Call her out in our game! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/poizon-pets

Hey everybody!

It's me again, Kepsert, Giraffe fanatic, and developer of the compo game named Phasebound (markup links don't seem to work atm, will get back to it soon? Phasebound

I just wanted to share a couple of thoughts when it comes to level design. First some basics:

• Besides the main mechanic, I have a total of 4 actual gimmicks.
• These gimmicks are spread out over a total of 15 levels.

Now, the levels are pretty short, but it's still quite some content to go through (most of the time is taken from the fact that main mechanic is rather uncommon). Now, one of the things I struggled with the most was anti-cheesing these levels. Making players follow the intended route as much as possible. How am I, in a game that gives the player almost unlimited freedom to travel all over the screen as they choose, during a compo that only lasts 48 hours and with basically no playtesting, going to get rid of as much potential cheese?

Well, I sat on this for a long time, approximately 2 minutes, when I came to an answer which I will now share as a tip to y'all:

• I don't

Players are going to find cheese. Players are going to find skips. We use the data of those moments to either patch it out, or leave it in for speedrunner purposes (especially if it doesn't ruin the game from a casual perspective). Instead, for the jam, I made sure that potential places that would allow for cheese (mostly due to my own design flaws, 48 hours isn't a lot of time!) would not end in a softlock.

I welcome you to try different routes, find speedrun strats, find skips, and share them! Found anything cool that seems off from the recommend path? GIF or record it and drop it in the comments at Phasebound

Anyway- if you haven't yet and you're looking for a platformer that people seem to enjoy (commenters would never lie, now, would they!?): give my game a try. It's called Phasebound and it's got a giraffe.

PS. Looking forward to the end of the jam deadline- will be playing through games on stream tomorrow after work and then most of Wednesday. Good luck to y'all on the final stretch!

This is some kind of development log for Diablillos (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/diablillos), my compo entry for Ludum Dare #55.

During the weekend, I took a few notes, recorded gameplay in GIFs and posted on social media, so I'll try to recreate what the development was like.

This has been my first jam after a 3-year hiatus, so I've been quite rusty. However, I'm happy I got to submit a finished game, and I even could squeeze an in-game tutorial.

I used PICO-8 for development, so that meant a 128x128 display size and a 16-color palette.

You can play and rate the game here:

Saturday

I usually like to do a mind map to brainstorm game ideas, but this time I kinda "saw" the game while I was having a walk outdoors. I got back home and drew the thing:

The main mechanic would be some kind of siege/linear "tower defense" in which you would summon an army of imps and had to defeat your rival's one. My vision was this game to be strategic, but it would end up being arcade-y instead. I'll elaborate on that later.

The first thing I did was to drew an imp (diablillo in Spanish) with a simple 2-frame animation and post it on Twitter to get feedback —I really want the imp to be really cute! People loved it so I didn't change the graphic.

Then I just changed the color to create enemy imps, and made them fight each other when they got close enough.

After that I drew some towers to serve as "goal points" for the imps to reach. And of course, some juicy screenshake 😎

I went to bed feeling that I didn't achieve much —which was true—, and set a short-term goal to try to have a complete gameplay loop (and possibly upload a playable build) before Sunday lunch.

Sunday

The towers felt kinda wrong for imp summoners, so I revamped them so they felt more… warlock-y. And drew the summoners too! I also coded a button (PICO-8 doesn't have built-in UI primitives) and a "purchase" system to summon imps at will… as long as you can afford it.

I didn't get my goal of having the full gameplay loop before lunch, but I carried on nevertheless. In the afternoon, I added some health bars, along with an icon to make them more intuitive. For the icons, I had to draw a smaller version of an already small 8x8 sprite, so that was a bit of a challenge.

And at last, in the evening, I finally achieved the final implementation of the core mechanic. I had to switch the style of games for a more high-pace, arcade feeling (strategic mechanics require more time to balance and playtest). Now instead of planning what to purchase (I originally wanted the player to summon different kinds of creatures), the gameplay revolved around collecting souls (the "coins" to purchase imps) and spawning minions as fast as possible.

It was a bit after 7pm (CEST), I wanted to go to sleep before midnight, and there was a lot of polish to add.

I started by adding a start screen, which was almost identical to the gameplay screen, but with a title, which I drew in gothic characters and added a palette roll effect to it.

Then I created the victory and game over screens (which are identical but with the text copy changed), and coded the win and lose conditions.

It was 11pm and I still had a lot of polish to do. However, I wanted to stick to my goal of not going over midnight, so I had to choose between adding a music track or a tutorial. I opted for the tutorial, since I already included some basic SFX and it wasn't too bad, and the tutorial could explain the mechanic to players.

To implement the tutorial I used different levels, and that code logic was re-usable to make different levels as well. So I put a cap of 5 levels (tutorial included), with increasing difficulty (basically the higher the level, the more imps the enemy can spawn).

And that was a wrap! If you got this far, thanks for reading! :) I hope this post was entertaining or inspiring.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/$384728

Finally finished my entry >> The Arrangement << Give it a shot here!

Alright, despite being confident yesterday I could get collision and pathfinding done with a hacky method that wouldn't take all day instead I've been stuck bugfixing it for hours and I'm ready to call this a failure. I think I'm 1-2 hours away from fixing the pathfinding and then I'd probably be up until 2am tonight before the game was ready to play. Instead I think I want to salvage the rest of my day before I'm back at work tomorrow.

In the past I have promised to finish up the game post-jam but in reality I don't find the time/motivation for that so this time I'm just admitting failure and moving on.

Here's the last screenshot of hybrid "turn-based real-time" strategy game. I finally got some proper art in so at least looks a lot better today:

So I had a streak of successful Ludum Dare's making narrative driven adventure games, but I stretched myself these past two to make strategy games. Both have failed and both for the same reason. I think with a more mechanically driven game you need to have the core of it playable and fun quickly and then be building on it all weekend. Although both times I did focus on getting the core gameplay up and running first, it wasn't fun on its own, and so I spent the rest of the weekend building more to try and make it interesting. Hoping it would all come together in the end.

So for future jams I'm going to take one of two paths: - Return to narrative adventure and puzzling solving games. They're my comfortable zone and I know what I'm doing there and can get it done fast. - Build something mechanical around a fun central core and don't try to add depth and complexity if the core alone isn't interesting already.

A humbling weekend especially as I'm now on a 2 jam losing stream. However it's all good learning for what will hopefully be future wins!

Summon forest creatures to save your island from the evil villagers!!

Play here!!

Hi GameDevs,

I will stream on Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/schw3de) and play some LudumDare games. Join the stream and I will play yours.

Greetz da schw3de

Come hang and we will play your game! https://www.twitch.tv/tavernratstudios

Hey everyone! We're finally done with our Jam entry! Please give it a try and let us know how you feel about it! The crafty masterchef Nuki needs your help to solve some puzzles on his way to escape! Summon the goblin Mr. Kobi using a magical cookbook to help you on your task! Our Game Page

Just uploaded my game 'The Summoner Stone' to itch.io

Here is a video of some of the game play

https://youtube.com/live/NngVV8c_BA8

Our musician can relax, he did everything to ensure that the game had a fun rhythm and many different sounds. We hope our game brings a lot of fun!

After a decent amount of work and lack of sleep, finally it is done and I can head to bed! Hopefully nothing critically wrong is found with the game, but knowing our luck, someone is gonna break something.

Anyways, it was a good jam with my friends, I hope everyone else had a good jam, and be sure to get some good well deserved rest!

I have managed to finish a game a for game jam! Next year I'll try to make something good :laughing:

Just kidding, I'm reasonably happy with how it turned out, but not for me to say!

Introducing Shape Defender!

Game Page

Good luck to everyone else still crunching those last hours!

I will return tomorrow to start rating.

hi its my birthday and iam gonna be lazy so my project gonna be in extra, also being in extra i can make it extra cool so that will be cool and its cool

right now i just got basic one of the mechanisms working and its getting going.. so thats cool it is also inspired by this other jam here : https://itch.io/jam/asset-jam-2024-by-pixigb the idea was to limit myself to just 1 simple asset for artwork this Kenney pack: https://kenney.nl/assets/1-bit-pack iam into 3d so i made it 3d and doing something with the ludum dare theme of Summoning.

i guess its kinda sorta like populous but not really lol idk what its gonna be iam just playing around, intend to be mostly done by April 23rd .. at least to a cool enough spot .. for that other jam's deadline.

Long weekend of ups, downs, and second-guessing, but I actually finished my game and submitted it. It's a very simple game called Me Want Donut!

Going to relax a bit and then work on a Post Mortem post later.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/me-want-donut