplay and make a fully arcade game with more levels and increase the difficult.

Also you can collect lives when you reach specific amount of score.

To be honest: this might not be my greatest game but what was important ist to put the name from my son (who had this idea for this game) in the titel screen (which is btw. important for every developer to put).

Hope you have fun playing it.

Skew Pong's Jam Version

During the last Ludum Dare (49, theme : Unstable), I've made Skew Pong, adding instability to the classic Pong gameplay through a 3d game area that would be unstable and turn around on 2 different axis depending of the player's actions as well as the ball's movement. The game was playable either in local multiplayer (gamepads or same keyboard) or solo against AI.

The game was well received and my best result in a LD so far (139th Overall in Jam). With its well-defined small scope, it was also a perfect game to go with for a first try at a commercial release over the course of a few months. So, I decided to continue it after the LD results were out, and started working up towards a release.

The path towards release

I spent 3 months and a half, since late October until now, working on the game on my free time though I couldn't dedicate as much time as I'd have liked to it at some points (uni, exams, part-time job, moving out, organizing global game jam, etc... had quite a lot of stuff happening in my personal life those last few months). I also had to learn and deal with administrative stuff as a commercial release means you need to do the legal stuff like registering a business and all.

One of the first things I did was to rewrite some parts of the game, as code made in jams is often not very clean and not exactly made with upgradability or maintainability in mind due to the time constraints, as well as bugs being quite frequent in jam games. One of those parts I spent the most work on was my Menu&Buttons system to make it modulable & easily extendable (and it got extended quite a lot afterwards to answer the UI needs). I also worked on some new systems for stuff like Settings or Localization, which aren't things you focus on doing properly during a jam but are really important for a full release.

Next was improving the gameplay, adding in more content and improving replayability. I didn't want to touch too much at the base concept nor derive from it, and so chose the path of adding different game modes that would play with different parameters with a lot more fine-tuning than the jam version. The jam version only had a simple Instability setting (ranging from none to extreme) which would allow the board to move more or less. Instead, I separated it in multiple parts, so each axis' instability could be toyed with independently, as well as making more things modifiable like gravity, the camera's perspective (can be 3d or '2d') as well as more classic stuff like paddles' size or ball's speed. This, allows to explore the different possibilities that can be done with the base mechanics and propose different game modes to the player ranging from classic pong to an extreme mode (+ players can also access the parameters and toy with them to play custom modes).

Another important part was improving the game feel, which would go through balancing the game and polishing the game, adding in more juice. Balance is kind of an hard issue, especially when you've got rather unique mechanics to deal with. Fine-tuning the default 'Skew' mode was quite hard, and it took a lot of iterations, ending up with a balance very different from the jam's one (more dynamic/fast-paced, while trying to keep it beginner-friendly). Another side to balance was AI. The jam's AI was simply too good as with Pong being a rather simple game, making an unbeatable AI is very easy (just calculate where the ball will go, go there and done) while doing an AI that feels human and makes errors takes a lot of work. So, I iterated quite a lot on making the AI less reactive/more prone to errors and implemented different AI difficulties.
As for adding more juice to the game, it went through adding more feedback like coloring parts of the wall when a player is pushing the arena around, improving the core gameplay loop and doing a lot of work on the UI & Menus, etc...

After the release / What now ?

First, I'm planning to continue working a bit on Skew Pong in the coming weeks, as there's still a few things I think could be improved and that I want to add. There also might be some issues/bug encountered by the players that I'll have to fix.

After that, I don't know what I'll be working on next yet. I'm planning to take part in LD50 in April of course, and who knows, maybe it will give birth to my 2nd commercial game.

You can check out Skew Pong on Steam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPdqruL4oyg

Hey everyone,

My name is Harry White, and I'm the founder of Geta Games Team (https://getagamesteam.itch.io/), who, in particular, created this game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1144850/MANIC/

I'm planning on doing a game jam every weekend, and for each one I'm going to work with a different artist.

All of the games will 2D, and either made in "GameMaker: Studio 2" or with the "MonoGame / XNA Framework"

If you're interested in working with me, just let me know in the comments!! :)

Anyone aware of a relatively recent list of official scrabble words in text/csv/json format? Having trouble finding something that looks credible. Doesn't have to be scrabble related, just a list of most English words.

Those of you who played the smash hit Star Crossed (1,548th overall) during Ludum Dare 47 may remember the short story introducing the game. An image from that story (copied below) inspired another project, a picture book titled “Sorrow, Hope, Hunger.” In addition to Star Crossed it’s based on an old Russian folk tale about a princess and her wicked stepmother. Read it here:

🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷

                                                                               Sorrow, Hope, Hunger                                                                                

🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷

The first two stories inspired by Star Crossed were Semiautomatic and Edge Detection. “Sorrow, Hope, Hunger” is also the title of an unrelated game made for practice for LD48.

Hello fellow jammers! We put an early Demo of Dome Romantik on Steam, based on our Ludum Dare 48 entry. It's much expanded and polished from the jam version :)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Romantik/

If you had fun with the original jam game or missed it completely, check it out :)

Edit: We are no longer looking for music, 3D or sound artists.

Our team is looking for experienced 2D artists for the upcoming Ludum Dare jam to make concept art and, if possible, textures. Currently, our roster consists of 3-5 Unity developers with varied levels of experience, 1 experienced 3D artist, a beginner-intermediate 3D artist, and a musician.

Some of us are fairly versatile and can help with different aspects of the game, but we would love to have more focused talent in these areas so we can create something really awesome.

Please check out my page to see our previous entries.

If you have questions or if you are interested in joining, please post where we can find your work and how you can be contacted on Discord.

Thank you!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLpyiJQB7bo

In april 2020, I completed my LDJam 45 entry "The Totally Convenient Feeding Machine".

The comments and feedback received here gave me the strength to take some time to expand the concept into a full game. Today, I'm releasing it on Steam!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-98CpRQIk-w

I wanted to thank the awesome Ludum Dare community for their support, honest feedbacks and kind words. I also wanted to say to inexperienced game devs that it is possible and that you can do it too!

Please, give the demo a try and drop the game a wishlist :) Totally Convenient On Steam

See you in April! Jonathan Lorenz