(Firefox is crunchy sometimes on ldjam site, if so, play on itch instead)
We kept working on the game after the initial demo for the 55th Ludum Dare Jam and now we are proud to announce our first update that brings many improvements!
Many playtesters wanted to have a timer in the game but we were hesitant to slap a boring stopwatch on the GUI and instead went with a more unconventional solution, see if you can spot the remaining time in-game!
The game's progression is now better designed to increase the difficulty as you progress through culls.
You can also enable Easy mode in the settings which gives you 9.99 seconds each round instead of the standard 6.66 seconds on Normal mode.
The Bad Blood ending was a bit confusing for players so we revised this mechanic into a new system that gives you three Souls (shown as green flames at the bottom of the screen). * If you slash something that doesn't match your goal, you will lose one Soul. * Your Souls carry over to the next culls * If you run out of Souls, you will get the Bad Blood ending. * You can aquire new Souls by completing three Pure Evil rounds in a row * Slashing the wrong targets now also has chilling screams to make it easier to notice your errors
While we retuned the spawning system to somewhat reduce overlapping targets around you, we also added an ability to throw creatures into the air to clear out the way for other targets behind them. You can use this ability with the Right Mouse Button. Look at our cool dude enjoying himself... for now.
To make our game more accessible to colorblind players we implemented toggles for each color in the game's palette. By disabling these colors you can exclude them from appearing as target goals. Targets will still be colored with the entire palette but you will never get an "ALL THE ORANGES" goal for example, if you disabled Orange.
The game now includes a Settings menu where you can adjust different aspect of the game
With this jam I think we somewhat improved upon our tendency to present hard to understand games with no explanation to players, our revised menu also includes a tutorial page.
The game now remembers your highscore and other statistics about your play. You can check them out in the new Stats menu.
That's about it for now!
Have you ever watched The Animals of Farthing Wood?
It's time to stop running and start defending the forest!
Now it's your turn to vanquish the enemy, not just with sheer numbers, but with the powerful spells in your deck!
Our game — Oversummoned — uses many cute 2d-sprites (demons and decorations) with completely 3d surroundings (tiles and houses)
At first, we rotated sprites to look at camera, but they started to clip with 3d objects 😈🏠. So we devised a hack: our sprites rotate only around vertical axis, and are scaled vertically by sqrt(2), so they look unmodified (camera looks down at 45°).
In-game view
Editor view and in-game view of a grabbed demon.
When demon is grabbed player sees it turned upside-down, but actually it's parallel to the ground...
Editor view of a demon — it is as tall as a house!
Thank you very much to everyone that has voted, We as a team would love it if you havent already to go and give our first Ludum dare game ever a play and rate us! Check down below our enemies and a potential mini boss we will add after the jam is complete!
Due to popular demand, I improved the game and added a new level. I thank everyone who supported me and the team with feedback, helped with testing and suggested interesting game mechanics and improvements.
The most difficult task was recoding the fungal root growth algorithm. I had to divide the space into voxels between colliders, then use a custom pathfinding algorithm A* in 3D space, and then convert the resulting path points array into a spline onto which the root mesh is already attached. It was a very interesting challenge!
I hope the team has enough strength and resources to turn this prototype into a full-fledged game.
You can play post-jam version here: https://katamary.itch.io/mushroomaissance
Thank you for playing our game!
I think this will be the final version of my game, I fixed some bugs, polished the tutorial a little. I could try to make a bigger version of the game, but I think this little version is finished and works well. Furthermore, I am happy with all the feedback, there were not a lot of complaints and they are all really nice, thank you all 💕
This LudumDare marks my 6th time participating and my third consecutive Jam entry. As usual, the weekends have been a rollercoaster of emotions, but in the end, I managed to create Runic Summoner, which I am quite proud of. Let's break down how the weekend went and what I learned for the future.
Throughout the week before the event, I made sure to deal with every real-life responsibility I could. I ensured we had all the snacks at home, completed all the housework, and made sure nobody from work (or the family) could bother me. These all helped to make the weekend a much smoother experience than usual.
Right after work, I decided to install every software I would need. I really wanted to make something 3D this time as well, so I installed Qubicle Voxel editor to create models and tried it out a bit. Then I set up OBS and my new microphone for the stream. After that, I got bored and instead of creating the Unity project and testing some model imports, etc., I went and played Valheim until like midnight… Yeah, good start, I know.
Surprisingly, right after reading the theme, I thought of an idea that was neither overcomplicated nor impossible to manage in two days. After some quick planning and setting up the stream, I opened Qubicle and realized I had no idea how it works. After a quick Google search, I swapped over to MagicalVoxel, which works the same way but somehow clicked way better for my brain. I spent the rest of the day focusing on coding the main game loop, doing my best to ignore how dumb everything looked with just different-colored cubes and spheres. My plan was to finish everything I needed to play the game, and then I could spend the second day on polishing and art.
Remember how I said the idea was doable in two days? So yeah, at the end of the day, I threw away about 40% of the planned content. Pretty good time estimate considering how it usually goes…
Sunday started pretty alright. I was motivated to do some art and put them into the game. Unfortunately, soon after, this motivation dropped hard when I realized how much work needed to be done and also how annoying it is to draw everything by hand and import it into Unity. I was close to packing up and calling it a weekend at this point, but my wonderful partner helped me get through the worst of it. Soon after the first few arts were finished, I regained my motivation and spent the second part of the day on a mad sprint to fix all the bugs, create menus, and convince Unity to let me export the project on the web.
Overall, I’m pretty happy with how the weekend turned out. I learned a lot and found some extra motivation to keep working on games outside of jams. Would like to thank everyone who ended up playing Runic Summoner and hope to see you all again for the 56th LudumDare.
I have reached over 20 user ratings, which means I'm eligible to receiving a score for my categories! Thank you to those who have played my game for the jam! And in return, I think I'd like to reflect my jam experience of what went well and the things that didn't go as planned.
Anyways, that's my experience with the jam. Thanks again to those who have played my game. If you want to check out my game, feel free to check my profile or click this link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/the-ghost-of-leo
See you in the next one!
The game is called STUPID LEGS – you summon customized derpy monsters to do the chores for you: check mail, do the laundry, gather apples, pay taxes, and more!
It was made in 48 hours for the Compo – I managed to do all the essential stuff in time, but there's also a post-compo version that is more polished and has some additional content and sounds in it.
I loved making this one, and it's pretty fun to play! There are 4 levels (6 in post-compo version), so it's not very long (around 5-10 minutes, I'd say).
Hey guys, I'll be playing, and streaming, and critiquing LD games :D
Also happy to try out Post-LD entries!
Starting in about 10 minutes (9:00 MDT)
https://www.twitch.tv/technostalgic
Submit your game to the #ludum-dare channel on my discord, I'll be playing them in the order they are listed there:
https://discord.gg/HA65WGU9Dm
Scrolling on by huh? Why not check out some of that Vocatio.
8 Days left until 'Rating games ends' and My LD55 submission still needs ratings.
I have fixed the player's movement and now it accelerates and decelerates faster. But I will leave the original version here and I just added my GitHub repo's release link in the description. so it will not violate the rules.
After the end of rating games, I am planning an engine migration for my LD54 submission, Metagirls from UE5 to Godot 3. I have placed all sprites of this shoot'em up game in XZ plane and this was a huge mistake. So I will completely remake this with Godot engine so that no more critical errors will occur (and rotating all objects to XY Plane for each 2D sprite import in UE5 is such a hassle).
And I need to get a job from now on. I might not enter LD56 and my game remaking project will proceed slowly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFxkQTlBQJo
Hi, I'm Bo, and I'm an artist on our team!
In this post, I explain how we optimized our pipeline, the challenges we encountered and the decisions we made to overcome them. For game Uncanny Inscriptions
We decided that the game will be in 3D, however creating characters in 3D takes much time. For instance, my model of a duck includes: sculpting, retopology, UV-layout, texturing, rigging, and finally animation. But I needed to figure out how to create several characters within a short timeframe.
I decided to create 2.5D characters, which simplified my work. You'll understand why as we progress.
I'm skilled in 3D rather than drawing, starting with _ZBrush where I can rapidly refine the shape of my characters and add cost-effective details. I created a model for 2D rendering, so the most important part is the front. I don't focus on the other sides. Also, I used Polypaint(vertex paint) for texturing characters—an easy but effective method. I didn't need retopology and UVs, which are often the most frustrating parts of 3D work
For rendering, I used _Marmoset Toolbag 4. I separated the model into several layers in ZBrush and exported it to Marmoset. Then, I set up the scene, adjusted the camera angle, and lighting. Additionally, I added an extra render pass for the Normal map. Furthermore, I used this scene for other characters.
I organized and refine the render layers in Photoshop and then exported the PSB file to Unity.
The "2D PSD Importer" automatically separated my layers into sprites
Before this moment, I hadn't tried working with 2.5D. I realized that sprites don't interact well with a 3D environment and lights. This confused me, but our programmer figured out how to fix it and wrote the shader. Sprites began to behave as I wanted; I was able to use the Normal map, and the sprites responded to light.
I rigged the characters using the standard _'2D Animator' and 'IK Components' in Unity. During animation, I focused on my favorite principle of animation: 'Follow through and overlapping action'. We realized that we didn't need triggers for animation, as the animation starts automatically when we call the prefab. The programmer prepared prefabs before for characters that we planned, and I began to fill them with other characters.
I hope you found this post useful and interesting. It's my first time writing something like this. I've always wanted to share about my work on the Jam. Thank you for reading, and _don't forget to play and rate our game Uncanny Inscriptions
Summoner Armin's Bad Day just got updated! Play the updated browser version on our itch.io or download the original version to try it out! https://commadotgames.itch.io/summoner-armins-bad-day
See out LD Jam page here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/summoner-armins-bad-day
First of all I would like to thank everyone who played Runic Summoner and gave feedback on it!
I found some time during the week to create a post jam version that you can play right now directly in your browser from: https://freamdev.com/games/RunicSummoner/
Changelogs:
New Features:
Bug Fixes and Improvements:
