While I was able to produce something playable this Ludum Dare, it was not one of my favorites. I failed to manage the time and scope of my project. As a result my entry falls far short of my goal.

When the theme was announced I brainstormed three ideas:
1) A 2d platformer where the player shifts between two parallel planes of existence. By touching an enemy the player is either kills it or is killed by it depending on if the player is in the correct plane.
2) A top down tower defense game where monsters appear through portals (to connected worlds). The player needs to survive a set period of time.
3) A 3d platformer where in a surreal floating dream scape. The player would collect journal pages as they explore the 3d level.

I went with the third one, in part because I had been wanting to do a game like this for a while, but also because I would not have to program enemies. The collectable Journal pages would allow me to add some flavor to the world and do some basic tutorial stuff.
After settling on a concept I dreamed up a feature list that included Momentum based air movement, bouncy blocks, moving platforms, and wind patterns. The wind patterns were going to be the main feature of this game, allowing the player to rise on up currents and glide about the level. I spent a lot of time implementing the wind system and the particle effects that the player would use to visualize it.

I spent Friday night programming the movement, platforms, and wind system. I planned on having the core game play done by Saturday morning. Then I could spend all of Saturday afternoon doing art. Sunday would be reserved for making levels. The schedule began to slip when I spent a good chunk of Saturday refining the wind system and making the journal/portal code. I finished up the level art assets Saturday night on schedule. When I awoke Sunday I felt the need to mess around with the code some more. The first real level I had made was behaving oddly, and I had to go back and fix several bugs. I didn’t get to proper level creation until 4 hours before contest end.

Ultimately I managed to make two levels that would instruct the player in how to use the jumping, double jumping and moving platforms. I had wanted to make 1 level for each of the game features. As the player mastered each feature they would be able to explore more of the central hub level and discover more levels and journal entries.

What went Right:
* I used tools I was very familiar with: Unity3D, GIMP, and Blender. I was able to bash out the core of my game play and art in very little time.
* Picked an idea that involved dynamic movement (one of my favorite things to program)
* I kept my art style consistent and did not try and steal textures from google image search.

What Went Wrong:
* Did not allocate enough time for level design.
* Did too much playtesting on a non level.
* Focused too heavily on features that would never be implemented.

Conclusions:
I managed to produce a good prototype for a game concept that has been lurking in the back of my head for ages. For games like this movement dynamics and level design are make or break the experience. I focused too heavily on the first and neglected the second.

Hello there! I am Dmqza, I joined 1-2 days ago. I wanted to upload a game to the Ludum Dare 30, but I started after the entries closed. You will see it on the third page of the warmup weekend games, titled ‘Warmup Entry That Was Supposed To Be A Ludum Dare 30 Game’. I hope you enjoy it. But it is not very good, so maybe not. Anyway, to sum it all up: I’m new here, can’t upload my game, in the warmup, not very good. Bye! P.S: LD30 seemed like the most interesting one. But now it’s (the entries are) over.

Tags: introduction

AFTER you’ve played and commented on my game, you can feast your eyes on this mosaic ↓

↑ Your game is in that parrot! You just have to find it… happy hunting

I picked a parrot picture because in my game there are still some wild animals to be found on the map in some of the jungles… happy hunting there too

You may also like my interactive map of Ludum Dare participants ↓

Its really really fun to watch your pins appear on the map when you play my game, and light up and reveal the ahem annotated map as you comment on other LD30 games!

Please do comment on my game too so you light up my map when I play my game! That’d be the nicest compliment of all.

This isn’t the first mosaic I’ve made for this Ludum Dare 30; you may also enjoy hunting for your entry in this map:

Ludum Dare 30 has been a very unique experience for me. It’s shown me my abilities and limits in game development. It’s been a whole lot of fun rating everyone else’s game, too. Great ideas out there.

I believe I did very well for my first Ludum Dare, check out my entry,  Alternation:

Click me

Thanks for all the feedback by the way! Please rate if you can on Kongregate because I am getting few ratings.

Now, I made numerous mistakes and wrong turns with my entry, but I also did some great things with it. Here’s how Ludum Dare weekend basically went along:

Before the theme was announced, I was focused on making a 3d game with Unity, preferably a platformer. I also wanted to enter in the Jam.

When the theme was announced, I immediately started to brainstorm for ideas, among these ideas:

• A top-down where you have to get to other planets by shooting other spaceships.
• A platformer where you travel through dimensions to a goal.
• An FPS where you shoot things that attack you (so unique).

I went with the second one and I begun to make a prototype. I decided to make the entry a puzzle fps without combat, much like Portal (couldn’t help it, love that game so much). The prototype took a couple hours to get to a point where it functioned. I then began to build the first level.

Upon finishing this level I determined the core gameplay, the ability to switch between dimensions by clicking. I started to work on level two when I realized I should introduce a new gameplay feature. I did just that with the addition of levers. I later added “death blocks” to level four. I made six levels in total, and play tested them multiple times.

I finally got to a point where I liked the feel and mood of the game and I submitted it around 8:00 pm Sunday. I thought the game was decent enough for Kongregate, so that’s where I hosted it.

After release, I slowly received feedback and I saw the good and bad of my game. Feel free to read the list:

The Good:

• The audio I used was completely awesome. Thanks to audionautix.com.
• The dimension switching was (almost) free of bugs.
• The puzzles proved to be challenging.

The Bad:

• The puzzles turned out to be a bit too difficult and awkward for some people.
• Only six levels are present, sorry guys.
• Most of the levels rely on parkour/reflex skills, which was a really bad move.

Overall, this was a great first Ludum Dare for me, hope you all like my entry and do well with yours!

Thanks for reading and extra thanks to everyone who posted feedback! See ya!

Tags: #LD48 #LD30

I made an HTML5 version but when I try to put it online the screen never loads any thoughts its just a black screen that says created with gamemaker sometimes I get a Browser doesnt support canvas error.  here is my link maybe im just stupid please let me know if it works.  Also any better way than dropbox to load a game??

shttps://www.dropbox.com/s/aqxlgzugrbwm7gf/index.html?dl=0

A week ago I was just finishing up the most ambitious game jam project I’ve done to date. Compared to projects I’ve worked on in the past, Voyage of the Magpie is less immediately rewarding – there’s no jumping, no shooting, and no skill points to spend. There are, on the other hand, coins to pick up, mazes to run, tickets to manage, and click-heavy mini-games. The goal of the project was to create a set of three smaller games that were somehow connected to meet the theme requirement for “connected worlds.” As a secondary (but more obvious) nod to the theme, the game involves navigating a network of interconnected locations all over the world to find lost treasure.

In the over world section of the game, the player flies their zeppelin from location to location by using tickets associated with those destinations. The tickets are consumed, but more can be purchased in cities or found in mazes. Tickets sort of represent leads on where treasure might be. At non-city locations the player will run a procedurally generated maze in either a temple or jungle setting. Gold, scrap metal, and tickets are gathered in the maze, which must be navigated before the sun sets. The more damaged your zeppelin, the less time you have to run the maze. Barriers in the maze are chopped through with the heroine’s machete, which dulls with use. In the third section of the game, the player attempts to repair their zeppelin and machete before setting out again to explore the unknown. The only way to succeed at the game is to be good at planning your moves, navigating mazes, and rapidly completing tasks. These different jobs are supposed to feel like different “worlds” to the player.

What went wrong:

Conveyance

Conceptually, the game was way too ambitious for a 72-hour jam. It was terrifying to work on because you can’t really get a feel for what the final game experience will be like while building THREE GAMES at once. It started to come together at the end of Sunday, but just barely. Though the end product was playable, there was no time to implement a tutorial. Given the complex inter-connection of the game phases, a tutorial was sorely needed – or at least better conveyance of what the connections were so the player could discover it themselves.

As a brief summary, here’s how the player was intended to see the connection between zeppelin condition and time in the maze: on the over world a zeppelin condition bar is on the far left. When entering a maze the bar on the far left is at roughly the same location but is now a sun icon.

Hopefully they would also see their machete condition lowering as they chopped through the jungle and would notice it improving during the repair phase. The biggest oversight was not adequately showing the player how to use scrap metal. The repair screen features a prominent central symbol that the player is meant to click to extend the timer. Unfortunately, the button is a baked-in image I was unable to give an effect when hovering over. Also, the timer and metal display are so small and far away from the button that even if the player were to press it they would likely not notice what it did.

Conveyance Again

Some minor cuts were item pickup sound effects and walking animations. More seriously lacking was a statement of the overall goal – find the Golden Magpie in the city of El Dorado. Without knowing when the game would end, players got confused. That combined with an ear-piercing sound whenever you try to sharpen your machete made for an unintentionally grating experience.

Yet More Conveyance

The least amount of work went into the maze-running section of the game. I shied away from working on it even though I knew that everyone would see that as the “main” game mostly because I didn’t know how I’d be trying to populate those mazes. In the end it was too big of a problem to tackle last and I ended up with the system you see – one gold piece per room, with either metal or a ticket at each dead end. I didn’t put an explicit end to the maze since I wanted the run to be timed. This was also a problem of conveyance, since the player could explore a really small maze and have to sit and do nothing for about 30 seconds. Pressing Enter will skip to the repair phase when the player is done exploring, but with no visual button I had to try to tell the player in the comments. I intended to auto-transition the scene by counting loot left in the maze, but abandoned this idea due to time constraints.

What went right:

Novel Systems

While working on disparate parts of the game in parallel was scary since the fun couldn’t be seen until much later, it did allow for me to squeeze as much productivity out of myself as possible. Once I was sick of working on one thing I could switch attention to something entirely different, which was nice. Also, despite the lack of tutorial I’m fairly happy with the systems that emerged. They play off each other in an interesting way, encouraging the player to be close to larger mazes to maximize the amount of time they have to explore them, and to plan their ticket usage.

Shops

I’m also happy that I was able to get a shop system implemented. It’s cumbersome to try to buy multiple copies of the same item, but pulling off click-toggled menus wasn’t easy to begin with.

New version

After finishing a jam with a lot left to do, I like to go ahead and make improvements  in a version with “Super” at the start if its name. I’ve tried to address many of the conveyance problems stated above in Super Voyage of the Magpie, as well as recording some sound effects for item pickup. I’ve also color-coded the locations by tier, so that the player knows how close they’re getting to the end. Higher tiers provide better tickets, with El Dorado as a possible drop on the top tier. From lowest to highest, the tiers are white, blue, and purple, with El Dorado a golden/orange color. After checking out the LD30 submission I hope you’ll check out the improved version too!

Hi there,

Not sure whether to say something or not.  But I am somewhat frustrated…
I’ve been assiduously rating Web browser playable games since competition ended.  Probably looking at about 80 per day, based on playing for between 30 seconds (if game doesn’t work, or is very incomplete – in which case not rating but leaving a comment ‘not yet rated’ and explaining why), or playing for up to 20-30 minutes when completely engrossed, which doesn’t happen often. Then I’ve been trying to leave a thoughtful comment based on my experience.

I freely admit I’m bad at twitchy and ‘hard’ games, but try to leave an honest comment.  My own game is probably a reasonable mid to average (48h) quality of game, based on my very personally biased view of course… however hard I try to be objective!

I’ve been swapping 1st place on the coolness ladder with Mallot1 for a few days… Not trying to outdo, but just overtaking sometimes, then he/she overtakes me back.

Last night Mallot1 rated 500 games!!!
Approximately the same as we had each managed to rate in 8 days (since the main competition closed last week).  I don’t think I could even look and read the webpages for 500 games in the 10-12 hours elapsed when Mallot1 went from 495 (approx) to 1030.

Is this reasonable ?

I’ve been a bit stressed since… Have I been trying to hard to rate games ? Is it best to just carry on with development and stop looking at my peer group at work ?

I’ve been back and forth about whether to say something.  It really isn’t that important to me to be first on coolness, I was mainly just enjoying making a list of things I need to get better at programming and design-wise, while playing and rating lots and lots of games.  I wasn’t even expecting to feature on the cool list, but as I’m currently out of work it seems that my free time has enabled this to happen.

Should I have said something or not ??  Am I taking it too seriously… and other self-doubt.  Hmmm….
Would appreciate your thoughts.

< /rant>

After you’ve played my game, you can feast your eyes on these stats ↓

As my game scrapes the LD30 game contest entries, I gather a lot of stats about who comments on whom.  And, I believe, comments are a good proxy for playings and ratings.

We’re over a week into the 3 week voting time, and already the activity on the site has dropped significantly.

Here’s the comments over time (PDT):

The high peaks are at 12 noon each day; it seems people play and rate in their lunch hours!  Even as the number of comments per hour drops steadily, it still has a local maximum at 12 noon each day.

I know I play, rate and comment during my lunch breaks … but I’m not in the PDT timezone.

In fact, I have the supposed location of 617 players so far (seen my game?) so I could actually do an ok job of determining the local time they comment, and perhaps its not their lunchtimes?  I may do this…

I was expecting the comment rate to pick up again at the weekend, but seemingly not.

There are 2,539 entries, of which 1,044 are jam entries and 1,495 are 48-hour comp.

There are a staggering 43,495 comments!

3,536 of those comments are replies by the entry author, commenting on their own entry.

764 of those comments were posted by 365 Ludum Darers who didn’t enter LD30.

18 entries have no comments at all, and 1 entry has only the entrant commenting.  Sad!  I’ll put a list at the end so you can go do something about it!

The top-10 commented-on games (so far) are:

212 Close Your Eyes – nonetheless (Web, Source)

195 Sinister – Joe Williamson (Web, Source)

187 Heart Star – AdventureIslands (Web, Source)

175 Connecting LD30 to the Real World – Will Edwards (Web, Source)

161 Chipset-0 – deepnight (Play (flash), Source (Haxe), Timelapse (soon))

153 Waterfly Octus – gillenew (Web, Source)

136 Starpiercer – Schrodinger Games (Web, Windows, OS/X, Linux)

133 NOODLE FEELING – Magdev (Web)

128 Super Alien Bro – nerd burglars (Web, Linux)

128 This Little Piggy… – InfectionTeam (Web, Windows, OS/X, Linux, Behind the Scenes Video)

The top-10 commenters are:

530 ConnectTheWorlds – mrexcessive (Web – HTML5, Source)

234 Salvation – 43iscoding (Web, Source)

220 Star Tycoons – MechanicMoon (HTML5 (Web), Windows, Android)

216 Data-Man – Hyoga-3D (Web, Linux)

200 Super Alien Bro – nerd burglars (Web, Linux)

180 Connected Retro Worlds – yodamaster (Web, Source)

180 Alice Anxiety – jukimv1986 (Web, Windows (21mb))

175 Abstrakt – ViliX (Windows | Linux | OS/X | Source (Java), Walkthrough (Youtube))

174 Close Your Eyes – nonetheless (Web, Source)

161 Where Did The Stars Go? – mechabit (Web (Unity), Tumblr, Twitter, Website)

And the following 19 have no comments at all

< Alien Defense – swipefaststudios (Windows)

< Schizoscreenia – nothke (Web, Windows)

< Either Side of The Power Cord – oobie (Windows, Source (.gmx))

< Temp Placeholder! – Filth and Money (Web)

< Crossover – Lafolie (Love, Windows)

< WhaleCommander – wolfengange (OS/X)

< Dependant – Abominas (Web)

< don’t touch red blocks – chadheim (Web, Source)

< The Plague – Zim the Fox (Source, READ BELOW!)

< Dependancy – Colecf (Source)

< Boffin Battle – ClocktowerGames (Web, Windows, OS/X, Linux)

< HappyGreetings – Tadepex (Web)

< dude – spx (Windows (OpenGL 3.3, x86), Source)

< TheyAreWatching – goodbyeworldwill (Web)

< Loopzilla – Bernhard (Windows (167kb ZIP), Source)

< Gravity – kaitokidi (uep, Windows, Linux, Source)

< Nile Delta – Auron2030 (Windows, Source)

< Monochrome – Monochrome (Web)

< Dragon Theatre – vipper (Web)

Do something about it!

Our game, this time, was started in a different way. I would like to make a action game, with explosions, funny controls and a charismatic character. I like this kind of game, and I like make this kind of game. When the theme was shown, the brainstorm started and my idea for the game was a guy who connect islands. Get resources, put on the right way and done! Of course, some island would have enemies or NPCs. So, the coder decide to participate with me, and he want to make a game about aliens who abduct cows or others things. So we stop. We had two good games! And then, like others jams, we decide start again. Always we have a idea we think “maybe some other dev will make the same, so let to do a different game. New. Something we never made”. I like play music. I didn’t play very well but computers can make magic! And we start the LudumDare30 with a experimental game for us. A music game. We use the metaphor about our connections with the universe, the noise of informations that go away to the void. (A good movie start with this purpose). Universal Feelings was, for me, who rate a lot of these LD30 games, something unique (for now). And it’s a great thing! We get what we want! A different game! Of course, he isn’t a perfect. The music didn’t sync, we try to made a easy game and it still difficult for someone… It’s a simple gender to make but difficult to be well made. To do some game with sync, and complete music would use more the 72h just for that, but it’s ok. The game have 21 achievements, a progressive difficult, a lot of sounds, and the planets Spin! (no… they don’t, but the light work very well) That is our game, for this LD30. Universal Feelings. Enjoy!

————————

Tags: LD30, postmortem

When the theme of current Ludum Dare was announced, and I read it in the morning, I was kinda puzzled. Even though I voted for it in the final round, I couldn’t come up with any ideas that felt original and  were possible to realize in such limited time span. Which worlds can be connected? The world of living and the world of the dead? The world of rich and the world of poor? The world of dreams and the real world?  It also turned out, that I didn’t have almost any time to work on Saturday, and hope for finishing a game for the compo was lost. So I was a bit discouraged by lack of time and ideas, and was not even sure if I should participate at all.

But I’ve missed previous LD and was eagerly awaiting for this one, so I pulled myself together and started making the freaking game. I decided to stop wandering between ideas in fruitless search for the perfect one and settled with the idea of connection between real and imaginary worlds in child’s vivid imagination.

When I was a child, things around were never ordinary. Take a stick from the ground, and it turns into a mighty sword. And a crooked stump in the forest is actually a scary monster. You are not just a kid, but a superhero with limitless powers! You can fly, you can lift mountains and become invisible. There’s no definite border between reality and imagination. So in the game I tried to show how ordinary things trigger child’s imagination, and how it turns usual trip to school into exciting adventure.

For development I chose Flash, because I thought it would be faster to put stuff together there then in Unity. It still works well for rapid game development and allows to quickly add some graphics and animations, though sometimes I felt regret about this choice.

After making the basic setup for character movement I started drawing some stuff. I wanted to go with some unusual graphic style, but there was no time for experiments so I just settled with something plain and cartoony. At some point I also considered making trixel graphics as I did in my previous LD game, but then discarded this idea for some reason (I don’t actually remember why). And I didn’t want to work with pixel-art, because I don’t have much experience with it and, well, I feel like it is a bit overused nowadays (sorry guys).

When I started making music I got and idea to make different tracks for each part of the game but with the same melody. I still think it was a good idea, though now I don’t really like the melody. It sounds fine in real world and, probably, in fantasy world (the last one), but other versions don’t sound good for me anymore.

Eventually, I’ve managed to finish the game and submitted it for the jam. Unfortunately, I was too tired to notice and fix major gameplay issues and the game ended up being too difficult. And the biggest problem was that the most difficult level was the first one (at the same time being the one with the worst visuals), so most people couldn’t even see anything beyond that point.  So on the next day I uploaded the “cheat” post-jam version, where the character was invincible during first level. It didn’t fix everything but at least made the game more beatable (though some people sad that they finished the original version without much problem ).

It is my general issue with game development. I tend to focus on aesthetics rather than on gameplay, even though I realize it is wrong approach. But I’ll learn to keep things in balance, I promise

You can play the game here.

Thanks for reading! Share your thoughts in comments here or get in touch on Twitter.

Tags: LD30, ld48, post-portem, postmortem

Seeing as there is another graph a few posts down, I thought I may as well post mine for LD#30
It shows the current vote distribution across all entries, ‘frequency’ being the number of entries with ‘value’ votes.

You can add your user name to the image url to show where your game is on the graph.
The graph updates itself so is always current.

And wow that is a horrible graph, at the time of posting there is apparently someone who has rated 1030 games, and 744 people haven’t rated any. Perhaps I should modify the it to disregard outliers.

Edit: Added an ignore parameter scale the graph a bit. set to zero to see the full graph. Alternatively you can use maxvalue= and maxfrequency= to manually scale the graph. Perhaps I should make I fully interactive…

— I know this post is looong, but I would be so happy if you would read it and maybe comment your thoughts —

So I finished my game very tight to the deadline, but I finished it! YAY

About the game

So you are an (evil) empire that wants to take over the universe. You start by choosing your own name such as “Ludum Dare Galaxy Empire”, “Das Dritte Reich”, “Little Tim’s Multi-World Domination”, “DPRK” or something else creative for you to come up with. (HAS TO BE EVIL) To connect worlds to your empire, make a spaceship by resources and start connecting!

–> Play Universe Connector here <–

Bad beginning

First of all I started making the game too late. I stayed up all night and waited for the theme to be announced at 3:00 (danish time) and went to sleep after that. I woke up at about 13:00 and was kind of too lazy to get up and start Ludum Dare’ing. So I got some food and started making a game. I thought I would use Unity, but I just wasted my first hours to find out my idea was too hard to make (I have only made one game in Unity before…) So… I ended up using Game Maker: Studio like last time, and I had to come up with a new idea…

The thumbnail for my game

The progress

Time passed and I finally had an idea but it was kind of unclear, so I started by making the graphics. I worked and worked and checked twitter and facebook and worked and checked youtube and worked and got distracted again and worked and so on. When it was around 4:00 and I decided to get some sleep my game wasn’t even near a game yet. Half time; not at all half done. The next day I was a bit more concentrated, but my idea wasn’t clear enough yet. I made some sketches on paper to get a better overview of what my game was about. I worked a lot without being sure what the game would turn in to. But around 6 hours before deadline I thought my idea was done enough, and I just had to finish the game too.

The original idea:

At that point my idea was something like: You have a planet. The population grows and there is a maximum number of people the Earth has room for, so you have to get the population over to other planets. To get to different planets you need spaceships, you make by resources. The Earth also has an amount of resourses that grows. There are different planets, that have different: number of spaceships needed to connect, speed of getting resources and max capacity of people. So you had to populate all the planets without getting overpopulated and getting a lot of resources.

But… All I had done at that time was: The system for getting resources and population, displaying everything over the planet, and upgrading and buying stuff. Now I just needed to make the player able to connect to the other planets by using the spaceships… And long story short: I used some hours to figure out how to “copy” the system to more planets and ended up not getting it to work. So it was 2-3 hours before deadline I only had one working planet, and no connection-stuff.

The final one:

So… I changed the idea totally, so you just connected to other worlds with spaceships, and it just said “connected”, instead of the idea of every planet having different population, stuff to upgrade, buttons etc. And by doing that the “population” thing would make no sense, so I removed that too.

So the deadline came closer and I worked as fast as I could. I remembered there was also the “submission hour” and quick made some music, and finished the game itself in the last 10 minutes of the submission hour (Yes, it was technically over deadline, but fuck it…). I uploaded it, and did the porting after the deadline. SLEEP. The next day I made the thumbnail and uploaded the source.

Conclusion

The game:

I feel okay about the final result, but the game turned out to be a bit boring… Overall this was probably the worst – out of 2 LD compos, and 4 total game jams I participated in – game I’ve made. But again, it’s okay; A nice little game.

Looking forward to see the results!

What I’ll do better next:

Next time I will work more focused instead of the on/off-work as I did this time. Get up. Food. Jam.

I will learn Unity more, and test some ideas before the compo starts AKA do the warm-up weekend, so I’m ready to make a game.

Timelapse / follow

Soming soon – follow me on Twitter and YouTube to keep updated.

I made it with ChronoLapse, nice software!

How to know you have played my game too long (will not happen, you’ll quit) also, Israel took over the universe :(

Tags: 2D, final, game, LD30, post-mortem, postmortem

Since more than a few people had problems getting past the first or second level in my game, I decided to post a video of the full game played through with no deaths. I did keep one in though, because it was hilarious. 😉 Should be useful for people who don’t want to spend forever becoming mega pros to see the whole thing!

You can check out the post mortem here if you’re interested in how I accidentally made a sequel to my LD27 game, or if you haven’t tried playing the game yet you can have a go here!

This is my fourth ‘best of’ post. Hereafter I’m abandoning the categorised approach, or else I’ll risk leaving shit out. Please do check out my past posts: the best romantic/erotic games, the best sci-fi games, and a mini-feature on a fascinating little game titled Any Moment.

Where Are Your Friends Tonight — This is one of those games that many people can doubtless relate to. Who hasn’t been moving on in life, finding out that you’re no longer tethered to certain friends as once was the case. Reunions become loquacious bouts of nostalgia but nothing more, until gradually the people you once new most intimately just fade from your life. And it’s all done with nice-looking graphics and a simple, accessible social network-esque interface.

Circling Circles and Oval Opposites — These are two of a perfect pair. Apparently both developers know eachother and decided to pair up to create two “connected”, thematically similar games set in the same world. Probably one of the most inventive takes on the theme I’ve seen. And the games work really well too. They’re minimalist, casual games with distinctive designs and moods.

Familiaris — A gorgeous Twine game — both visually and narratively — centred round  a dog and his owner. It’s all written from the dog’s perspective, which makes for an interesting, and ultimately engaging experience that I can heartily recommend.

Intranet — Another Twine game, but this one’s much more creepy than it is cute. And it uses the theme wonderfully. I don’t really want to say much more. You’re better off playing this one without any foreknowledge.

A Ludic Proof of the Difficulties Inherent in Finding a Proper Skull — Few! That’s one hell of a title. And it’s one hell of a game too. Like with the last one, I’m going to reserve to right to say no more. Narrative-based games like this are best played with a wholly unaffected mindset, I think. Just go play it. (You might not get it immediately though. It has a fascinating, but at first kind of subtle, take on the theme.)

Connecting — An involving conversation game written with utter believability, and set against pleasant graphics and atmospheric audio. You are texting your partner after a trip visiting a past love (or old fling; it’s not overly clear, nor does it need to be). The text messages can take multiple directions, and all the one’s I’ve found are engaging and affecting.

Alice Anxiety — Beautiful artwork, stunningly moodful music and notably interactive for a visual novel. Sadly, the game is very much still in embryonic form — just as things start to get really interesting, it ends. The developer obviously ran out of time. But what is here will keep you engaged, just be prepared for a lacklustre ending. I truly hope a post-Jam version is in the making.

And if you want to play my game, you can visit its page here. If you leave a comment I can promise I’ll check out your game and repay the favour. It just might take me a couple of days, considering my to-play list is expanding at a stupid rate.

And also because (self-serving plug coming up) I’m a bit distracted with the RuinJam 2014, for which I entered A Tale of the Cave, a hyperlink-based hardcore-but-short cave-crawl nearly entirely written using William McGonagall’s tremendously inept poetry. And I intend to make another game for jam in the next few days. I encourage anyone else interested to join me in ruing the game industry.

–Snoother

Tags: best of, highlights, list

So I’ll be going live again to play your games (from 5:40pm – 7pm-ish GMT+1)!

EDIT: Not currently live but I will message you on Twitch when the stream goes back up!

Watch live on twitch:
http://twitch.tv/TomboFry

Submit your game:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1YdGFp_Ogk-9V2gVhKVbJBV327amgxbACtCn5JfxYXws/viewform

Don’t forget to play my game too!
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=20850

I spent the weekend with some friends and they fought each other on Warmageddon… Why don’t you give it a try?
project page

Hi there,

the controls of my Compo entry are really terrible, so I decided to eventually add PointerLock controls to a Post LD version \o/ hooray \o/.
And because I found a lot of other bugs, I’m going to work on this little gem a while

Play the PostLD version here: http://www.lobsterlove.de/LD30/

Please let me know, what you think.

And of course, I’d like to get a rating for my Compo version here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=12061

Thank you

Marc

Tags: postLD, unnona, webgl

I’m going on playing LD entries, commenting on them while streaming and adding the best ones into my list.
If you’d like to watch the stream or recommend a game, go ahead, post the link into the chat.

STREAM

Well, things have gotten a little tough around here, but we are still at it! After a nice long break, we are coming back at it with full strength

Gimbal ship

Items that we’ve integrated since last time:

• Warp Gate Health
• Better Heat-Seeker dynamics
• New enemy ship “Striker” – designed to destroy warp gates

Items that we would like to add for next time:

• New enemy Drone: Small-fry pesky little ship
• player lock-on seekers
• warp tunnels

Items that we would like to add next-next-next-next….. time:

• improved Holo- UI
• Storyline and progressive intro levels
• full strategy map with Enemy army AI

In the mean-time, please feel free to check out our latest version in the (Post-Jam) link

(Please remember to not vote based on this update, this is a post-submission update, but we would appreciate your thoughts!)

Link to Gimbal Fighter!

Tags: flight, FPS, Gimbal, space

Why do people call these things postmortems? I don’t know about you guys, but my game is (hopefully) anything but dead.

So my game was actually made for this scholarship-giving thing I might win, and I figured I might as well do Ludum Dare and double-dip. It had to be about a social issue, and connected worlds = networking, which = internet safety, so my game was pretty much cut out for me.

Anyways, enough Trojan horsing around (rimshot), let’s get this biopsy on the road!

What went right:
*I think I made my graphics look reasonably nice, at least good enough.
*Pretty cool gameplay! It’s got a bit of an addicting feel, and the fact that levels are randomized means that you might have better luck next time.
*I learned how to make a rage game! (purely accidentally, but hey)
*I have a decent chance of winning the competition! (wooo)
*The music is good. Like, so good, I whistle it in the shower. Random music generators are great.

What went wr-
GAME IS TOO HAAAAAAAAAARD.

No, really.

Many people made it only to level 3 out of 5 + boss level. Some didn’t even beat level 2. It goes to show how difficult internet safety i I actually can’t justify it, no game to help the general public understand internet safety should be this hard. So I made amends!

The newest version of Networkaholics (which I’ll submit into the scholarship thingy as opposed to this) comes with an easier mode. Still difficult, but not so much. That way you can beat it for yourself (or if you want to, go all hardcore to impress me. Really, if you beat this game as-is I’ll have to give you some sort of reward).

So, so long and thanks for all the Ludum Dare.

Play my gaaaaaaame over here, and enjoy.

Also, don’t click on suspicious links.