Check new fixes on Itch.Io: Ink Summoner

Summon demons inside a vending machine! The strange premise for my LD55 Submission "Infernal Refreshments". If you haven't checked it out yet, feel free to give me your opinion! :smile:

Play it here!

Small patch to Patty Panic to fix the following issues: - Runtime crash when trying to go back to main menu after game over - Screen flicker when switching scenes

I think these are acceptable changes, but just in case I've kept the Windows build original. Only the web version has been updated.

https://twitch.tv/alexrosegames

LD page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/the-alumnus-of-darkness

Three days have passed since my team (my wife Tatiana and me, basically) loaded our game to Ludum Dare 55. This is the first time I've used my own game editor for Ludum Dare (the second time for my game engine though)! I decided to write a blog post with some work-in-progress screenshots, sketches from pixel-art app, and some of my thoughts about all that. Let's go!

First Day of Ludum Dare 55

I woke up at 8:30 AM and anxiously opened the Ludum Dare website. People chose "summoning" as a topic. Tatiana was a bit disappointed because she wanted to make "not the main character" one. We went for a short walk with our dog and started our brainstorming.

"It would be good to summon the undead and let them fight for you", my wife said.

"Don't you think it's a little bit dull to just stand still with your hero while your subordinates are fighting?"

"Nah, I think it would be great if you had no weapon at all".

I had my own doubts about it, but decided to give it a try.

Prerequisites

Two days before the event, I made a hello-world repository based on my game engine. Since I have no documentation for it, and this is not the place to start making it, I will mention that it is a data-driven engine based on JSON files heavily. In 2022, I started writing a game editor that would allow me to edit those JSONs using not the text editor but a so-called WYSIWYG.

It looked like this:

And in development:

You can try it yourself, if you clone this repository and switch to the 1st of April state.

Quick note: you need to run npm install and npm start to see a game. Or npm run start:editor to see the editor.

Beginning

So I had my own game engine, my own editor, and my wife Tatiana (a rookie who also can code but can't do it on my own engine because, quote, "You didn't write documentation and it would take some time to grasp all things, and we don't have that time, so I'll just go and make some textures". Man, who needs documentation?! Joking, I will definitely write it a little bit later.)

We sat down together and started our joined journey to the spooky necromancer's world.

I started drawing a poster for the game.

We decided to pick up a color scheme from Lospec which has a mint color in it. And I also wanted something World-of-Warcraft-Duskwood-coded, so I asked my wife to search for some references. We have choosen this scheme:

https://lospec.com/palette-list/ty-celestial-sapien-26

We decided to pick 24x24 square as our basic size for character, so this guy was our Mr. Template (it is a main character from my last ludum game):

Tatiana has little experience with pixel art, so she was a bit nervous about everything. She combined a moodboard and made a sketch in Pixquare app on IPad with a pencil.

We started our work.

Developing

My game engine uses Javascript where everything was written from scratch except rendering. I use Three.js but hope to replace it with custom WebGPU renderer soon.

Usually, I use GitHub Pages for hosting my games; every repo gets its own page. For example, this game can be played at:

https://michailremmele.github.io/ludum-dare-55/

So every time I push something to the repo, the new build is sent to this domain. Easy and very convenient. Every person who observes my repo can play in early access :)

Firstly, I started with moving and resurrecting mechanics. I borrowed some systems such as the movement and combat system from my previous game and fine-tuned them a little bit. Then I wrote a simple AI where the enemy sees you when you are in his attack radius and starts following you. You can press "E" to get an ally from a corpse. They will start fighting with each other.

I spent the whole day playing with my funny little schematic cubes, so the black cube is a corpse, the player is a violet one, and the enemy is red. The resurrected character is the mint one. Yes, playing the Captain Obvious here, but thought I needed to mention it.

Next few hours were about adding platforms, UI for health and mana (discarded it later) and a new type of enemy: a range enemy. An archer, to be precise. Due to the feedback, the biggest pain in the ass in this game. Can you believe that initially, friendly fire was enabled and if you have a ghost archer behind it can shoot you in the back instead of enemy. I fixed it afterwards, of course.

The next problem: my resurrected ally could not get to the archer on the platform. Look at how he trembles! Woah, I thought, should I really write an AI for pathfinding? It had been 7 PM already, and I was worn out. I decided that for the first day, I was done with coding.

Time had come for putting some sprites and textures to the game because the cubes stopped being exciting about three hours ago.

Art

Speaking of textures. My wife dedicated herself fully to the pixel art on the first day. Since she is a newbie, it took her a lot of time to shape objects to the form she wanted.

That's how her working panel looked:

"Look what I've made!", she told me, "I tried to make as many textures as I could so people would never notice that the grass repeats the pattern. Everything made in tiles!"

"So... How many tiles do you have for grass?" I asked with a small suspicion in my voice.

"Six!"

"W-wait, but..."

"And NINE different tiles for houses!"

The problem was, my editor has no such tools as a tile palette, so every template object should be picked from a looong dropdown list and placed on a scene. It could take hours to build a simple level if you have to pick from dozens of different tiles of the same thing.

"Okay, okay, do not freak out, I will combine everything for you myself," she said, with her brows raised in surprise at my uneasy face.

So that was a feature that I decided to add to my Notion space in the To-Do list.

That's what Tatiana initially had as a sketch:

And that's what she made after ~8 hours of drawing tiles and lines:

After she prepared textures for export, I added them to the level.

Everything was a little bit out of contrast, which was not what we expected. We decided that we'll do better tomorrow, in the second day of Ludum.

Second Day of Ludum Dare 55

After busy and nervous previous day, I dreamed of strange and complicated things. I woke up, and shared this with my wife.

"I had a dream about a 100-years-old corpse of my distant relative, which was already mummified", she said.

Ludum was going hard on us.

So we got back to our errands. The plan was to polish everything that we had. We discussed that it is highly unlikely that we will have enough time to design the main villain, aka Boss, with different phases and mechanics. Instead, we decided to add a crowd of enemies closer to the end.

We sat down and started working.

Art

I drew characters for the game. At first, it was a very simple sprite.

I added some action, such as summoning animation, damage animation, running, etc.

I drew enemies and animations for them:

Next, we decided to add more colors to the palette. Tatiana reworked some assets, so we had many minor changes:

Finally, we added skins for platforms and lightning sources for bonfires and lamps.

Development

So, it was time for some shitty code...

I made fighters forget the enemies if they stand up higher than 12 pixels. That's 1/4 of their height.

Then I added a simple if/else condition to the combat system to ignore friendly fire if a projectile collides with a player. Enemies still can kill each other. Occasionaly of course.

And the last meaningful change was THE summoning.

I gave my hero the Q button to summon his allies to the platform. At first, I thought: what a nasty hack. But it turned out to be a feature!

We decided to post the game on site, because we were tired from the development and drawing and wanted to start getting some feedback. So we got some, that allowed me to add some tasks to the backlog.

Feedback && Bugs

We made the final build and sent it to people.

Collision bug

Some of them complained about the characters going down to the void through platforms. I studied the bug, it seems that my physic system needs polishing – right now, if there is a lag, it creates a big delta time, that breaks a collision detection algorithm. In other words, collider could not detect an encounter.

I have a big plan to refactor the major systems in the engine later this year, so I've decided to create a special patched version of the engine with a small hack specifically for this game.

The physic system was one of the first systems in my engine, which I started to write in 2018. So yeah, time to revisit it, I guess.

Hitboxes

A different problem: I forgot to fix hitboxes. It is immensely hard to avoid any damage right now. Some say it's a challenge, and some will hate me. So... will patch it later.

Overpowered enemies

The archers are kind of ass. I mean, they have a 2 seconds delay before shooting, but they have fresh memories of your coordinates. Too fresh. So fresh, they will shoot you in your current precise postion. Well, it sure needs balancing.

Aftermath

In conclusion, Ludum Dare was very useful to me. Now I know, what I need to rework (physical system), add (analytic systems, sound system, tile system... a lot, actually) and fix.

It's hard to attract attention to your game, you need to market yourself etc. But still, you get the possibility to actually show your baby to someone :) so in the end it is worth to participate in the Ludum. We bonded together with Tatiana, got some experience, and will definetly participate in the next game jam.

Contacts

So if you are interested to play our game, this is the latest build:

https://michailremmele.github.io/ludum-dare-55/

I have a blog, but I write only in Russian. Plan to write in english, though:

https://t.me/mishapishetdvizhok

Here is my workshop about my engine (in Russian, will plan to add subtitles):

https://www.youtube.com/@MikhailRemmele

Game Source

https://github.com/michailRemmele/ludum-dare-55

Engine

https://github.com/michailRemmele/remiz

Engine Editor

https://github.com/michailRemmele/remiz-editor

Are there any lovecraftian horror games OR cooking games you made/liked in this Jam? I would love to play something like that, but after going through about 30 games encountered maybe 1 or 2.

(image for attention, from my entry "Evocation")

Summoning players to my game:

LD page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/summoning-by-a-lovely-wizzard

The original soundtrack for our jam entry, Untitled Witch Game, is now available for download. The track features an extended cut of all the music from the game in MP3, WAV, and FLAC audio files.

You can find it on the jam page (UWG_Soundtrack.zip)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/untitled-witch-game

Do you have questions about your summonings? Don't know where to turn? Our beloved colleague Oliver from "DOD" is here to answer your questions.

We hope everything is now clearer for you. If you want more drawings, you can follow our artist on Instagram. And if you have no more questions, it's time to start your cultist career by playing "Demons On Demand".

Hey y'all, we just emptied the queue, so please come by if you'd like to me play and right your game live onstream! https://www.twitch.tv/digitaliliad

If I played your game already this week, don't worry, we are taking resubmissions!

If you're incurable nostalgics, you should give our game a chance. We tried to pay homage to the old-school graphic adventures while fully respecting the theme of Ludum Dare. Graphics and code from scratch, and lots of sweat! I'd appreciate it if you could leave the links to your games below so I can try them out! Thanks everyone.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/a-cake-from-beyond

@nuanda79 and @giulia

The boys are back playing your games live on stream! Come on by and bask in the stupidity!

https://www.twitch.tv/coleslawski

We add version of the game on itch: https://anaastaska.itch.io/whiskers-wings-the-great-mouse-hunt Check it out👀

Nothing except the size of the game has been changed. We hope that downloading through itch will be more convenient for you. Enjoy 🫰

DELETED

Made this short top-down shooting game in which you need to survive and escape! I have tried to create horror vibe and satisfying killing

Draw arcane glyphs!

Cast mighty spells!

Protect your Tower!

~~Be slightly frustrated by the UI!~~

Glyph Tower is waiting for YOU!

Hello there!

We just post a final jam version of the game. It includes various bug fixes and a french translation (our mother tongue).

Feel free to test or test again our game and give us comments!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/hells-kitchen-2

Kiss to everyone!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwrQ1pzFAK4

You are a warlock that summons fiends to fight alongside you. Your objective is to summon all the 7 fiends by collecting crystals. Each fiend has their own personality, like a greedy one who is after the crystals you need to collect.

You'll find out fiends aren't your friend, like every warlock does.

Ludum Dare page

Updates

• Hitboxes are smaller
• Sound effects have a lower volume
• Lust chases the closest mob to you, instead of the closest mob to him. And he doesn't go to the exit door at the final stage, he does something else.
• EXIT sign. (Yeah, it doesn't make sense an ancient cave have an EXIT sign, but neither most of what happens in the game.)
• Visual improvements

Post-jam is available as Windows and Mac (Silicon/Intel) downloads

Me when you don't sort by Danger:

There are many games that have yet to cross the 20 review threshold to get a rating at the end of the jam. By sorting by "Danger," you can take an active part in pushing those games over the finish line! There are many gems yet to be found. Some of my favorite games have been danger games!

And to those not yet over the threshold, the best thing you can do is make a WebGL build of your game. The second best thing you can do is rate more games and give good, constructive feedback which will boost your game's visibility.

Good luck, everyone!

Another Ludum Dare has come and gone! This time I teamed up with Whaies and we created a game about summoning lawyers and other ... things ... to court. You can play it here.

Upcard write is written in the Janet Programming Langauge using tic80. I had a lot of fun figuring out the code for Cards. I wanted them to lift, rotate, and shuffle like the real thing and I think the solution I came up with in TIC-80 was pretty neat! Here's a technically rundown

Anybody familiar with TIC-80 will know the basic way to draw a sprite is with the spr function. You give it an index in the sprite sheet and [x,y] coordinates and your done. But what if you want to do something crazy like rotate the sprite?! For that we must somehow implement affine transformation.

The way everyone in the TIC-80 community has done this is using the ttri, textured triangle, function. I actually wrote about this a couple years ago! The basic idea is to use 2 textured triangles to draw a rectangle, and by manipulating the 4 coordinates using math you can do all sorts of fun transformations. Here's what that look likes like in Janet.

```

adapted from https://cxong.github.io/tic-80-examples/affine-sprites

(defn deg2rad [theta] (* theta PIOVER180)) (defn rad2deg [theta] (* theta ONEEIGHTYOVER_PI))

(defn aspr/rotate [x y ca sa] [(- (* x ca) (* y sa)) (+ (* x sa) (* y ca))])

(defn aspr [x y &named u1 v1 texsrc chromakey sx sy flip rotate w h ox oy shx1 shy1 shx2 shy2] (default u1 0) (default v1 0) (default texsrc TEXSRC_SPR) (default chromakey -1) (default sx 1) (default sy 1) (default flip 0) (default rotate 0) (default w 1) (default h 1) (default ox (math/floor (/ (* w 8) 2))) (default oy (math/floor (/ (* h 8) 2))) (default shx1 0) (default shy1 0) (default shx2 0) (default shy2 0)

(let [sx (if (= 1 (% flip 2)) (* -1 sx) sx) sy (if (> flip 2) (* -1 sy) sy) ox (* -1 ox sx) oy (* -1 oy sy)

# Shear & rotate
shx1 (* -1 shx1 sx)
shy1 (* -1 shy1 sy)
shx2 (* -1 shx2 sx)
shy2 (* -1 shy2 sy)
rr rotate
ca (math/cos rr)
sa (math/sin rr)
[rx1 ry1] (aspr/rotate (+ ox shx1) (+ oy shy1) ca sa)
[rx2 ry2] (aspr/rotate (+ ox shx1 (* w 8 sx)) (+ oy shy2) ca sa)
[rx3 ry3] (aspr/rotate (+ ox shx2) (+ oy shy1 (* h 8 sy)) ca sa)
[rx4 ry4] (aspr/rotate (+ ox shx2 (* w 8 sx)) (+ oy shy2 (* h 8 sy)) ca sa)
[x1 y1] [(+ x rx1) (+ y ry1)]
[x2 y2] [(+ x rx2) (+ y ry2)]
[x3 y3] [(+ x rx3) (+ y ry3)]
[x4 y4] [(+ x rx4) (+ y ry4)]

# UV coords
u2 (+ u1 (* w 8))
v2 (+ v1 (* h 8))]
(tic80/ttri x1 y1 x2 y2 x3 y3 u1 v1 u2 v1 u1 v2 texsrc chromakey)
(tic80/ttri x3 y3 x4 y4 x2 y2 u1 v2 u2 v2 u2 v1 texsrc chromakey)))

```

Sidenote: that this implementation does not use matrices, which maybe means "affine" is the wrong technical term?

With this function we can draw a sprite and rotate/scale it however we need.

Awesome!

HOWEVER, there's one problem. This rotates sprites, but how do we transform text? I didn't want to waste space in the spritesheet embedding letters, and TIC-80's print function definitely does not support rotating.

The Solution is to ~~abuse~~ use VRAM. The video ram in TIC-80 is "double banked", which means you basically have 2 screens which are drawn over each other to work with. Conveniently, ttri supports pulling the texture from various different places. Those are the spritesheet, tilemap, and the VRAM you're currently not drawing to. With this we can

1. switch to
2. draw out the entire card using boring functions. Don't worry about any sort of rotation or scaling at this point.
3. switch to VRAM 1
4. clear the screen to hide everything on VRAM 0
5. use our custom ssprfunction with VRAM 0 as our texture source to draw our card with scale and rotation!

Here's the annotated card drawing source code in Upcard Writ

```

begin drawing in vbank 0

(tic80/vbank 0) (tic80/cls 0)

draw empty base of card, which is in the map

I palette swap based on its type... maybe more on that in a future blog post

(with-pallete-swap (match (character :integrity) :virtuous {5 14} :pragmatic {5 9} :sleazy {5 4}) (tic80/map 0 0 6 10 0 0 0))

only face up cards need to have their details drawn

(when flipped? # print out title (print-centered (character :name) 24 4 1 false 1 true) (print-centered (character :name) 24 3 7 false 1 true)

  # draw the cards picture if it has one
  (when (character :sprite)
(tic80/rect 0 11 48 32 (character :sprite-bg))
(tic80/spr (character :sprite) ;(character :sprite-args))
(tic80/rectb 0 11 48 32 7))

  # draw the cards "resources"
  # ... theres some annoying logic to split it into 2 rows
  (loop  [[i [mod ev]] :pairs (array/slice (character :evidence) 0
                 (min 2 (length (character :evidence))))]
(evidence-spr ev (+ 8 (* i 22)) 43)
(tic80/spr (match mod :+ 1 :- 2) (+ 3 (* i 22)) 43 0))
  (when (> (length (character :evidence)) 2)
(loop  [[i [mod ev]] :pairs (array/slice (character :evidence) 2)]
  (evidence-spr ev (+ 8 (* i 22)) 60)
  (tic80/spr (match mod :+ 1 :- 2) (+ 3 (* i 22)) 57 0))))

some other stuff happens...

eventually we switch to vbank 1

(tic80/vbank 0) (tic80/cls 0)

and Finally draw the card with rotation and scale!

(aspr ;(round (- (self :pos) [0 (self :height)])) :u1 0 :v1 0 :w 6 :h 10 :texsrc TEXSRC_VRAM :sx (self :scale) :sy (self :scale) :rotate (self :rotation)) ```

Phew! Here's the results (I've removed a screen clear so you can see both vrams).

If nothing else, maybe all this has inspired you to take a look at tic80, its pretty neat.

Regardless, thanks for reading!

-->> Veles Book <<--

Greetings fellow wizards!

Patch 0.1 is officially live! We, the Soul Pact Dev team have successfully patched all the game breaking bugs. And we encourage you to try the game out if you haven't already or if you already have, check out the changes! It'd mean the world to us! We plan on re-working the game after the jam and release it so please leave a feedback and rating. :)

Yours sincerely, Soul Pact Dev team

Patch notes for patch 0.1:

• Main Menu Stability
• Main Menu now functions smoothly without any glitches.
• Settings Accessibility actually work,
• Access Main Menu Settings fixed
• In-game Settings working as intended
• Adjust settings within the game without disruption, ensuring uninterrupted gameplay.
• Music loops nicely
• Enjoy uninterrupted music at Level 1, looping flawlessly throughout gameplay.
• Tutorial is visible now
• Tutorial functionality restored, providing a comprehensive learning experience.
• UV textures repaired
• Textures for clues have been fixed, enhancing visual clarity and immersion.
• Player Collision Resolved
• Player no longer clips through walls, ensuring a smoother gaming experience.
• End scene now functions properly, providing a satisfying conclusion to the game.
• Book Reading Experience is now working,
• Books are now readable.

By the way, I made a developer walkthrough video this Ludum Dare again, for my entry Evocation! It has my commentary on development process, includes all the endings and spells, and story explanation in the end ~ You can watch it on YouTube if you are curious. I think last time video playthrough helped a few jammers to check out the game (especially since HTML version is not that good >_<)

https://youtu.be/rh0n_WIMwF4

(check time codes in description!)

My friend and I have been making art of these characters for a while, illustrations, crochet, little figurines, etc. We love them, and joined forces to make a short narrative game with them as the driving force of the plot. In the future, we want to make a longer game with a lot more characters and focus on puzzle gameplay. In the meantime, we put this together for LDJAM to kickoff progress and further development :^) Send your narrative game links so we can play them as well

Play it here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/lucky-little-darlings-the-game-jam-version

Collect as many elements as you can to summon your great warrior!!

And try to defend your ritual from pesky adventurers!

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

Thanks for these lovely vtubers for testing our game!

SaryahM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ia1aQDZk3Y

Punniz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSZBKKVvbfw

We had fun watching them and they seemed to have fun playing The Culling. You can check out their LD pages at @saryah and @punniz!

One at the start, to see another one you need to win, he-he.

https://clips.twitch.tv/KitschyResourcefulRedpandaHumbleLife-5VY4EgBLCnHqWfBE

They are also streaming right now on https://www.twitch.tv/coleslawski (STREAM ENDED)

And you can play Dungeon Summoner HERE

A rum-filled iron-clad dwarf stands in the Demon Lord's way. Her army approaches. MOW THEM DOWN! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/throw-hands

Good time of day! Guys, Thank you very much everyone for your feedback and rating of the game "Ghostslayer"!!! This really makes happy!!!^^

We appreciate your advice on the game, but this is our first Jam аnd the first Game, so no offense) We have a lot to learn, and we will try to implement even cooler projects in the future! I speak for myself as the Artist who created the game style :)

I really enjoyed being part of a team and working on the game for those 3 days! This is great!!! B)

Speaking of "Ghostslayer", in the coming days, I would like to publish posts on the topics of "Cut Game Content" and "Future Game Plans". I hope you really enjoy reading it! Here's another poster at the end) See you soon! ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

Project link: (https://ldj.am/$384374)

I don't like summoning classes in RPGs. I was confused at the start of the jam, but then I realized that my game could be about summoning something strange. So, I decided to make a game about summoning an elevator.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/the-grand-summoner-of-lifts

Look no further - welcome to our pizzeria! Its address is - My profile town on Games street Ludum number 55

Thanks for 20 votes! Glad so many of you seemed to enjoy ruining villager's days!

All in all, I'm pretty happy with how Druid Island turned out. I did not have a strong idea for this theme. Honestly, I wasn't too interested. So I just picked an artstyle and ran with it-- following in the footsteps of my friend lootbndt.

Island generation wasn't all that difficult- I had it up and running in about 30 minutes. Some friends came online and I spent the rest of the night playing halo and trying to think of what to do with it.

Day 2, I made the waves move and the plants sway, added flower gathering and villagers and realized I didn't like it. I'd had to cut down the number of creatures you could spawn for scope, so the plants no longer really felt unique. So after maybe 6 hours total of work I stopped and watched most of Fallout. Pretty good show. Not a masterpiece, but I'd recommend.

Day 3, I decided to juice it to the gills, add archer enemies, and see if it felt any better. It did! Amazing what some screen shake and particle effects will do! So I grabbed a mallet, my mortar and pestle from the kitchen, mixed some sound effects at my desk, cranked out some music and ta-da! That's pretty much it.

So for the (maybe) 12 hours I put into it, I'm quite happy. I think maybe I'll take this artstyle and see what else I can do with it. I quite enjoyed the turn based characters jiggling all over a bitsy grid. Maybe a soulslike?

Come on the stream and !submit your games. I'd love to play yours.

https://www.twitch.tv/saryahm

The qualification period for the next Ludum Dare Score Chasers tournament has started!

Score chasers is a tournament where people compete to get high scores in games submitted to this Ludum Dare. This includes things such as completing a game in the lowest amount of time, getting high scores in a game, or other ways a game can be competed in. The tournament is taking place on Saturday, April 27th, 2024 4:00 PM UTC on https://twitch.tv/ategondev.

Anyone is free to join the tournament! In order to qualify you need to submit an impressive score in any game submitted to the jam. To submit you can join our discord at https://discord.gg/FhP4jaZ7KS and post a screenshot of your score in the entry submissions channel.

If youre interested in just watching the tournament feel free to join as well to get notified about things such as when it goes live and to chat with contestants + other people watching

Hope to see you there!

If you have a game you think fits the tournament you can share it in our game pitch thread for competitors to look at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/$394070/ludum-dare-score-chasers-game-pitch-thread (please dont join our discord to advertise your game, post it instead in the pitch thread

Is it only me? Or does the theme always sound terrible at the start, and even worse if I don't manage to deliver a game. But after submitting a game, I kinda forget about the theme, or end up loving it.

Anyways, I'm excited to catch up on giving feedback this afternoon!

Im about to go live over at https://www.twitch.tv/ategondev playing some games from the jam! Feel free to stop by and watch me play your game

I'm imagining a giant 64x64 pixel detail image of the item in the top right, and a 32x32 reaction portrait of Erasmo in the top left when it's done

some of this has spoilers, i pushed them to the end but you its better if you play the game https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/horrors-from-beyond-the-bayou

i did the art, animatios, video editing and much of the early game design, we was a pretty small team (the VA was Traun btw, that dude is amazing) at first the game had a top down perspective, the 3rt person view was a spontaneous choice, it looks pretty sick, but you can tell the concept art is made for top down view. at first the crocs where gonna chase and block the player, then we decided there would be froggerlike segments where you had to dodge crocs, the final chioce was for landmine crocs once we chaged the perspective, the frogger segments where scrapped :(

the demon took a lot of time to do, i should have done him in photoshop, debs wanted me to make in vectors and i dindt want to dissapoint them, it turns out they didnt knew how long it would take, so i should have spoken up.

i wanted him to be more gruesome the more you look at him, and he had to have a kind face (its father Dorians possesed body btw)

its not crocs btw, its alligators, but we always called them crocs, peace

here are the profile pictures of demons from our game, drawn by @nomersol

black cat and dwarf are probably my favourites despite the fact that there is such a hot succubus :broken_heart:

YOU CAN TAKE A CLOSER LOOK AT THEM IN OUR GAME

I've been clicking through the LD55 submissions and almost all of them have been downloads. Even if they are posted to something like itch, it's still a download. I usually give those games a pass. I don't like having to download, install/unzip, and otherwise manage or worry about games on my machine. Having them in a browser just adds so much convenience and some feeling of safety.

Anyone have some good submissions that run in the browser?

I am working my way through rating games, trying to give each game a fair chance by actually finishing the game if there is an end. usually takes about 10-20 minutes each.

Also, there are a lot of Satanic games this time around XD. If anyone feels like playing something more lighthearted, here is a shameless plug for my game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/raising-the-bread

In the game, you have the opportunity to assemble various bosses over a total of 9 rounds and then battle them. This can quickly turn into an absolute bullet hell...

If you successfully complete the 9 rounds, you will achieve the status of immortality! For those who want to try the game, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. What was your most exciting, toughest, or simply the most interesting combination you have fought against?

And for those still seeking a challenge, one of my personal favorites: 3 Eyes, 3 Arms, 2 Brains and 1 Parasite, good luck! And if that's not enough, there's still the Leg and the Eye of Ulthor, both of these body parts take the fight to a whole new level.

Looking forward to your comments!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/crafted-calamities

As a JavaScript developer, I'd love to test your HTML5 game :

• Leave a comment with a link to the LD page of your game.
• Please wait 1 or 2 days while I test.
• Feel free to test my HTML5 (Vanilla JavaScript/WebGL) game Ancestral (JAM - SOLO) in return.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/crafted-calamities

In the game, you have the opportunity to assemble various bosses over a total of 9 rounds and then battle them. This can quickly turn into an absolute bullet hell...

If you successfully complete the 9 rounds, you will achieve the status of immortality! For those who want to try the game, feel free to share yout thoughts in the comments. What was your most exciting, toughest, or simply the most interesting combination you have fought against?

And for those still seeking a challenge, one of my personal favorites: 3 Eyes, 3 Arms, 2 Brains and 1 Parasite, good luck! And if that's not enough, there's still the Leg and the Eye of Ulthor, both of these body parts take the fight to a whole new level.

Looking forward to your comments!

In the game, you have the opportunity to assemble various bosses over a total of 9 rounds and then battle them. This can quickly turn into an absolute bullet hell…

If you successfully complete the 9 rounds, you will achieve the status of immortality! For those who want to try the game, feel free to share yout thoughts in the comments. What was your most exciting, toughest, or simply the most interesting combination you have fought against?

And for those still seeking a challenge, one of my personal favorites: 3 Eyes, 3 Arms, 2 Brains and 1 Parasite, good luck! And if that’s not enough, there’s still the Leg and the Eye of Ulthor, both of these body parts take the fight to a whole new level.

Looking forward to your comments!

Hey everyone! This is my first ever game jam and after 1 week of jamming I just wanted to say thank you for all the positive feedback on our game. When we started this I never expected that it would get so much attention. There are plans to polish and finish the game with more mechanics and better optimization. I've also been enjoying playing other games from this jam and giving them feedback and I'll keep doing that until the end of rating! What an amazing community. There are lots of hidden gems here. Make sure to check out our game, Plaguebringers, as well even if it has its own flaws! ^^

P.S. Yes, the image attached is Keith, the C++ mascot xD

I did a basic couple art assets for this jam, figured I would show em off :) Here's the two summons I managed to scrounge together in the short time I had

Just did basic box modelling and then a quick sculpt to define some muscle groups and shoved that into Substance Painter to get a nice enough normal bake out, they're sort of rushed and unoptimized but they worked well enough!

Then I did quick rigs + animations for them, the arms were driven by the user's own arms using IK so they look a bit basic in these animations haha.

Here's a little book cover I drew up inside substance painter and a wand I threw together just to have something

I also made a little button model real quick, it's super basic but it's rigged up so I can just move a bone down to make it "click"

The actual environment got the least time spent on it basically, used Substance Sampler to generate the textures and the level geometry was done using S&box's "Hammer", which is basically just regular Source 2 Hammer, made it quick to get some level geometry together with usable tiling UVs.

And this is a VR-only game because I love VR and use every opportunity I get to write VR games where I can!

I've been doing exclusively VR entries since I got the original HTC Vive in 2016, these days I use a Valve Index but write using OpenXR so I can usually make standalone android ports for the various other headsets out there. (Like the Quest)

If you've got a VR headset, please give my game a go, I don't have enough ratings quite yet!

If you do not, I did put up a playthrough video so you can at least see what I was going for...

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/summoney-vr-only

As far as I'm concerned, this LD has been incredibly successful.

From a gaming perspective, our game is relatively complete, and we've received a good amount of feedback and overall ratings, which is fantastic. To be realistic, as a team participating for the first time, achieving what we have now means we don't need to worry about the final rankings.

We've gained so much already; it would be both inappropriate and unnecessary to ask for more. I know that in terms of raw strength, our game can't compare with many others, whether in the robustness of its foundation, the level of detail in graphics, the richness of sound effects, or the quality of the puzzles themselves. Many teams are far ahead of us. Our only advantage might be that every aspect is 'just right', relatively balanced—that's all.

If such a game were to achieve higher rankings, scores, and feedback, it would be unfair to those who put more effort into their games.

So, three days ago, I stopped working on my game. Instead, I began helping friends who had helped us. On one hand, I assisted those struggling on the brink of survival, and on the other, I vigorously promoted those talented creators who deserved more attention. Additionally, I left sincere and substantial comments for those who sought my help.

My teammates might say I'm crazy these days because I play around 20 games a day, each leaving over 200 words of commentary. These, to me, are the best "creations" from this competition. I'm a highly social person; what's important to me is the atmosphere, culture, and emotional shaping.

I enjoy making friends, communicating with people, and leaving genuine evaluations for things I care about. Language and time differences are not barriers for me, let alone obstacles—arrogance is.

I like everyone I've met and talked to here. Some have become friends. But what saddens me is that our friendship can only last these ten days or so. It's like our interactions are consuming a limited membership card, each one a stark reminder that we're about to part ways, never to meet again.

It pains me deeply.

I love @congeesetador and his game. It was the first game I played after submitting our own and passing out. He certainly brought many surprises. I love everyone in the Moving In and Moving On team; they made me believe that sincerity pays back a hundredfold. A small favor from me was repaid with almost everyone's support, which I'll remember for a long time. I love @marin-davys, who stood up for me when I was misunderstood and vouched for my character. We chatted a bit about Russian literature, and during that, I 'met' the lovely @kanity—I should have recognized her sooner because we played her game and loved it. I just didn't realize it was her in Discord. What a wonderful coincidence. I love the brother @rakowu, whose affirmation and encouragement were my biggest motivations to keep helping others instead of myself. His words clarified what I should do. I love @themaskedman; he seems a bit hot-headed but is actually very humble and interesting, even a bit shy, haha.

I'm not sure if I fully understand the so-called 'indie spirit', but the happiness and satisfaction these people have given me are more important than completing the competition or winning a place. Something inside is calling me, "Hey, you should talk more with these people; they are what you truly want." We help, appreciate, and encourage each other. We communicate with sincere hearts, away from commerce, operations, traffic, and all the mess—this is the truest form of gaming and the best jam.

But, as I said at the beginning, I'm already heartbroken thinking that in a week or two, we might have to go our separate ways. It's a loss that's hard to part with, a profound and unspeakable sorrow. You know it's inevitable, yet you're powerless to stop it.

Yet, I also believe in fate, in the mysterious connections that bring us together. I believe our meeting is not without reason, and farewell will not mean forever. They have shaped who I am today, and I will surely give back to them in the future.

I'm thinking, for the next LD, why not try to organize a 'United Nations fleet', bringing together these geniuses from millions of miles apart? Let's mix our hobbies and cultures into one magical potion—it would be fascinating. Saying this, I'm already getting excited.

In conclusion, I love you all, and I love this competition.

Hi everyone!

Thanks to all of you who already played our game "Chefs from the Dead"! This is the first time @madrain and I co-developed a game (or anything for that matters) together, and we wanted to use LD55 as a means of having that first experience as well as giving us an excuse to do some Java and get better at it. And here's the result!

In "Chefs from the Dead", you use cards to summon chefs in order to cook as many meals as possible in a limited time.

We used the libGDX library that we discovered during this jam, so we lost a bit of time here and there but we are super happy of the end result regardless. She ended up doing most of the programming and debugging part, while I focused more on the graphics (in a quite slow and not optimized process to be honest!). In the end, this ended up being our first co-developed game, our first true Java game (yeah, a hangman game all in console doesn't count as much), and our first HTML build as well!

We had a lot of fun doing this and are planning to extend the game with far more content in the future, so any feedback is truly appreciated! All the comments already left by players are very insightful and has been duly noted. If you'd like to give it a shot and tell us what could make "Chefs from the Dead" a better game, here's the link of the LD page : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/chefs-from-the-dead

As said above, there is a playable HTML build if you don't feel like downloading any file ;) Thanks again!

It started with a programmer's art and then beautified by a qualified artist.

Ponies:

Gacha panel:

Web quest:

The game ^^ https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/pony-summon-quest

The game is available here! Playable HTML5 version is also available via itch link, check it out!

AnimationPlayer

While it does what you may expect from its name - making animations for assets - in Godot it has much more potential to even replace some code! Here's how we used it to create an attack for one of our mobs in-game:

:walking: First, the crusader is walking with no attack with normal speed

:dagger: Then, lock_on() function is called, which determines the attack's direction (at the player)

:stopwatch: While locking on, the crusader: + is standing still, the speed is 0 + takes an winding-up aiming pose + gets charged up with color to telegraph a coming attack

:cyclone: After the charge-up, the crusader makes a dash: + the speed becomes much higher than its normal one + an attack swipe becomes visible and its collision becomes active + crusader takes a swiping pose + color returns to normal

:levitate: After an attack, it takes some tome for the crusader to recover. Which gives the player a chance to strike back!

This way, you can modify almost all of objects' properties (even ones you've declared!), call their methods, and time all that perfectly.

Here's how it turned out in-game!

Akino’s Dungeon is a challenging, addictingly fun top-down arcade where you’ll have to dodge and maneuver to kill enemies with the help of your orbital familiars. Pick skulls, summon familiars and feed Akino! Check our game out on our page, link here!

Non-browser games are okay too! Let's get rating ^^

Playing over at https://www.twitch.tv/basicmilky

Feel free to play our game here, it can be played within 5 minutes: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/middleman-summons

In the game, you have the opportunity to assemble various bosses over a total of 9 rounds and battle against them. This can quickly turn into an absolute bullet hell...

If you successfully complete all rounds, you will achieve the status of immortality! For those who want to try the game, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. What was your most exciting, toughest, or simply the most interesting combination you have fought against?

And for those still seeking a challenge, one of my personal favorites: 3 Eyes, 3 Arms, 2 Brains and 1 Parasite, good luck! And if that’s not enough, there’s still the Leg and the Eye of Ulthor, both of these body parts take the fight to a whole new level.

Looking forward to your comments!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/crafted-calamities

Our Submission

You're blowing my robes off!

I had some severe Imposters Syndrome going on when I turned in my game this LDJam, I felt it was too short and - aiming to be a MetroidVania - I was afraid only one upgrade was too little... But all of your comments are great, seeing the work and the potential, thanks!

You can check out Hellbinder here. If you leave a comment, I'll be sure to check out your game too!

Play Ribbit Craft

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

Not a streamer really, I only stream for LD, so come and drop your game in Chat

https://www.twitch.tv/ausstein

You can play my game on your phone or tablet. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/songbird-symphony

There's another LD game not only playable on phone but made on a phone?! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/readybuns

Any other mobile compatible LD games out there?

I feel like we should post more updates to get more visibility since our smart balance is -57 at the moment :scream:

Oh, and also, we're happy to play & rate your games of course - and would be glad if you return the favor :grin:

:arrowright: Play TAO here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/tao :arrowleft:

okay i made a post jam version of mouche(s)? with all the proposals that players have suggested in their comments

enjoy and thank you very much

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=141758

Hi all,

I thought it would be worth sharing a few games that I've come across that I've particularly enjoyed! I'll probably do a few of these before the rating period is over depending on how busy / tired I end up being in the next week or so. So, without any further ado:

Orion

This game immediately stood out to me with its gorgeous pixel art background and excellent use of a limited colour palette. There's fun to be had in piecing together how to get the most out of your summons, and a compelling sense of "ok, how far can I get with this?"

Luna's Ritual

I've been playing quite a bit of Risk of Rain 2 and Vampire Survivors lately - sources of inspiration that Luna's Ritual really wears on its sleeves. The game does a really solid rendition of piecing together the best character build you can and trading off that accumulation of power against the gradually ramping up of the enemy's own toughness. And - like Orion - some truly beautiful pixel art!

The Ultimate Cup of Coffee

Coffee has always been a very important part of game jams for me, so I'm always up for a game about it! My first go at this, I didn't really get what was going on, but after some of the comments prodded me in the right direction I found a satisfying deductive reasoning puzzle.

Deep

On Friday night, I felt I'd just about had my fill of playing / rating / reviewing jam games for the time being. "Just one more then I'll call it a night" I thought. Deep was that one more game, and it kept me hooked for way longer than I expected. There's an interesting map to explore and the build up of upgrades allowing you to venture further and further felt really well paced to me.

There are already more games that I want to mention, but I think better to keep the recommendations in manageable chunks! Although I will afford myself one more spot for my own game - Hellevator

Hi everyone! We've just released our game 'Burdemon' on MacOS! So for all the Apple users among us, here's another game you can enjoy :)

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

I've been enjoying all the games so far, and hope to enjoy many more. Have a nice day y'all!

Новая HTML-игра, играйте в нее здесь:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/a-long-hello

Music: @bcav and @KennyMacMusic / Artwork: @genie

Hello everyone
For this jam we made an adventure card game with deck-building mechanics.

The game was inspired by PHYSICAL deck-building games (like the Legendary card games) and adventure card games (ike the Lord of the Rings card game). From the comments people seems to like the mix of story, quest & deck-building mechanics.

You can play it HERE

Since we want to extend and reuse the engine created for this game in future games we love some quality feedback.

So can you stop the cultists before they finish the ritual and summon Cthulhu in the...

Just posted an update to my Jam entry, theGRIMOIRE!

Changes are mostly QoL-related: * Undo feature * To restart you now need to hold the restart button (to prevent restarting level by mistake); also added a fade out effect for that * Reshuffled levels to make at least some kind of difficulty curve * Added Japanese translation

Give it a shot or feel free to ~~suffer~~ enjoy the original version I made solo in 3 days on the entry's page:

theGRIMOIRE_

Game

"You are a warlock that summons fiends to fight alongside you. Your objective is to summon all the 7 fiends by collecting crystals. Each fiend has their own personality, like a greedy one who is after the crystals you need to collect.

You’ll find out fiends aren’t your friend, like every warlock does.

Mobs drop crystals like in survivors-like games. You cannot attack anyone, instead you collect the crystals from mobs killed by fiends."

Idea

All the 7 Fiends symbolize a deadly sin, which is reflected on their unique behaviours.

My initial idea was the warlock would summon the Fiends to help him in a survivors-like battle. The Fiends would be more like "inconvenience", but I noticed they act much more like enemies while coding the game. "With A Little Help From My Fiends" was its initial name, but it was too funny and it didn't reflect the game as good as "Fiend-Zone".

Players cannot attack, the zombies are killed by the Fiends. All player does is move around and collect stuff.

What went right?

* People liked the originality of the idea. * Game objective and gameplay was clear. I knew players would try to cast an attack with mouse button, but the game has none, so I put a "You cannot attack in this game" message on mouse click. * I had limited time to draw the sprites, so I made a base Fiend sprite with white color and then tinted the sprite for each Fiends (excluding Pride, he has a variation of player sprite).

What went wrong?

These are all the consequences of the game not being tested by someone else before submission.

* Deadliest sin of this game was the large colliders, like the one on left. Game became much better when colliders became like right, but this happened in post-jam version. Large colliders made the game much harder and disrupted the flow of the movement. * It was too loud, because I was too tired and forgot to test the game with my headphones. Not only I reduced the volumes in post-jam, but also added volume rolloff to fire projectiles, so the distant explosions would have low/no sound. * I didn't have energy left to add polishes like screenshake or projectile animation upon submission. I dislike the zombie sprites, but at least they do the work. * Pixelbleeding on the tilemap. Still unresolved in the post-jam.

Here is the Ludum Dare page

As this is a Compo game, source code is available.

I've finally gotten the time to really get to rating games, so leave yours in the comments and I'll get to it in the next couple days. And if you want to rate mine in the meantime, you can play "daydream" here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/daydream

Hey there! After lots of positive feedback we decided to keep working on our game Plaguebringers (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/plaguebringers) and have a full release in the future. We wanted to ask what kind of features would expect there to be? The obvious improvements for now are optimization (lots of it) and bug fixes. But what concerns major gameplay features we plan:

• Rework current gameplay into an "endless" mode.
• Add a campaign with an actual story.
• More rats.
• More enemies.
• Major rebalancing to make the game actually challenging.
• Environmental damage.
• Possible MP support????
• Upgrades to rats themselves (new diseases maybe?)

What would YOU add to this list? We want to hear your opinion! ^^

I've added difficulty levels to choose from! Also a lot of bug fixes of course. Available now on itch as HTML5 and Windows executable.

While I don't think Tug Of Slime is too easy or too hard I do think that this game is difficult to actually lose since once the enemy is at your base you have quite the advantage because you can stack your slimes there and killing just one of the opponent's slimes will always give you enough mana to at least spawn one more slime to fight for you. I am not sure if and how I want to prevent that and even if I do find a way I think the worst that can happen is a static battle where no one really wins. Unless of course you deliberately lose or forget to spend your mana or use your spells. Yea....

It's difficult to get this right and I am not sure yet where I want to go with this, so I've released it as is for now and will wait for more feedback.

Changelog 0.3

• Added difficulty options
• Decreased kill rewards slightly
• Increased wizard health by 100%
• Various improvements to UI
• Fixed slimes sometimes not queuing up correctly
• Changed some particle colors
• Improved slime rendering
• Improved and fixed slime attack animations
• Improvemed audio system
• Fixed 2x Esc not quitting game
• Fixed opponent not using spells correctly
• Fixed game restart not working correctly after game over
• Fixed a bunch of other bugs
• Various other small improvements and balancing changes

Known bugs: - Rarely slimes cross each other when they should fight in front of each other instead.

Thought I'd share some enemy designs and background elements, some of which didn't make it in the jam build

if you wanna check out our game you can Try it here

We uploaded an improved version of the game but we're still working through some bugs. If you still haven't please play out card-based platformer and let us know of any fixes we can make! We were very happy with the project but still want to polish it :)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/creepy-crawlers

Hey there! I will just get right to the point here... I started tinkering with Visual Novel dialogue systems and the like, the entire system is almost completely done minus the cutscene controller which is just the intricate wiring of movement and text, should be simple to make...

However I was wondering since John's Visage (My LD entry) uses an old aweful design that adds limitational flaws to the system, should I invest time into upgrading the system and the game a bit or do I stick with the OG system and just fix or change a few bits?

I know this is mostly up to me to decide but I always liked input from other people, so I appreciate all inputs in advance!

New day new us, morning morning fellas jammers! It's been a week since the deadline and what do we have now? Bunch of cool games were played, new faces unlocked, old faces remembered and yet 12 days to go! Huge ranking party this period, so don't forget to play DEMANAGER! (or this silly dwarf (we hired him) will be pointing at you)

PLAY HERE!!!

We are really happy and grateful that our Summon Inn has received the highest amount of ratings from all game we have made for LD jams. :champagne_glass:

And we also received a lot of valuable feedback and reactions, thank you very much! :clap:

I've seen amazing games so far. While ours won't be a competition for many of them maybe you feel challenged to defeat as many waves as you can! We would love to see your highscores :)

Click Here To Play