Hey folks, have you noticed that on some games, we can see their placements in the descriptions already? Is that a bug?

We're live on my channel (https://www.twitch.tv/digitaliliad) for what is likely the FINAL day dedicated entirely to playing compo + jam games onstream, so come on by!

!join to put yourself in the queue. If I’ve already played your game this week, don’t worry, we’re accepting resubmissions

As three Brazilian data scientists and engineers, we love games. We have dreamed of making games for the longest time, and over the past several months, we have put this dream into practice by learning the tools of the trade. Ludum Dare 55 was the first time we worked towards a finished game that other people could play and give us feedback.

Play NecroBit here!

We aimed to create something manageable yet polished and fun enough for others to experience. We learned a great deal from building this game, and this post is a way to share that with the community, give back in some sense, even if it's not as useful for LD veterans alike.

What worked

• Focus on what's fun: This sounds obvious, but repeatedly asking ourselves “why would that be fun?” every time we added something to our game was paramount to achieving an engaging experience. From the get go, we believed that having a horde of summons working for a weak necromancer would be fun, and the act of summoning should be engaging. We never lost sight of those pillars, even when we changed fundamentally how the game worked on the last day. Even the bad parts of the game could be fixed if we followed that mantra more religiously.
• Fast decision making: From the moment we decided to join LD we knew that we would disagree as a team. But we feared that would slow us down, and we structured things so it didn’t. We agreed that our game was going to be 2D, we knew we would use Unity, we knew our code was going to be a disgrace. And those types of decisions made decision making faster during the jam. This “disagree and commit” mentality was followed during the entire event and really made the difference. The schedule also helped us make the best use of our time: we discussed fundamental changes in the morning, worked until the evening and then did a round of playtesting and discussed things to change in the next day.
• Limit scope with multiple shallow passes: We restrained ourselves from going too deep into any aspect of the game early on, and committed to revisit that aspect later if we deemed it important. Turns out we rarely did, choosing to focus on something else. We did that for art and animations (only one animation for each enemy at first), sound effects (there are only 4 sound effects in the game), environment tiles (again, very few tiles), and many other aspects. We didn’t have time to go back to any of those later, and that was totally fine, because there was always something else more important to do. Abandon levels, ideas, and remove everything that doesn’t contribute to the game experience. In a Jam, you don’t have time to produce a lot of content, so the core must be all that’s left. Also, some design decisions can be attractive while still easy to produce. Case in point the 1-bit art. Its low complexity allowed every team member to contribute to art while maintaining its attractiveness.
• Feel motivated along the way: We could have prototyped everything with blocks and canned assets, but having a game that felt cute at the end of the first day was motivating. It also established the mood, and we were able to make the game around that. Following our gut and fixing something that felt utterly *wrong (like making the Boss fight fun) was important to make the game feel good every time we played it. Sometimes that minimal polish is the difference between a game that is fun and one that you throw away.
• Making small in-game tutorials: Preferring not to interrupt gameplay with lengthy instructions, we found a simple solution by integrating bite-size, contextual tutorials.
• Contribute to the Jam: Engaging with the community was fun, and it also resulted in a lot of feedback to our game. It was amazing to learn from similar games and even games totally different from ours. I'd never thought about making a Sumo game!

What didn't work

• Workflow problems: We lost a lot of time because of our Unity workflow. Merging stuff and losing something was the norm. We didn't know how to solve that, and we need to improve those skills for our next Jam. (ps: HALP! Is version control just bad for gamedev? We used Plastic within Unity's UI)
• Graphic design: While the 1-bit art was very important, it resulted in visibility issues for our players. We knew we had to make something like colored outlines for projectiles and summons, but we didn't have the time for that. Also, it's surprisingly hard to use 16x16 px tiles with 1-bit. Making something coherent is very challenging, and maybe we could have used a 2-bit pallet or a bigger tile size to make that simpler.
• Vampire survivor-likes are hard: The first idea was to make one of those. This is the kind of game that is ill suited for a Jam, especially for beginners. Roguelikes (can we call VS that?) live and die by their content and by the fun of repeating runs. We don't have the time to produce a lot of content and our players don't have the time to repeat it a lot of times. Also, performance becomes a concern a lot faster.
• Combat should be rewarding: We didn't ask "why would that be fun?" when implementing enemies. They don't make satisfying sounds when they die, they don't have a cool animation and more importantly, killing them doesn't reward the player in game. At one point we had everything to fix that in place: enemies dropping things when they died, an upgrade system, a bone asset that we would use as drop. Well...maybe next time.
• Level design: I'm personally proud of my first level. I love when games foreshadow upgrades way ahead of time, making players anticipate the reward, and there's one place I did that. We also had branching paths, I love them. However, not everything works as expected: the level is too long, and deep levels make backtracking more tedious. Finally, we didn't immediately show how Devil summon was useful as soon as you got it, so you only learned that (or didn't) during the Boss fight.

We definitely have a lot to learn in the next months, as we're even considering working a little more on NecroBit to fix the stuff we're unhappy with. The community was fundamental to those learnings and we're very surprised with how cool and welcoming it is. So thank you to everyone who played our game and took the time to give us feedback.

If you haven’t played it yet, please do it here, and thank you for the feedback and support!

Check out the latest gameplay trailer for our game! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1KG6u8WH64

See if you can master the movement in Throes of the Javelin:

https://www.ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/throes-of-the-javelin

Hey everyone! We needed a few days to recover after the event, but we were really eager to show you a version of the game that had all the animations we cooked up during the jam. It's now available!

Doomsday Care is our modest jam entry made specifically for the Game Boy Advance. Yes, you read that right! But we provided a browser version based on emulation so that anyone can test it. It's like Tamagotchi with demons to summon instead of eggs to hatch.

With your feedback in mind, we've gone ahead and conjured up a more formidable necromancer—this one's a real wizard with the spells! He's perfected the art of high-speed spellcasting, ensuring those pesky rats don't just get a lift, they get a spectacular send-off. Say goodbye to slow-motion levitations and hello to instantaneous rat-splosions! Our upcoming patches will include this snappy new animation that'll have you cackling like a witch brewing a particularly mischievous potion.

Take your chance and try our concept here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/blood-rite

A huge shoutout to @badcop for this! It is a tool that lets you bundle your jam build with the current updated version of your game. I had such a bad time with simultaneously wanting to have the last update up and playable, and feeling bad for not having the actual jam build for people to rate. I had made them both downloadable, but it is a pain to spin up a host to play a downloaded web build. So if anyone is suffering from the same problem, go and check it out! this is the original post where I found it. this is the tool itself.

And this is what it looks like when you click to run the game, and you can pick which version to load!

Thank you so much for making this available!

We finally made it to 20 ratings last night!

Do you see it? Its our brand new pizzeria! Come inside! To get inside just go trough my profile right to the Game part and then see our Ludum 55 jam entry!

Hi! This is a list of games the fulfill at least one of these requirements: - Can be or must be played on hardware other than a basic computer e.g. PlayDate games, VR games - Require unusual setup like setting up a virtual machine or emulator - Are played best IRL, e.g. paper and pencil, physical games - Are multiplayer

These games are often harder to get people to play than most LD games, and it's hard to find them when you are looking for them. If you have the required hardware, or have the time and energy to do the setup, or have friends available for multiplayer games, here is a list where you can find them all in one place.

If you know of more games that fit the bill, let me know in a comment and I will add it.

Deprecating this copy so I don't have to maintain multiple copies. Master list available here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/i-am-a-wizard-and-my-shoulder-hurts/uncommon-hardware-unusual-setup-games-list

We’re live on my channel (https://www.twitch.tv/digitaliliad) for what is likely the FINAL day dedicated entirely to playing compo + jam games onstream, so come on by!

!join to put yourself in the queue. If I’ve already played your game this week, don’t worry, we’re accepting resubmissions

I'll wait until the end of the rating period to release it.

Some players requested that the main character could crouch to get under the giant ant's legs. I had a better idea: rolling. Here it is, implemented in 10 minutes. It isn't quite exactly a majestic Souls-like animation, but it gets the job done.

I wonder if it breaks the game's difficulty (…or cutscenes).

If you want to play a html5 game and help me get only 6 more ratings, https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/court-date

I've been debating if I wanna make a post jam version of my game but I'm not entirely sure, I would mainly make it easier to understand the voice acting as long as having subtitles/text to go along with them and make gui so you can tell what items you have, what do you guys think?

Drew this as a cover art for Unpacking Armageddon! Have you tried it? :D https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/unpacking-armageddon

Last weekend i joined my 17th Ludum Dare with a team of old and new people. We made "Tristram", a game about summoning heroes into your village so that they might venture into the dungeon below the village, with you being on the sidelines of the action, only taking care of the village.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/tristram

I thought i might do a mini post mortem already :)

What went right

Preparation

I've done this 18 times now (one GMTK jam in there) and got a routine for preparing the jam for the team. I think it works well and avoids most issues i had to painfully meet before :D

As usual, we - set up a new git repo - created an empty Godot project - created a Miro board - created an empty ldjam page - created an empty itch project - made sure everyone had access to everything and was added where possible

We always run with this framework of timing: - Saturday until 12:00 - figure out what game we want to make - Saturday until 18:00 - have a first playable with placeholders and some core mechanics. Like move & jump if we make a platformer (which we won't 😅). Generally we want to be as quick as we can in having something that looks shitty (placeholders) but can be used to iterate already. - Saturday until 24:00 - have a first playable with core mechanics in place - Sunday until 24:00 - have all must have features in - Monday until 24:00 - polish, polish, polish. Accessibility, Sound, Effects, Tutorialization, Ending Screen, Start Screen. If you see anything really polished on Saturday or Sunday, that's a bad sign - everything should be quick and dirty until here, with few exceptions like the player movement. - Tuesday - polish itch and ldjam page with descriptions, graphics, animations, maybe trailer. Test browser export and build, and upload if working.

One key thing that is not obvious with which this framework helps is scope. Knowing we got to have a core running on Saturday does limit the scope somewhat and makes it even easier to judge than planning for 3 full days.

I think the preparation went really good and that we actually did not learn anything here.

Team

The team was really mixed with the full spectrum, from my wife Anne who i did all the 18 jams with, to 2 completely new people we never worked with before.

We had a team with fantastic experience in total. I'm really looking for people who do really good work, can work independently but also well integrated to the team. I am happy to say this fits to everyone in the team of 6 who worked directly on the game.

The beauty really unfolds as a group i think, when everyone comes together and brings in ideas that inspire each other, and does such good work that it pushes and motivates the other people. It's wonderful to experience, and i'm really proud of the team.

I do run a games studio called Bippinbits, and everyone works there except for our long time contributors Martin Kvale (Sound) and Cameron Paxton (Music). So it was kind of natural that it worked, but not a given either. When we started doing Ludum Dare in 2017, we were still hobbyists (and would stay hobbyists for 5 more years), so i'm really excited now about having a big team of great people where all aspects of the game are covered by someone.

Idea

I'm really happy with the idea for the game. It is still a concept i'm really intrigued about, and it seems to resonate with a lot of people, despite the shortcomings of the jam.

The connection to "Summoning" is not as strong as for other games where summoning was really in the center of gameplay too, but to be honest, i rather make a game i'm really excited about than have a perfect fit to the theme.

What also worked well was the brainstorming around the concept. Initially we formulated some "experience goals" of what the player should feel and experience in the game. Something like Design Pillars, but very much from the perspective of the player as opposed to the perspective of the game designer. I think that helped at least some team members to work more independently and decide more things on their own, because they understood how it aligned with the goals. This way i did not need to hand out fine-grained tasks as much, but was myself able to focus on the design and balance of the game more than in any game jam before.

What went wrong

I love when things go wrong, because this is where we learn the most. Most of what i know about making games i learned in game james (at least it feels like it!).

Undercooked Core

One of our experience goals was that the player should feel like they can guide the fortune and misfortune of the heroes indirectly. Overall, that aspect of the game fell quite flat. We were missing some buildings and mechanics like the training ground, equippable items, hero sanity and age.

The concept was very ambitious for a jam, but i still think we could have developed these things much more if we'd have been cheaper with some features. Like, having a full fledged pixel art map, 6 character classes and 8 different monsters and 3 bosses is great, but i feel like we could have done less there and instead pushed the possible actions for the player a bit further.

It is humbling to see that even with great preparation, great people and a clear vision, it is still so easy to work on things that are really not the most important bits of the experience.

Lost in Details

On the third day we got lost a bit in details, mostly arising from being a bit overworked, only talking via chat that day and not understanding each other well. We discussed minute details for an hour or more, instead of really wrapping up the game a few hours before submission. We wrapped it up still, but it was unpleasantly tense and unfocussed.

We talked about what went down on wednesday, seeing where we understood each other wrong and how it came to be that we got so stuck. This was the biggest mistake i made as the Director/Producer of the game, of getting bogged down in my Game Designer tasks too much. I kept track of the big picture, but i wasn't able to put the whole team behind it, instead losing overall productivity because i didn't "step out" of my tasks enough, having too little patience and empathy. A great lesson for me, and both something that feels really hard to get right, but also something that is really important and that i want to work on.

UI

I really like this one, because it is a quick win for the future.

We didn't make an UI theme until shortly before submission. This hindered us in quite a few ways: - whenever building a UI, we didn't know if that would fit the final size, making everything feel like a suggestion and unfinished - we had no idea if it would look bad at the end - it was boring and uninspiring to look at, not being clear if players would enjoy it or if and how we could polish it further

When talking about this afterwards, we were surprised why we didn't do this earlier, but will do so next time. A nice UI adds so much, it's nothing to skimp on.

Debugging Tools

We had some basica debugging tools ingame from the get go - we are pros, right? Except for one thing that probably overall cost like 2 hours: a quick way of going into the dungeon battle scene. Whenever we wanted to test something there, we had to call over the heroes, let the parties form and send them to the dungeon. Over and over again. This got worse when we wanted to test something late game, because then we'd need to do this cycle 5 times or so.

We could do this on quick speed thanks to our debugging tool, but this was still arduous. It was funny afterwards when we noticed that everyone thought "i'll just try it this once without debugging, it won't take that long. I'll add the debugging later". Only, no one ever did. What would have saved hours was one button being like "generate random parties and go into battle immediately". This is not only time, but also churn of concentration. Doing that over and over again eats at you.

So next time, we should be more proactive with this. A "what went right" definitely is that we even had a debugging/quick test tool integrated, but i kind of look out more for the things to learn from :)

That's it! Do you agree or disagree with something? What did you learn this time around?

Maybe it can be comfort and/or motivation to you, that I still make many mistakes and learn a lot after 18 game jams. It's all about learning, and it feels like there is an unending wealth of what can be learned :)

Once upon a time there was a player who was sick and tired of searching for a WebGL game. All he wanted is a game that he could play right in a browser, with no long descriptions, and a built-in tips which buttons to mash. A game for fun.

In the unlikely chance you've got up here, that player is YOU! And I've got a game for you: Vampire Summoners. An action game inspired by Vampire Survivors with its survival core mechanics, Overwatch with its activated abilities, and LD55 with its summoning theme.

Get into action!

Sick of your job? Want something worse?? APPLY TODAY!!!

Job title: FULLEST TIME MISCELLANEOUS RITUAL ACCOUNTANT

Duties/Responsibilities: Demon summoning paperwork that we don't feel like doing

Pay rate: you keep your soul

Apply now: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/demonware-incorporated

Post your high score in the comments!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/summoning-3

Hi All!

Thank you for giving our game a chance and the constant feedback. It's been so motivational seeing everyone love our chibbles as much as we love them.

A lot of you are saying the game is too difficult, and after playing the previous version, we agree!

We have now made it less difficult the closer you are to finishing the game, that way you still have a chance to win when you're in the home stretch!

We hope you give it a chance once again to finally succeed!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/chibble-nibbles