I was messing around with different effects for the obstacles and I stumbled across one that instantly made all the levels look cooler.
Although, effects can only go so far to hide the crudeness of my graphics. :P
I'm gonna work a little more before showing gameplay footage.
The only thing I could think about when I read the theme was "Strong and Stable", one of the mottos used by Theresa May during her stint as the British PM. So of course, my game is now going to be a boss fight against an angry, unstable, disembodied Theresa May.
I really hope somebody gets it!
I only started at 5pm today, so I'm playing catchup. I doubt I'll have time for everything I want but I can at least try!
24 hours since the game jam started!
Time to focus a bit on the gameplay!
I will stream coding "The Train Station Mage" now on https://www.twitch.tv/tobugis
It looks good so far, but there really is no game yet. We took about 6 hours and 1 discarded concept to arrive at what we went for. It's important to find a game you are confident with, but still i'll feel the loss of these hours on monday evening ;)
(we went with palette 7 from before, for now)
Day one just ended and I have most of the controls and have some 3d models made by a friend so its just implement those and make the reactor unstable
https://youtu.be/WoLyBpVDXK8
Making progress regardless, about to wrap up for the first day! 💪
Progress of our game, i fear we set our scope too high and we'll end cutting some stuff out, but at least we try :D
It just occured to me that if you make an unstable theme (buggy and crashy), you can always say it's intentional :wink:
We've done a lot of work around the game, but it's only the beginning.
Our game designer @dynames is already adding the assets made by @reant and @sirixam. We are using Construct 3 this time. Some potions coming soon to this main scene! 
(TL;DR We've couldn't participate on the jam because we were busy announcing the Steam page for our Global Game Jam project!)
*Hey everyone! 👋 *The first day of this weekend’s Ludum Dare has come to a close, and I hope you’re all having a fantastic time working on your respective projects!
The theme sounds really challenging this time around, but quickly scrolling through the feed, there seem to be some fantastic game ideas coming together! Really looking forward to seeing what some of the regular folks (ahem @coleslaughter @mateusboga @peace-of-cake-games) are working on! 👀
Unfortunately, our team isn’t participating this time around. We were really looking forward to participating, but we had to focus on a major announcement for our team and studio instead. My colleague @moski did post a few tips yesterday for newcomers though, and I definitely recommend giving them a read!
*Remember that there’s no right or wrong way to participate, and if you feel like you need to drop off due to being stuck, mental health, or personal errands, it’s fine to do so! *Whenever you’re ready, there’s always next time to pick up and try again! At the end of the day, we’re making games. If we’re not having fun while making something that’s meant to be fun, what’s the point? 🙌
While we’re not participating, I do want to take the opportunity to talk a bit about that major announcement I mentioned earlier! I feel free to use this moment you’re taking to read this post as a little break or procrastination from your work if you want. 😜
Up until now, our team at Whales And Games has mostly been around because of our work across several game jam projects. *We have participated in _8 Ludum Dare’s_ up until now, and earlier this year we also participated for the first time in _Global Game Jam_ and _GMTK Game Jam_ together. During _Global Game Jam_, feeling some hangover from not being able to travel during the pandemic, we created an exploration-trading game called *Townseek, where you travel a map discovering landmarks and trading with towns.
After the game jam was done, we started working on a post-jam version of the game, and were expecting a mostly quiet release to follow as is common with most our jam entries. The reception blew our expectations, and Townseek became our third most played game in the time-frame of a month! We received many comments with praise for the game, suggestions for more features and towns and even got featured on itch!
This week, we released The Star-Seeker Update as the final update to the jam version of the game. *Today, we’ve announced that we’re working on a full-release version of the game for _Steam_ and beyond! *It marks a huge step and a new voyage for our studio and team! While we were working on a bigger project with Bunny Splash Casino (and continue to do so on the background), following on Townseek and doing a full release just made the most sense to us. It allows us to get more familiar with the Steam release workflow, better setup at marketing, and other important things on the grand-scheme of setting up a studio!
If you have the time, we definitely would appreciate it our Steam page a look! If you like what you see, we’d even appreciate a wishlist (and a retweet too)! 🐳
While not every game jam needs to be a full-release or needs to have a life cycle after you’re done with the jam, if you do happen to come across a project with good reception and that you enjoy working on, it might be interesting to keep working on it! And if it doesn’t work out, it simply wasn’t meant to be.* I personally like to believe that there’s no such thing as lost life opportunities. Even if you miss an opportunity now, another one will show up later! *Indie development tends to be so demanding and crunch-based at times, that it’s good to remember to stay positive every now and then!
While we had to sacrifice joining in this time to focus on making the Steam announcement across our social media,* we’re definitely going to be around _Ludum Dare 50_! That’s a promise! We would want to lose on such a milestone edition for sure! 🙌*
For those of you who are participating this weekend, I wish you the best of luck, work and fun! *I’ll be on the lookout for your games! *Cheers! 🐳
I crated them. :smiley:
I do a lot of web development as a part of my job, and I'm used to using various bundlers and preprocessors to slurp up my code (e.g. webpack, rollup, esbuild, typescript, babel, etc). However, one of the cool things about LittleJS is its sort of refusal to need any of that stuff, instead just relying on traditional script imports.
What that means is that, in tandem with Github Pages, whenever I push an update to my GH repo, it's near instantly up on my website: https://y2bd.me/ld49js/ !!. Now that's continuous deployment!!!
Oh no! How will they ever enter?
Here's how our game is looking so far:
The basic concept is ribbiting along nicely.
Get ready to build some unfrogetable skyscrapers to make your clients jump leaps of happiness 🐸
After one day of work, the working station is getting more and more stuffed with alchemy supplies!
Our programmer spent literally all of Day 1 trying to get a functional collision system for a platformer. Finally got it to the point where floors work properly, but walls and ceilings still bug out hard. However, when you can't reach your goal, just move the goalposts! We're now making a runner game, as removing ceilings and making walls fatal will allow us to continue with what we have. Maybe a little bummed that we won't have the puzzle platformer we were excited for at the start, but the new concept is getting us fired up, and I won't have to remake sprites for a new game style! Plus, the music that our composer worked on will fit thist style of game even better than what we were going for before.
2 more days until jam ends, and things are looking good. I'll keep you posted!
Day one starts... we brainstorm and have ideas. Then suddenly, BAM ... Rather than LibGDX/Artemis, let's try making something in Unity instead. Not only that, but let's make it 3D instead of 2D. How exciting!
Being the graphics person on our team, I do have some 3D experience in the sense of level design: Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Natural Selection 2. But modeling, not quite. So rather than another jam filled with pixelart, I installed the latest version of Blender and found what appeared to be a much-used tutorial series on YouTube by Blender Guru. Time to make a donut.
I followed the tutorial until it had covered texturing/materials and figured that was the point where I should get started on something to put in our project. @daanvanyperen had been figuring out how to operate Unity in the meantime, successfully inserting my sprinkled donut into the level area and doing all sorts of nifty things with particle sprites to boot. @astronautmikedexter managed to accept our general aimlessness and started various musical theme ideas in spite of it all.
I remembered fellow Ludum Dare veteran @imphenzia has a YouTube series where he very quickly created low-poly models, and so I spent a little while studying his workflow. Then I got started on our horse.
There are some issues applying the UV mapped texture, but it's sufficiently recognizable as a horse... though it's kind of a generic horse. No real design decisions made there. Ah well, you have to start somewhere. We'll fix that tomorrow.
All in all, this Ludum Dare is the most experimental in a while for us. I already learned more today than I usually do throughout the entire jam, so in that sense we're very successful. Let's see what tomorrow brings.
