Want to discover some wonderful Ludum Dare entries?
Let me show you to the most beautiful gamedev creations of the week.

>> VIEW GAMES <<
———————-

One does not simply escape a roving pack of night dwelling demons. At least not without a Coleman lantern that I got at the swap meet last night. But that can be a bit too spooky for my blood. Thankfully we’ve got a part of fun and very goofy shooters to relax and drive us mad before bed time eh?

LiliLight by Carduus, Valmont, & LooPing

RGB by Conk (Simple and Tasty)

Bugged Out by Sebastian Lague, Daniel Snd, & Thiago Adamo

Got a spiffy game? Share away! Im going to be creating showcase videos throughout the voting period. So I’d love to add some more to the list. I’ll be trying to shuffle them in regularly.

You can also keep up to date with the latest episodes via the [Ludum Dare 31 Chupacabra Playlist]

Cheers All!

Tags: ld31, review, showcase, video

As noted earlier, we here at Tech Valley Game Space are going to play your Ludum Dare games live on Twitch.tv! We’re looking at Tuesday, 5:00 PM EST till midnight, though do note the time is subject to change. Keep this link below bookmarked so you can see us in action!
http://www.twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace

Interested in getting your game streamed? I have a form up in the link below, so go right on ahead!
http://goo.gl/forms/8IkM8aU5eK

The games I’ve played so far are listed here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RbvfWHMb-vWmYBagjjnfVAMKugG1vgQ41QFQ_Wa4YjE/edit?usp=sharing

Tags: live stream, Tech Valley Game Space, Twitch.tv

Another twelve cool games from Ludum Dare #31… Send me your game and I’ll record a video! I currently have a short backlog of requests, so if you made your request last time around, it’s on my list. But keep the games coming

1. One Act (Compo) by Sheepolution (twitter: @Sheepolution)
2. 2P – BounceEmUp (Jam) by Kuality Games (twitter: @KualityGames)
3. Slam Dunkin’s Beat The Crap Out Of Everybody (Jam) by sP0CkEr2 (twitter: @sP0CkEr2)
4. Fibonacci Grid (Compo) by Andrew Adams (twitter: @andyjamesadams)
5. A MAZE inc (Compo) by 5you
6. GTAlien (Jam) by Pulsartronic (twitter: @pulsartronic)
7. Meme Pixels THE GAME (Jam) by TrentSterling (twitter: @Trent_Sterling)
8. Frosty Ninja (Compo) by belva1234
9. The Lonely Realm of Tom Thaum, the Space Wizard (Jam) by JJEvil (twitter: @joeyjandrews)
10. SumoBall! (Compo) by flyingbear
11. Vibrant City (Compo) by Anshul Goyal (twitter: @goyalanshul)
12. Fantastic Ludum Dare theme generator (Jam) by Rick Hoppmann (twitter: @tinyworlds)

Tags: video

Kuch Bhi ! is an arcade game with no logic.

GAME LINK

What went well

The color palette and general look and feel. The UI feels nice, and the style feels consistent to me.

The graphics in each scene are simple but effective enough. I am especially happy with the police car animation (above). It was a total hack using rotation, so I got away with one sprite, with flashing light pattern, and just moved and rotated it.

What didn’t go well

I didn’t leave enough time to make the “meter” mechanic as tuned as it needed to be. Currently, it is a bit too hard, especially on the first go. It is punishing, which is frustrating. However, the thing I really struggled with was the intentional difficulty. I want the game to be hard. I want it to be a little frustrating. But, I wanted it to be less frustrating than it is. Not “winnable” or “beatable”, but also not so hard that people want to stop playing.

“Tennis Serve“: I played with the idea of a “tennis serve” style introduction to the meter mechanic. By this I mean the first time you see the meter on the level, it sloooowly starts dropping, then increases in speed until its max speed. By that time, you could get your bearings and understand the level a bit. Picture a tennis serve: The opponent tosses the ball in the air and winds up, but you know what is coming your way – the ball – at high speed. I didn’t implement this, as with the other ideas, I wasn’t sure how to make it “not too easy”, which would defeat the purpose and message of the game.

Outcome Text strings: I left these to the end, and shouldn’t have. My original intention was to have a dynamic set of text that was specific to the outcome of the game. I wanted more diversity in tone while maintaining variety (for each outcome combination), without adding too much work. It turns out this is more complicated than I thought, and I couldn’t finish. So, I reverted to a more bloated set of strings with more straightforward logic. On the upside, I demonstrated to myself the honed skill of determining when I have enough time to do something and when I don’t

Summary
Overall, the feedback so far is about what I expected. Some people seem to get it, which makes me happy. All things considered, this feels like my best entry to date. It feels concise and cohesive.

Check it out if you’re keen:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=7424

Thanks for playing!

I am accepting games to play and review from Ludum Dare.

Just visit my stream and post your ludum dare link!

http://www.twitch.tv/integershift

Thanks everyone!

Hey everyone, Holger here, gfx guy from the game “You Are Lost” | @ShakeMeLuzifer

It´s been so nice reading about you liking the graphics and the mood of this game and I just wanted to let you know, that I really appreciate your nice and heartwarming words. It´s been the first time ever I worked with pixel art in a game and I totally fell in love with it! So thank you for your support!

When designing the graphics for this game, I knew that death will be a main event for you. Have you noticed the individual death animations for every walking direction?

If you can´t make it out of the forest, at least you can die with style. Right?

Play it here without downloading!

So this was my fifth Ludum Dare (holy crap time flies!) and I’m pretty happy with how my game turned out.

I wasn’t able to get started on my game until Saturday afternoon so the pressure was definitely on by the time I sat myself in front of my laptop. Normally I come up with an idea pretty quick after setting to work, but unfortunately I didn’t find this theme too inspiring and sat staring blankly at my laptop for the first hour. Eventually I decided the theme would be perfect for a semi-deconstruction of the platforming genre, and the idea for Tiny Square, Big Tower was born.

You start at the top and get to see the entire game in one massive fall from the top of the tower to the bottom , where the game begins

The idea was this: take the classic platformer concept and put the entire game on one screen/level. I decided to use a tower as a setting and use each “level” of the tower as the individual platformer levels, including a boss fight at the very top. I also opted to keep any necessary instructions or story exposition to the game screen and have the character fall from the top of the tower to begin so that the player can see the entire game before they actually start playing. Since I’m hardly an artist I relied on building the entire game with squares/rectangles to the aesthetic as minimal as possible.

What went well

– Aesthetic turned out better than normal for me

– The humour was well received

– The controls and level design were well received

What went wrong

– Probably not tied closely enough with the theme

– Sound issues/glitches in any browser but Chrome

– Too short

Given the time frame I’m happy with how it turned out. I’d definitely like to build it into a larger game. One of the biggest lessons I learned this Ludum Dare was the impact character size has on the feel and control of the character. Originally the character was not a tiny square, just a normal size square. This turned out to make the character movement feel too floaty and bulky. Once the size of the character was reduced significantly, that floaty-ness felt (and looked) way more natural.

Anyways give it a play/rate if you’re interested!  

Hello friends,

Join me for some Ludum Dare game rating.  Watch me play your game!

http://www.twitch.tv/rengowrath

Granada Gaming people’s choice award

Hello fellow Ludum Darians, we’re extremely excited to tell you we’ve spent the weekend presenting our LD31 game at a games festival in Granada, a beautiful city at the south of Spain, called Granada Gaming.

People waited in line to play it, they’d come back for a rematch, and they even had a little king of the hill thing at a time. We were amazed and immensely happy.

Rodaja holding the Granada Gaming people’s choice award for their LD31 game Platform 31

The most amazing thing is that when the visitors had the chance to cast a vote for their favourite game of the show most chose Platform 31. So Platform 31 won the people’s choice award! You can see us in the picture above as happy as tired, as the ceremony was held late at night after a whole day of hard work at the show.

We want to thank everyone who came by (we know for a fact some of them also made a game for LD31, so come forth, people) and Ludum Dare itself, as we never would have made this game without it.

If you want to see what the fuzz it’s all about, you can play and rate the game here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=29557

Tags: award, granada, ld31, platform 31, Rodaja, SuccessStory

I decided to finally take the plunge and stream some games.

Since I run Windows, I can only stream Windows games and some web games. Feel free to come visit and post your game in the chat.

Stream Here!

Come see some games on my Twitch stream!

It’s been two weeks now but have been meaning to write this while everything’s relatively fresh on my mind.
Finished the LD Jam (3rd of the year, though did a few other random game jams) and once again very happy with the way things turned out.

Here’s our game, “Ricochet Heroes”
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=35477

It’s a pinball/pachinko-RPG hybrid, with some obvious (as seen from the title art above) influences from final fantasy/16bit rpgs, and peggle. It worked out surprisingly well, managed to get in all the planned content. Did have to pull a heroic all-nighter sunday night/monday morning, but other than that got a decent amount of sleep.

A bit about the team, it was me, Josh (who drove up here to SF all the way from LA, what dedication!) and two others (Josi and Charles) who both had to drop out a day in. Didn’t take any selfies or anything, but here’s a photo of a desk at work in the Zynga HQ in SF (where we spent most of the contest):

We spent an unusually long amount of time brainstorming (an hour and a half or more?). Here’s the general train of thought (sure wish I took a photo of the whiteboards/sketch papers here!)

1. We want to make an RPG!
2. RPG with the entire world map…ON ONE SCREEN
3. Maybe use a magnifiying glass to see individual parts of the world map?
4. Send out multiple heroes at once, or maybe one every 10 seconds?
5. Wait, how would gameplay for this work? Do you have god powers or something?
6. Specific god powers on cooldown, maybe lightning or swipe the enemies away
7. This doesn’t sound very fun at all think of something more action
8. Harvest moon + aliens/zombies, defend your land from the invaders IN ONE SCREEN
9. I still like the idea of watching people walk and fight, RTS-y.
10. World War 2 D-Day simulator where you control one person on the front lines and you die over and over again
11. That doesn’t sound very exciting either
12. This is going worse than expected
13. Go back to that rpg/heroes idea. What if you shoot out the heroes, and they bounce off the walls?

It took a bit of convincing that this idea even fit the theme of “entire game in one screen”, especially if we were gonna need to scroll the screen around. However, with idea in hand we were off to the races.

(About an hour and a half in)

(About 3 hours in)

One of our members had a hard time believing that this game was gonna be any fun. I agree, it probably didn’t look very fun at this stage. We had a lot of mechanics in mind (tilt, multi-ball, enemies, keys/gates), but how were they all going to be part of a cohesive experience together?

(Saturday morning)

I had some trouble figuring out how the game was gonna be fun too at this point. There were a couple of directions to go:
Was this game going to be more of a puzzle game,where you had to strategize how and where you were to shoot your balls?Or if not, how could we give it a more action-y feel?

It all came together around saturday night, where I was working a bit more on the “launch” mechanics. I wanted players not to just blindly spam clicks and shoot out balls, so that meant some sort of hold click to charge mechanic. At this point, the game didn’t have any sense of gravity do there wouldn’t have been any point to a “charge to shoot faster” mechanic. Once I added gravity, it all came together.

(Saturday night)

I made a pretty simple level resembling a simple pachinko machine, and the (imaginary) goal was to kill all the enemies in 3 balls or less. With the addition of gravity, hold to charge and tilting, this was actually a pretty challenging and fun level. With this, we knew where to go to get a fun game.

Spent all of sunday making all the mechanics (building entering, combat log, level transitions, enemy types) and the sunday-monday allnighter fixing bugs (which somehow this game had way more than usual) and designing the levels. To actually make the level layouts, I used the level editing tool from my recently released game SpeedyPups (http://speedypups.com/) to draw the mountains and place objects.

http://spotcos.com/gogodoggy/editor.html

I get a surprising amount of mileage out of this tool. If you’re reading this and interested in a simple vector graphics drawing level editor (that exports to JSON), send me a message and I’ll hook you up

Spent the last few hours adding sound effects and music (just like last time). Big credits to Josh who found the main world theme on newgrounds, I felt the music fit incredibly well and really improved the game. Wish I still had a link to the original on NG so that I could give credit, but it’s lost to time.

Submitted with about 20 minutes left to spare, and snuck in some physics bugfixes a few hours later.
We (both me and Josh) were considering doing an expanded version of the game possibly for mobile. There’s some obvious places where the whole “pinball RPG” could go…more RPG mechanics, upgrading character balls, quests, etc.

In the end, we decided to hold off on it for the time being. I’d really like to come back to this idea sometime in the future, but for now working on an “unnamed robot rpg”.

Get hyped?

Follow us at
https://twitter.com/spotco
or
http://spotcos.com

——

LD Recommendations:

I’ve played about 60 other games, and found 3 that I really liked.

“Lawbreaker” by deepnight
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=2982
2d GTA on one screen. As always, deepnight does the incredible in 48 hours (something that I’d probably have trouble doing in 72 with an artist). Lots of really great little details, like hijacking tanks and helicopters.

“Juoi” by teameagle
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=23493
One bossfight – the game. It’s one very pretty and well animated boss fight, with lots of action-y screenshake-y goodness.

“Snowball juggling Olympuio” by Benjamin
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=2952

Snowball juggling. My favorite out of all that I played, incredible amounts of detail (just look at the animation on that snowman). Really fun in a “flappy birds keep trying to beat the score” sort of way, also really does replicate the feeling of juggling.

Tags: heroes, pinball, postmortem, ricochet, RPG

So, I made this timelapse for my game. All with awesome music and stuff. There it is:

The last minute is pretty hilarious (at least to me) due to my dear roommate broepi.

If you like what you see, be sure to check out the game here:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=24534

Hey guys, so I just finished reviewing 100 games and wow there were so many innovative and interesting games created for this Ludum Dare 31! It was difficult but I’ve formed a short list of memorable and enjoyable games that I recommend everyone to try and rate!. So Here goes.

LITTLE OFFICE TROUBLES

This one had a bit of a slow start, but once the timer hit 1:10 mark the game gets intense. Non stop having to tap your keyboard like a mad programmer to get rid of the error messages! Loved the visuals for this game!

Link

BLOCKADE

Oh boy, this one gave me the biggest laugh ahaha. Gave all my friends a good laugh! Great entry.

Link

RUNNY SQUARE

Simple, Addictive and Flappy bird level frustrating.

Link

RICOCHET HEROES

Great enjoyable game that mixes the classic final fantasy rpg mechanics with pinball style play. The game has great visuals along with great inside humors!

Link

SWEET DREAMS BEAR

This one entry can only be described with one word :”sweet”. Great story :’)

Link

I”ve Seen This Room Before

Innovative! ahaha love the level designs and simple mechanics! great game!

Link

This was my first ludum and I had a lot of fun. The community is so nice and I have had a lot of helpful feedback. Thank you all!

At first I was thinking of a top down kind of game but I have never done a platformer type before so I really wanted to try that. Then I was thinking I wanted the bottom of the screen to be all lava and the player would have to stay on the platforms. Saturday I went to town for lunch so I could take a break from the computer and game and that is when the idea of the frozen ground came to me. So I cut the lava and made the bottom of the screen a solid platform. Then I started working on the code for the frozen ground mechanic. That turned out to be a good call because a lot of people said they liked that part.

After that I worked on adding power ups to make that game more interesting. I originally wanted a lot more but I ran out of time so I had to settle for 3.

= Shoot Faster
= Full Heal
= Flame Shield. (Makes you invulnerable and thaws ground you are standing on)

What I learned:

One thing I learned was after hours of play testing what I think is easy will not be easy to everyone else. I had a lot of comments that the game was hard. Some people liked that and some maybe not so much.

This was also my first time using gamemaker other than a few test programs the week before. I did not think I would be able to finish in the time limit with my normal C# coding so I took a risk and used gamemaker. The risk paid off here and I learned a lot about the software in the process.

What I need to work on:

I need to work on my art. I think it turned out ok in the end but I would like it to be much better. I guess that just comes with time.

I also had comments that I needed background music. I have never done music before so I crossed that off my list before I even started. So I think I will do some research in the next few months and see if I can learn to at least make some basic music that sounds decent.

Play Snow Invasion

Having played 100+ games so far I figured I’d post a list of my favorite. So in no particular order here are some of my favorite games so far…

• Super Pong Quest – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=40107
• Alice:nightmare – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=46239
• Claustrophobia – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=25979
• Christmas Punch – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=45502
• The Paper Dance – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=12204
• Illinois Smith and the Temple of the Sky – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=8404
• Much Ado About Pirates – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludumdare-31/?action=preview&uid=20990
• Dodge Pong – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=8754
• DOS Defender – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=8472
• Orb Fetch: GOLD – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=1712
• Meeses – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=34460
• Symphony of the Night – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=14757
• I’ve Seen This Room Before – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=46246
• Filthy And Guilty – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=47041
• Dolly – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=36120
• Sweep Stacks – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=38404
• Straight Trippin – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=41675
• Memory Link – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=4593
• Path of Alterity – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=47114
• PeriPheral – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=45963
• Screen Cutter – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=44065
• Clickbox – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=14711
• Microscope – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=47137
• Beat Bop Delicious – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=7470
• Last Ark – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=38866
• Sudarsan – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=36474
• Shapes – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=47090

And though I don’t think my game stacks up to these amazing games, it would mean a lot to me if you checked it out.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=23711

Tags: favorite games

We are going to play your Ludum Dare games live on Twitch.tv! We’re looking at Tuesday, 5:00 PM EST till midnight, though do note the time is subject to change. Keep this link below bookmarked so you can see us in action!
http://www.twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace

Interested in getting your game streamed? I have a form up in the link below, so go right on ahead!
http://goo.gl/forms/8IkM8aU5eK

The games I’ve played so far are listed here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RbvfWHMb-vWmYBagjjnfVAMKugG1vgQ41QFQ_Wa4YjE/edit?usp=sharing

More like…

Illudum…

NATI!

Oh look! A game with programming, snow and hunting! Now here’s a somewhat truncated look at it.

First of all, here’s a link to the game itself: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=46596 Play it, love (/hate) it and rate it please :3

I wasn’t able to get started on Saturday because I was busy; on Sunday I was desperately piecing together a draft for an English GCSE. Anyhow, I managed to start working on Coded Universe at 10ish. I came up with a workaround the regular interpretation of the whole game being on “one screen” – those retro arcade games from the 80s – by shoving the entire game universe onto a screen in-game , allowing the player to modify it. Having just walked home from school in the rain, I will spare you a very very very very long write-up of every little thought that popped into my head as I built the game and instead sum it up like this:

WHAT WENT WELL:

–  The parser, which was supposed to take ages to write, took shorter to make than expected, letting me work on the graphics.

– The graphics 😛 . They turned out better than I expected for 8 hours of jamming though some of the animal sprites sparked confusion among players.

– It had music. I didn’t expect to get any music in but I did. THANK YOU FAMITRACKER 😀

WHAT WENT EVER SO SLIGHTLY LESS WELL:

–  The general mechanic behind the game confused people. I didn’t have enough time to stick in a tutorial  When the phone slowed time, people thought it was lag.

–  The snow fell in a funny way, perhaps I could have randomized it further.

–  The music didn’t fit the mood I wanted to create. Looking over the LD website, I came across ToneMatrix, a wonderful little audio tool which would have been much closer to what I had intended. Nonetheless people seemed to like the mood :3

SOME RANDOM COMMENTS

The mother’s idiolect was actually inspired by a transcript that I was using for my exam.

This is what the level looks like in Unity

This single balance took me about 5 minutes to perfect D:

So far we played and rated just 227 games, we want more (MOAR)=)
Please, tell us about your game and we will play and rate it =)

And, of course, we are very excited of getting feedback about our game.
We invite you to play Houston game too:
Jam Entry: Houston, We’ve Got a Problem

Top score for now is: 15 365 scientific data (LegacyCrono)
2-d place: 11 630 (Bogden400)
3-d place: 11 395 (edve98)
4-d place: 11 145 (Mike Mezhenin)
5-d place: 10 610 (sapermysz)

What will be your score?

Oh, and if you like our game – we will be happy to see you in our FB group.

Tags: game, jam, ld31, Ludum Dare

I admit it. I was one of the theme ragers this time.
Actually I didn’t even wanted to participate, but when I saw the theme being a technical limitation rather than a theme, I intuitively made this –

The “Fantastic” Ludum Dare theme generator

It’s not even a generator as it says – it just throws some random items out of the list at you when you press a button.
Probably the largest effort went into providing strong user feedback for this single action.

What went wrong

• I participated although I had other stuff to do 😛
• It’s not much polished, nor an actual game

What went right

• Challenging my fear of using humor in games
• extremely rapid development – about 80min (new record for me)
• the humor may not be at the top, but the inside jokes are good enough for some giggles among other participants
• getting people to play & rate my game (see the vid by DietrichEpp below)

So all in all, this was a fun, little Ludum Dare for me, taking away my fear of using humor in games.

I also did a special of GameARTMonday with beautiful Ludum Dare games, you might be interested in:

GameARTMonday Episode 12 – Ludum Dare SPECIAL!

So I just made a small form for people to fill in if they want me to play/rate their entries (partly to make things slightly easier for me :V)

Anyway, click here if you want me to check out your entry and such.

In the meantime, here’s my entry.

Add artificial intelligence for those who want

play alone ^^

PLAY HEADBUTTERS

Kuch Bhi ! is an arcade game with no logic.

GAME LINK

Thanks to the helpfull feedback of Ludum Dare community I have made some progress in Director’s Cut version of my Ludum Dare 31 entry.

http://gamejolt.com/games/arcade/moonlit-crawlers-director-s-cut/41322/

– Now jump mechanics should feel more fluid.

– Added sfx to attacks and enemies kills.

– Improved collisions on attacks.

Next:

– Victory animation

– A better Menu

Keep playing and rating…

Compo version is here:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=32989

Tags: art, crawlers, game, gamedev, indie, jam, ld31, ld48, ludum, Otrora

We are playing your Ludum Dare games live on Twitch.tv! We’ll be jamming from 5:00 PM till midnight, Eastern Time, so keep those games coming! Check us out on the link below:
http://www.twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace

Interested in getting your game streamed? I have a form up in the link below, so go right on ahead! We may not cover it today, but we may in the coming few days.
http://goo.gl/forms/8IkM8aU5eK

The games I’ve played so far are listed here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RbvfWHMb-vWmYBagjjnfVAMKugG1vgQ41QFQ_Wa4YjE/edit?usp=sharing

Tags: Let's Play, live stream, Tech Valley Game Space, Twitch.tv

Today I’ve added the first post jam version of Treasure Quest to the games site.

New features are:

1. A new skipable textbox behavior.
2. A new font, because of better readability.
3. Some new texts, when using the magnifying glass.

I hope you enjoy the new version. More features are planned, but that have to wait until after christmas holidays.

Comments are welcome.

ruerob

Get hooked on Greeny GRUB now…

1) At what level did you die?

2) Do you think one day you might need medical help

to get you off Greeny GRUB before it eats up your whole life?

So now that I’ve had a bit of recovery time, I’ve made a start on a post-compo version of my game, Snowbotron. So far I’ve fixed a really annoying bug where the enemies could camp your respawn point, leading to an inescapable death spiral that ate all your remaining lives. I’ve also added configurable keyboard controls and started replacing the horrible bfxr sound effects. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out, so I’ll probably be adding more features and fixing more brokenness over the next couple of weeks.

You can find it here : http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=5206

I made a video playthrough of my game! The audio is pretty bad cos I has a cold, and my mic is maybe broken, I dunno.

You can check out the game itself over here, it’s a bossrush game. Nine bosses in total, can you defeat them all? Find out: Deicide!

And here’s vid, I beat every boss in the game in the video, so if you don’t want that spoiled, go check out the game first

Ludum Dare has been a fantastic learning experience, from game design to time management, it provides such a great platform to develop skills in a challenging and fun environment. The submissions of the community have been getting better and better every time, and it has been incredibly inspiring to see so many with so much talent coming together to make games for the pure hell of it.

The past few jams have really pushed me out of my comfort zone in terms of scope as a programmer (no thanks to my artist wanting the moon :P). I thought I was mad to consider building a 2D lighting system AND a game in a weekend, but seeing all the Twitch feeds, Youtube videos, blogs and vlogs supporting the event was invigorating.

So much so that this time around I’ve continued to work on my game post submission to really try and give life to the vision we had when we started.

Checkout our entry here

Thank you so much to everyone who has supported, participated and helped to organise this brilliant event.

See you guys next time!

Almax

This is team Flashlight and this is our first time participate in the LD community

It is soooo amazing that we got so many interesting, encouraging, useful feedback since the rating started. And it is also great fun and inspired to check out all other fun games, especially when meeting a game with similar concept or idea by coincidence.

Now, we are seriously considering developing it into a more complete game, so we are expecting as much feedback as possible. (Hopefully an arcade style game on mobile?)

Here is the link to our game Flashlight:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=47542

You are also welcome to just come in and have fun!

And here are some improvements we have thought of so far:

– more game modes: classic, endless, boss rush, etc

– more scene elements: obstacles such as tables that can block the player and his light, mirrors which may change the direction of light

– lights with different range, corresponding to different difficulty

– ???

Great thanks to all players.

Team Flashlight

Hello

I just bought some second hand WP phone for WP development today and almost finished mobile version of Lumit that will be published for:
– Android
– iOS
– Windows Phone

Android version would be available probably tomorrow. iOS version may take some time with all this accepting process and stuff (I’ve never actualy uploaded anything to iOS app store so I’m not actually sure how to do it yet) and about windows phone I have to learn everything about testing on a WP phone and uploading so it might also take couple of days for WP version.

Anyway progres with the game itself is pretty much finished:

I did 3 versions of controls:
– accelerometer – jumping by tapping, moving by tilting. Indicator in the upper part shows current tilt
– buttons – left/right/jump button to move left/right/jump. Customizable position of the middle button and also position of the jump button (for left/right handed)
– touch pad – touch area at the bottom where player taps and the orbs jumps/move according to the place of tap

I tried to make the controls as comfortable as possible and as customizable as possible so anybody could find some comfortable way of playing.

I just have to tweak some little things and bugs and I will publish on android in the morning probably (it’s almost 3AM here). Then I’ll start to learn about WP and iOS development/testing/publishing.

For now feel free to play the WEB version of Lumit:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=45380

Enjoy!
Cheers 😉

Playing/rating more games on my twitch channel

Stop by, link your game, enjoy yourself!

http://www.twitch.tv/rengowrath

What’s better than a Christmas Party Potluck and a late night spent playing games? Not much.

I can’t move because food.

Since I’m pinned under the weight of my own gut, I might as well make myself useful and play some of your games!

It’ll be a short night tonight — but it’ll be a good one!

If you haven’t already, make sure to play and rate “A Fine White Line!”

Tags: #31, a fine white line, afwl, feedback, i'm not hungry anymore, ld, Let's Play, Ludum Dare, rate and review, stream, twitch

So far we played and rated just 234 games, we want more (MOAR)=)
Please, tell us about your game and we will play and rate it =)
(joppiesaus, Warboys, Warpgames, TeamQuadratic – I’ll play your games today, when finally get an access to the windows computer)

And, of course, we are very excited of getting feedback about our game.
We invite you to play Houston game too:
Jam Entry: Houston, We’ve Got a Problem

Top score for now is: 15 365 scientific data (LegacyCrono)
2-d place: 11 630 (Bogden400)
3-d place: 11 395 (edve98)
4-d place: 11 145 (Mike Mezhenin)
5-d place: 10 610 (sapermysz)

What will be your score?

Oh, and if you like our game – we will be happy to see you in our FB group.

Tags: game, jam, ld31, Ludum Dare

Hi everyone!

I just created a Steam Greenlight page for Orion, so people can rate it and talk about it.

This would be of great help if I decide to continue the game. Cheers!

Finally I had the time to put together a short timelapse video of my experience of the Ludum Dare 31 competition.
For me and my Brother this was the first time participating. It was a great experience to spend the weekend with all of you guys and follow everyones progress on the blog. The community is so vivid and full of professionals and new talents. We both are no professional game makers, in fact these are our first games ever made, but we are looking forward to compete in future Ludum Dare competitions

We would be happy if you play and rate our games.
Games:
Nuclear Power Plant Simulator 2014
ld::receive(31)

Also my brother wrote a blog post about his experiences: ‘Participating in the Ludum Dare’

Music by Rolemusic

Hey guys, I wanted to share with you the story of my first officially released game…

I had many attempts before this, had great plans great ideas but unfortunate none of them get anywhere…. why ? because I aimed to high, I wanted to create the best game ever with all the possible features and all this by my self.

With this last game, I approached differently, with the idea, I will create a game with the basic features in place and after I released it will add more, if I have the mood and the time… and as it seems this worked.

Here is the game : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ro.dms.kingofthetree for now just Android, will add iOS asap.

It’s insane to realize how many details you need for a little game like this, banners, images, descriptions, icons, etc.

I also setup a facebook app and a facebook page to promote the app : https://www.facebook.com/kingofthetree

The effort involved :

• about 300 hours of my work, programming, art, facebook page, webservice, other accounts requred (abmob, etc)
• about 100$ in art
• about 50$ in sound
• 150$ in unity plugins (which I will use in other projects)

The tools used ware very basic :

• unity3d
• adobe photoshop CC
• adobe ilustrator
• time line FX (http://www.rigzsoft.co.uk/timelinefx-particle-effects-editor/)
• trello for agile management 😉
• bittbucket for code repository
• BFXR for sound effects (http://www.bfxr.net/)
• my own tool for scores and webservices

The art and the sound for purchased from envato websites.

Thanks !

Tags: #indiegame, gamedev, indiedev

LD31 is our 6th Ludum Dare. And after our failed attempt last August where both of us got sick on the last day (and later quit on the last few hours of the jam), we had one goal this LD: to make sure we finish the game this time.

And, long story short: finish a game we did!

Here’s Adrift, a game about making friends, solving puzzles and teamwork.

What went well

Pretty much everything in the Art department went well.

•  Characters. We always wanted to make a game with dorky adorable characters. The candy-ish color palette also went well with the cute character design.
• Story. The last 3 Ludum Dare games we made were fast-paced action games, so we thought hey why not give puzzle-y story-based games a shot? Our initial idea was to let the players get attached to the main character(s) and maybe leave them with an emotional ending. Which leads us to the…
• Ending. We don’t want to spoil this to you guys so just check out the game and make sure to get to the ending scene! But basically we think we made a pretty decent ending for the really short game.

What didn’t go so well

• Level design and mechanics. During the first two days we made lots of different puzzle element mechanics such as stepping on switches to activate/deactivate traps or open doors. We planned to make lots of different “mini levels” and compile everything (the whole map, the entire game) on the 3rd day. While we were able to do this, some mechanics weren’t included in the final “master level” due to time constraints, so a lot of hours spent into implementing those unused mechanics were wasted. As a result, the “mini puzzle levels” in the game were pretty repetitive (Blue always pushing boxes) and the new mechanics introduced later into the game weren’t utilized as much.
• Gameplay. We had lots of interesting puzzles when making the mini levels, but based on past experiences with the previous LD’s, people don’t want to invest a lot of time on your game. So we intended the game’s puzzle-y parts to be not so complex and frustrating to solve. This backfired a lot though because now I think the game isn’t really much fun to play and the puzzles not satisfying to solve. The upside though is most players can easily finish the whole game and see the end scene. And we badly want the players to see the end scene!
• Theme. Halfway through the jam and we still couldn’t come up with a concrete connection to the theme other than that the whole game is played in one whole level (or one Unity scene). But hey, finishing a game not related to the theme is better than not finishing a game related to the theme!

TL;DR: Overall, we think we made a pretty solid and adorable game. Although the resulting gameplay wasn’t as fun to play as we thought it would be, everything we planned from the start went right, and the feedback has been really great so far and nothing we didn’t expect.

If you reached this point, thank you for reading and we hope you enjoy Adrift! See you next Ludum Dare!

– Pixlexia
(Follow us on Twitter!)

Play and rate our game!

After missing out on the last Ludum Dare, I got to participate in this one! Still, didn’t get to put the entire weekend into my project, but I got to try out using Game Maker Studio (ran into a lot of newbie problems), and put in about 12 hours in total. = (

I didn’t realize until too late that it would cost me to build an HTML5 version of the game, so that ended up costing my wallet.

Sorry about the rough edges!

My goal this time around was to create another slightly meditative experience. Iaido has more action than my previous entry, Bubble Bubble Bubble Pop. My initial thought was to create a huge animation cooldown at the end of every attack, but I wasn’t able to pull that off (the controls weren’t rewarding and just felt like the game was holding you back).

I would like to revisit the game and build an exciting and rewarding combo system. It feels like with the right changes the game could have a rhythm and test your reaction skills.

Today I’ll review my experiences of last LD and the October Challenge!

So lets start with LD 31:

Fireguy: A bomberman spin-off with ugly-evil-unicode-snowmans. It was intended to have “the same screen” the whole game – no spawning, nothing that drops, etc. – but that didn’t work out very well. I ended up in a hurry and made an hostile AI that’s just smart enough to place bombs and evade them.
Graphics were cheap, AI code was horrible, gameplay was boring. I still felt like I had to finish it, because game > no game. People in the comments agreed on that too, I’m glad they voted.

I was pretty tired that weekend. The inspiration didn’t really come up, so I just practically worked and had fun. I kept forcing myself to finish it, and it was quite fun. I hope I do better next time.

Then there’s the October Challenge:

Offensive Defense: A RTS defense game, where you need to defend yourself against the things.

First, I came up with an top-down boxing game, but after a week or so I wasn’t really motivated for it anymore, and I realized it wasn’t really fun, so I quit.
Then I decided that I would work on a RTS game, what I always wanted to make. It’s very simple: Creatures in massive amounts are trying to invade you, but you have to keep ’em outside.
In the beginning I had really much motivation, I spent much time on it. Later, school began to take it’s toll, I had an test week, so I didn’t really have much time that week.
I wanted to push out a public test version October 15th, but I had too little time. That was just after the test week.
I went on vacation, and it felt weird to abandon the game a few days. After the vacation, I had to “refresh” my mind again. School was a problem, again.
At 29 October I realized I had too little time. I didn’t push my game out in time to “win” the challenge, but I kept working on it.
At 31 October my first phase was done. This meant the game was playable, but not finished. Before the October Challenge I thought this would be the date I would have an awesome game and start making Minecraft-money. That obviously didn’t work out.
After a while I ran out of ideas and I really wanted to finish it because it felt like it was never finished. I just picked a day where it needed to be finished, and that worked.
Then there’s a gap until 20 October: the release date. I don’t remember much of it. I remember I worked like crazy, I polished as much as I could, and that I felt every day different, but always a little weird.

It felt weird to make the game. Sometimes it was really fun, sometimes it felt really depressing. Again, I focused on getting stuff done. However, there was a big problem called school. It kept me away from working on my game, but after a few weeks I tried to ignore school a little more and work more on Offensive Defense, that was because of the benefits of the game weighted more than the benefits of school. I’ll probably explain that later.

Now the things of the game itself(IMO, it’s widely different from someone else’s opinion for example a friend of mine):

• The graphics. You see, in a creative process it’s hard to review your work yourself. I thought some of them where nicely done, like the Evil Hamburger, and some were terrible, like the headquarters. I should learn to make graphics in other programs rather than MSPaint.
• The audio. Terrible. Every time a bullet has been shot, a sound plays. But I didn’t think about the scenario where 100 bullets are being fired per second.
  Oh, and I didn’t include music, because I’m not a composer.
• The content. I included many features, which is a good thing.
• The idea. It kind of looks like something I made for LD28, One Wall. I don’t know why but I managed to make it to look like it in the gameplay. Someone said that it looked like “Storm the House”. Weird.
• The gameplay. I think it’s a fun game. It’s hard, but it has many difficulties, which I’m glad I implemented them. The balancing was hard. I’m not sure if it’s perfect, but it’s at least not to easy and not to hard.

So this is my first commercial game. I’m 15, and I don’t feel like an MLG AAA Pro Game Designer/Programmer Indie Freak, and I did this as an experiment. I’m still wondering about the opinions of this game. Because I don’t know if my game is good, the user chooses to buy the game. That’s to make sure the people who buy the game, are actually happy with the game. I am happy with money, so I can buy other games ‘n stuff.

What’s really disappointing, is that it has 5 downloads. Yes. 5. It’s almost a month ago, and just 5 people downloaded it! D:
I am really wondering what I did wrong in that part. I mean I did some promoting, but why so little? So if you’re reading this, and you want to play a game, please play mine, because it’s fun and I really wish some feedback.

I really wish I got some feedback, I don’t really need sales, but without it I still didn’t win the October Challenge.

So it was a weird experience. It was very fun, but I should’ve picked another moment and I should’ve thought more realistic. But it’s not really about the game, it was because of the experience, and that was definitely worth it, because I learned so much from it.

Intro

This is my third or fourth Ludum Dare I’m in. For this jam I decided to test my idea of terrain destruction to be done in Unity because I wanted to use it to port my old game I’ve been making with other guys for Global Game Jam 2012. It was the first time when I heard of game Liero and we used similar targeting and ninja rope from it. I never quite got time to port the game (we wanted to publish it on mobiles) so my idea to create destructible terrain was quietly developing in my brain :).
For this Ludum Dare I decided to make 2-4 player deathmatch game on single screen inspired by Super Mario Smash Bros I played recently, use destructible terrain with a lot of shooting because everyone loves shooting action, right? :). Also I thought that this shouldn’t be rocket science to do because I didn’t have whole 48 hours to spare (I got comics workshop in that time, trainings etc. etc.)

What went right

Terrain generation, destruction and reconstruction! For my idea I used Unity built in 3D Terrains but viewed them top down with a crossed plane in the middle:

Terrain was generated with Perlin Noise function also available in Unity and collision detection with terrain was already there too. For terrain destruction I wrote my function to update terrain heights so that destroyed terrain would lower itself below plane in the middle. It was tricky to do it because I imagined the game screen and terrain should be looped so It wasn’t very optimized in Compo version. Result of terrain destruction and deconstruction from falling debris:

I wanted also to include ninja rope to climb but I ended with simple jetpack because it was easier to implement and because jumping wasn’t working so good (Physics for platforming doesn’t always work very well), jetpack replaced need for jumping :).
Finally I’ve added shooting with bazooka and machine gun and second player which resulted in compo version.

What went bad

I haven’t got enough time to make proper player avatars so there were only spheres in compo version. I haven’t got time to implement all sounds I wanted and add more weapons, weapons switching etc.
Compo version is not very optimized because terrain destruction modifies whole terrain. Collisions are not very good so when player avatars are close to each other they don’t hit themselves.
And most important thing – I haven’t got time to make any title screen :).

Now?

I liked the idea of terrain destruction and oldschool hot seat fun multiplayer shooting so much I decided to make more proper post-compo version.
First thing I started with was creating avatar for players. Again I got crazy idea that I wanted to realize, use plasticine to make model in T-pose, scan it to computer and then animate it! My girlfriend Paulina made fun plasticine model of a soldier with jetpack, then I used Android mobile app Autodesk 1-2-3DCatch to make series of photos of this model, this was sent to the cloud by app and in a couple of minutes I got nearly complete 3D model. You can see some photos and model on Autodesk page here: click click

I downloaded .obj files with textures and using Blender I removed all background stuff, stitched all gaps, made some other errors (never use “Remove doubles” on model with defined texture UVs! – use Decimate modifier!), fixed T-pose, rigged model and started to make walking animation.

After that Paulina made plasticine models for weapons, they were tiny so I modeled them myself in Blender. Only used photo as reference:

Next I made model animations with character moving hands+head up and down and simultaneously weapon rotation animations so they could be blended with character walking animation. At first it didn’t work because animations were on a single action timeline and Unity wasn’t blending them. I needed to separate them to different action and then put them again on a single NLA Strip o_O. After that and some coding for animation blending it started to work:

Then I fixed bullets origin on the end of weapon, added extra weapons to already implemented uzi and bazooka: shotgun, pistol and grenade launcher. Next I added blood particles:

I played a little bit with Unity ragdolls to test if they would work with my model and … it worked great as you can see from this test:

Paulina made me really great logo for game’s title screen and finally I got permission to use two music tracks for title and in-game from DADi ( soundcloud , Facebook page ) – once again BIG thanks! They fit nicely to the game I think.

You can watch results here:

Future!

Post compo version is available for all of you to play and have fun with it. If there will be interest I will be more than happy to develop it further. Among many things game needs some more optimizations, computer opponents and maybe online modes.

I’m waiting for all suggestions, comments etc.

Game entry page
Post compo downloadable version (free or small fee if you like)
Browser version

Thank you all and I’m back to playing all those fantastic games you all created

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, unity, unity3d

Comment on it, let us know what you think about the in-game graphic style 😀 … (do not pay attention on willy)

You really have to try it … it is even crazier and cruel … we add some crazy car drivers … they don’t care about no one …. get out of their way … jojojo

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=45161

Hey everyone! We are the Button Masher Bros!

Startling monsters, padded rooms and a keep that is simply dreadful! … yup it’s still Ludum Dare!

With so many submissions, there was absolutely no way we could play them all.

Special thanks to our friends at Reddit, twitter, and youtube who all stepped up to give us suggestions – you guys are the BEST!

If you like the games you see, be sure to check them out of Ludumdare.com and let the developers know what you think!

Today we will be highlighting:

Title: Wide Opened Eyes
Category: Jam Entry
Creator: nzgiije

Title: Cell #327

Category: Compo Entry

Creator: Aru Nyan

Title: Dread Keep

Category: Jam Entry

Creator: Frump

Have a game you want us to check out? [SUBMIT HERE]

Finally, we’d love to hear what you think!
You can comment on the episode linked above, comment in this thread, or tweet us at:

@ButtonMasherBro – Show account

@MathBlasterRitz – Chris

or @jwowBMB – Josh

Thanks Everyone and HAPPY LUDUM DARE!

Tags: LD31 LD#31, ldjam

 Screenshot

This is our game for Ludum Dare 31. The game have only 8 levels but most people cannot get past level 4. Can you?
Good luck and enjoy the game!

Click here to play/rate

So, I rated 50 games. What can I say?

After playing first few games, I thought that the theme is bad, because there were a lot of games with the same interpretation or without one at all.

But now I can say that I was mistaken. There are games which use the theme nicely. Here are some of them:

(I picked games with little ratings)

Aketa,

a jam entry by chikun Dev Team.

A game about a little girl stuck in a big maze. And the maze is stuck in one screen. But this time Aketa is going to escape! If it’s not enough to make you play this game till the end, there is an ending song!

Cathode Ray,

a compo entry by Figglewatts.

Even wondered how does a computer screen work? This game will tell you! Follow the electron in its epic journey to a computer screen. More specific, to displaying “ENTIRE GAME” on one screen. Got it?

The Broadenlands,

a jam entry by Wolve.

You wanna go adventuring? Instead of going somewhere far away, why don’t you go to your bedroom? It has much more than you think! In fact, this entire game takes place in one bedroom.

Also, why won’t you play my game?

Kaleidoscope,

a compo entry by Me.

Have you ever looked through a kaleidoscope? There are some crazy stuff. Now, put some moving polygons inside it and play it.

So far we played and rated just 241 games, we want more (MOAR)=)
Please, tell us about your game and we will play and rate it =)

And, of course, we are very excited of getting feedback about our game.
We invite you to play Houston game too:
Jam Entry: Houston, We’ve Got a Problem

Top score for now is: 15 365 scientific data (LegacyCrono)
2-d place: 11 630 (Bogden400)
3-d place: 11 395 (edve98)
4-d place: 11 145 (Mike Mezhenin)
5-d place: 10 610 (sapermysz)

What will be your score?

Oh, and if you like our game – we will be happy to see you in our FB group.

Tags: game, jam, ld31, Ludum Dare

Today I wrote a sort of lament for the passing of the era in which small games made good money. From the article:

In the early 80s, all it took to make a game was a computer, some graph paper, and a lot of determination.

Games were created by brilliant individuals.

Their designs were often groundbreaking and sometimes deeply artistic.

Their choices defined much of what we see in games today.

Some of these auteur game developers even made a decent living….

I think you might enjoy it.

Oh and you should rate my LD31 compo entry, Claustrophobia, too.

Tags: gamedev

Nothing quite says wednesday (other than “Hump Day”) quite like fighting off lich spawned demons, helping a friendly snowman keep his head, and slaying some colossal ancient war giants. That or just waking up to pancakes. But why not have both?

Lich Lordz by Imaginary Monsters

Snow Need to Worry by SnoutUp (Aur)

Juoi by Team Eagle

Got a spiffy game? Share away! Im going to be creating showcase videos throughout the voting period. So I’d love to add some more to the list. I’ll be trying to shuffle them in regularly.

You can also keep up to date with the latest episodes via the [Ludum Dare 31 Chupacabra Playlist]

Cheers All!

Tags: ld31, showcase, video review

You are free to use the cursor, you dont have to name us and you can make money with it if you want :3

http://www.thorstian.deviantart.com/art/Cursor-500831430?ga_submit_new=10%253A1418845007

I participated in LD30 in August and wasn’t able to do the one just gone. I had never really showed my game I made that weekend and seen people play it first hand. I got a lot of good comments about it (from the competition and real people, including strangers) and people have said that I should Greenlight it and attempt to get it on Steam.

So that’s what I’m doing!

It’ll take me a couple of weeks to fix up the last bugs, add some more levels and make it more efficient and also to create trailers and logos for it, so if I don’t get too distracted then it should be on the Greenlight page in early January next year!

Here is the original submission, so give it a try. After looking through the project files I have realised that levels 6-9 are broken (The spawnpoint is in the wrong place, you spawn very close to the exit xD) which is a result of finishing the game up after 20 hours without sleeping. I’m sure you all know the struggle.

If people are interested, I will post periodic updates on here (or maybe make a blog for it) on how things are getting on and we’ll see where this goes!

Tags: post-mortem

AZOR POST MORTEM

Here we are with a Post Portem update after the awesome LD31. We want to talk about how Azor was born and how it has developed throughout the Ludum Dare.

Azor: the concept

I’ve been thinking about making a platformer/adventure game since my last Ludum Dare entry (LD26) and during this year I developed many projects, some of them are somewhere in my computer folders, others are waiting to be resumed and maybe one day the will become a finished project as AZOR.

It was friday night (here in Europe) and I was sitting down in front of my computer waiting for the theme to be announced, as I saw “Entire game on one screen” I couldn’t imagine something better for a platformer game. But immediately I realized this theme would have limited a lot the features of my game because, since I started thinking about a “room” game (with a story and something to explore), putting the entire game on one screen meant to spoil the end of the story! So there were two possibilities: find a solution not to spoil the end or try to not follow literally the theme! After a huge brainstorming I decided not to show the entire game on one screen but to put a dark (loading) screen when the player would have entered in the next room.

After facing the theme I began to seriously think about the game. It may seems strange but I got the name before the concept itself! I was thinking and… “A… AS… AZOR!” . Starting from the name I decided to find a plot that would have fitted the theme… AZOR seems something regarding the space stuff or futuristic stuff, isn’t it? So I have the settling… Space! I developed my story throughout the three days… and well it was becoming more complicated than I imagined! At the end I got a cool story, but sadly I had to cut it, since I hadn’t enough time…! But I want to develop the story and for this reason I will continue to develop AZOR… I want to get a final version and maybe upload it to Desura or Steam! After that, it was afternoon, I contacted my team mate for making the soundtrack, and as I told him the concept and the story he decided to help me and he made the splash screens for the introduction and the end. While he was working on the splash screens first, I started the level design and the making of tilesets/graphics! But the first was coming to an end…

The first day I went to sleep late since I wanted to plan the level design for almost the whole game… Immediately as I woke up I started working again… Fortunately I finished to code all the mechanics and the scripts (Oxygen, timers, files, animation… and a lot of stuff!) in time… because sadly I had to go out (to the real life) it was an afternoon evening…. As I came back home (It was 11 pm) I completed the level design for all the levels… I only had to decorate rooms and improving the lighting system, I particularly dedicated a lot of time to lights… I wanted to create a cool and innovative platformer! You can check my lighting work throughout the game… changing of lights intensity, color and position…! So if you haven’t tried it yet… do it now! At the end of second day I had levels, character and light system (almost done)! Terribly tired, I went to sleep…

I woke up really early in the morning since I had to work really hard to complete the game in time (1 day left)… I called my team mate for sending the screens but sadly he was still working on it… I couldn’t make the introduction so… I had to wait him…! I designed all the tiles and put them into the levels… I tried to make it playable but not so hard… (who played my first entry can imagine), for this reason I decided to help the player by putting in some rooms of the Lab oxygen capsules, to regenerate some Oxygen! I sadly had to stop the development of the story and I only put 3 files to find in the game… I couldn’t afford to make a longer game since I still hadn’t got a main menu, an introduction and an end… But… suddenly in the late afternoon my friend called me! He had finished the splash screens! Immediately he sent them to me and working faster than I could I made the introduction and the end… leaving the main screen for the last day… tired I fell asleep.

Main Splash Screen

As I woke up I set a target: I shall finish the game in the morning since my friend is working on music. I did it! I finished to code and to design the main menu within the morning and in the afternoon I went to my friend’s house to see the making of the music. He had already made the main theme for the introduction and the main menu so… we only had a few hours to make the levels soundtrack! We worked… and even if I wasn’t so satisfied at the end we got a really cool track that fitted the atmosphere of AZOR! It makes a sense of pressure mixed to paranoia! You can feel it when you play the game and oxygen is finishing but you haven’t got all the 3 files…! I ran at home incredibly fast and I put the music into the game… But there was a problem! 2 hours before the deadline I realized the game was unplayable since there was a huge bug… if you had only 1 file, when you collected the third one it was like you had found 2 files in 1 so it added 2 to your file… you would always win! Moreover when you got to the last room (to the spaceship HELKE 1), it would have subtracted 1 file to your files so… the game was unbeatable! I had to fix these bugs within less than 2 hours! I closed in my room and I worked as hell! Finally 1 hour before the deadline I did it… I tested the game, I sent it to my team mate to test it too (looking for other bugs… I hoped not to find other bugs otherwise well… it would have been a serious trouble!) and finally I published it! I submitted it to LD31 ! AZOR WAS BORN!

I immediately started to play a lot of other entries and I was amazed by seeing a lot of cool and well done entries! You guys did a really good job in this LD (well I haven’t partecipated to the last LDs so….) ! I was really happy when the first people tried my game and actually they liked it! Nothing is better than seeing your product so liked and played by the people! In these days I hosted it to ITCH.IO and GAMEJOLT and as I finish to work on it, in a nearby future I want to publish the final version on Desura, ITCH.IO and maybe Steam?! (I think I’ve already said it ahah I don’t know anymore) Waiting for the results now I’m writing this Post Mortem and I’m trying other amazing entries!

So people! If you haven’t tried AZOR yet… after I’ve been writing this post for 30 minutes now ahahah CHECK IT OUT ! Play, rate and enjoy AZOR… tell me what you guys think!

I think my team mate the last day made a huge work by making the official trailer for AZOR so… check it out!

He also released the main theme soundtrack on SoundCloud !

In these days I think I will also upload AZOR to HelkeGames website… you can check it HERE!

So… well I know this post may seem huge… but I told you guys the making of AZOR and my awesome adventure in this Ludum Dare 31! It’s always a pleasure and an awesome experience taking part into this competition! Waiting the results I will try other games ! So do the same with AZOR… I’d be really glad!

– Joe Recupero (Hellequin) 조셉

With all of your awesome comments about how we should keep going with the project.

I have been giving a lot of thought to doing a post-compo, and have decided that I’ll only work on a post-compo version is if it was to be a full-fledged game, not just bug fixes. In order for this to become a reality, I really need a community backing it. I have created a Google group and if we get 15+ people to join, then I’ll start working on it. Basically, I’m looking for an audience for the game. This is extremely important to us because there’s nothing worse then pumping your heart and soul into a project to realize that no one cares to even play it when you’re done, which has happened to us before.
If you want to join the group, then go here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/save-the-giant and apply for membership. I don’t want to make this group public, because this will act as the dev group. There will be a section for public builds if it makes it that far.

If you haven’t played our game, please check it out and let us know if this is a good idea. Leave a comment here if you would like us to play your game in return. Thanks in advance for your support.

I’ve never written a LD postmortem before, so we’ll keep it brief.

First off, we made a game, and we’d love you to bits if you rated it for us!

CLICK HERE TO PLAY

Secondly, we’re very happy with our work. This has definitely been our best game to date, largely on the basis that we got it finished with enough time to put in a bit of polish. Surprising, as this was the first time we didn’t work together in the same location, instead from our respective Uni’s. Ollie (programming) has been delighted that I finally gave in and chose to keep the ideas as simple as possible (No bloody online multiplayer). We always aim to be innovative, and we really think we nailed that with the use of raycasting to make spotting enemies almost impossible, but the aid of a nightvision drone, to scout and spot enemies. We recognise from the comments that a lot could be done to improve upon the existing stealth mechanics and enemy AI, but hey, 72hrs, man.

See below examples of our core game mechanic. Drone off, and darkness everywhere, drone on, and all is revealed!

Third, here’s a lovely timelapse of our code in developement, because that’s the in thing with you lot.

LD31 Timelpase for Peni6

We hope everyone had great fun on the games, congratulations to everyone who managed to submit a final product, and don’t forget to vote! <3

Whenever you play Greeny GRUB could you please let me know where you died.

Thanks.

PHT

Heres the Video from our game

This is the first game I made completely on my own and my first Ludum Dare!

Definitely learned a lot and can’t wait for the next one. (gonna work on my time management until then…)

Play it here!

Tags: Game Maker, jam

Well, it might be a bit late, but at least I’m prepared for next time

The quote is from Gabe Newell, creator of Valve

The background was created in Blender, using a plane and some lights.

Inspirational programmers quote in a wallpaper, HD

I updated my LD31 game to version 4. Focus of this update is on user friendliness, which really needed some help according to the feedback I’ve received.

Version 4 download link

Main change is to the controls. There’s now just one action button, which performs the displayed action, and a button to toggle between possible actions. The displayed action now also hints at what will happen if you perform the interaction, which is helpful when telling

‘craft this item’

from ‘kill the sheep in front of me’

Which will drastically cut down in the number of ‘oh shit I didn’t mean to do that’ interactions. It also highlights the tile on which the action is performed and as such hints at possible directional usages (the previous system of asking you which direction to use and forcing you to guess randomly is gone now).

Another much-needed feature is a simple highlight of your spawn location, which is now highlighted by a simple lighting effect.

Other changes include the addition of the Goad, which helps control sheep movement, and buffs to meat and grass seeds.

I hope that with this update the game’s difficulty will actually come from inability to juggle all necessary tasks rather than figuring out how the controls work.

Version 4 download link

Original entry page

Tags: Crafting, game, Game Update, ld31, post-compo, survival, update

Help the character to find the level exit.
But be careful not to enter the darkness because of abstinence character by computers.

Play Game – Go Out Screen

Tags: #LD31 #LDJAM #LudumDare #GameDev #OneScreen

Hi dear friends

We added an experimental WebGL-version of our game.

It isn’t as good as the webplayer-version but hey, it runs native on Firefox, Chrome and Safari

Oust Santa!

Be patient – it takes a while to load etc.

Have fun!

Do you try to survive in Jelly Test? If you do, how do you like it?

Play And Rate “Jelly Test”

//Update (version 1.1)
– Gamepad controls (360) implemented
– Hardcore jumps were smoothened
– A few audio effects were added
– Some minor bugs here and there fixed

*Mac export is coming…

** Thanks again guys for the great support and  feedback.

Looks easy but hard to master.

Game Link

Snowing in Montréal! So why not play some Super Cave In!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=38770

As a multiplayer game, COSMMOS worth playing together more than alone. That’s the reason why I announced in my post A 72H MMO game, from Theme to Reality I’d organize a let’s play together session, here it is !

All jammers and non jammers are invited with their friends to come and play COSMMOS together, on saturday 20th december at 17H00 (GMT+1). I’ll be streaming and tchating with whoever wants to on my twitch channel !

If you are a LD jammer and want to give a vote to the game, here is the ludum dare page of COSMMOS.

Please come and stress test the server with everyone !
Saturday, 17 o’clock (GMT+1).

I made a timelapse for Snowball Juggling Olympio my LD31 Entry :

I had to reboot my project 6h after the start. My initial idea was some sort of shooter arena with a very small ship and a very big arena 😀
The black screen sequences are my actual sleep time, it was pretty short on this jam… Not sure if it was a good thing or not.

Snowman face animation

Because some people asked me to, I also made a small tutorial to explain the snowman face animation. I’m not very good at making tutorial, but I’ll try.

The syntax used is haxe.

In this exemple the face will follow the mouse position in the screen.

WIDTH and HEIGHT are the game size.
RAY is the head ray.
mx and my are the mouse screen position transformed into a value from -1 to 1.
elements is a list of the face elements such as the eyes, nose, mouth etc. They all have a dx & dy offset between -1 and 1 to represent their position on the face.


var mx = (mouseX / WIDTH) * 2 - 1;
var my = (mouseY / HEIGHT) * 2 - 1;

for ( e in elements ) {
var cx = mx + e.dx;
var cy = my + e.dy;
var ddx = Math.cos( 1.57 * cx - 1.57 );
var ddy = Math.cos( 1.57 * cy - 1.57 );
e.x = ddx * RAY;
e.y = ddy * RAY;
}

var angle = Math.atan2(my, mx);
var dist = Math.sqrt(mx * mx + my * my);
nose.rotation = angle / 0.0174;
nose.scaleX = dist;

The nose element have a specific code to change his shape depending on the angle and the distance of the mouse to the center of the screen.
On the image you can see the nose also have a base element with no transformation so it can keep a round shape at the base. this element also add a small shadow using the DARKEN flash blendmode.

The use of the cosinus function make the linear values of mx and my become curved values. ddx and ddy are still between -1 and 1 but their value tends to stick to -1 and 1 more quickly. This is where the fake round face feeling happen.

This is not a 3D projection and, therefore, far from accurate especially with diagonals. In my case I had to mask my face elements so they dont leave the face area. You can see more details in the source code of my game.

Hey gamedevs!

We’re LasagneGames a small team of 2 x Game Designers and 1 x Coder who love Ludum Dare, and how does it repay us?

With the theme ‘Entire Game On One Screen‘!!

Actually it wasn’t so bad, and we’ve learnt that a theme that you’re not too keen on can really challenge you to go out of your comfort zone a little and try something new.

With that in mind our brainstorming session began and after a few ideas, we settled on a game where you control the facial expressions of this guy called Mr Litso Kaplan and help him through various social situations by using the keyboard to pull the correct expression.

Mr Kaplan: up and running!

We thought it would be a simple idea to start prototyping with, and see whether there was any fun locked away in there.

The Good

Compared to other LD jams, we were actually all in the same room, we’re split between San Marino and London, so we normally do things over Skype. So this time was definitely way cooler!

We got set up fairly quickly and then threw ourselves in to the content side of things. I spent my ‘free-time’ thinking about how to best submit and score expressions. I tried a few things and decided a rhythm game style input would be worth exploring. The default setting was to either submit by checking the keys were correct, or progressing the player after the timer ran out if they didn’t get the right combo.

In the end, I thought it would be a cool mini game to break up the stages a bit, so stuck it in anywhere I could. 😉

Rhythm game – oh yeah!

The Bad

In the end, it turns out that the last 3-4 hours coding is worth approximately 20 mins of proper non-exhausted-red-eyed coding. In the end, all I did was keep breaking the game and not having the mental capacity to know what I was actually trying to do, and how to fix the bugs other than hacking at the code like an axe to a silver birch!!

Also, I ignored all calls from my team mates to add a submit button so that the dialogue wouldn’t skip through if you were still holding the keys down. Plus, based on feedback in the comments, what was with the rhythm game?! It was unanimous that it didn’t fit in to our game mechanic, and my inability to ‘let it go son!’ meant it reflected bad on our game overall.

So, for the next jam, LISTEN TO YOUR TEAM MATES!!! Let them do their thing, and get on with your thing, based on the awesome suggestion they just shouted to you from across the room!

At the moment, we’re working on the post-jam version, Mr Kaplan is now the submission it should have been! From this point on it’ll be polish, get some good artwork (we have a great illustrator doing the line work), and expand the levels with more dialogue.

The post jam version

If you want to check out our POST JAM version you can see it progress as the game evolves.

Until next time, see you all in three months (well in 11 days when I check the results…) Good luck, and thanks to all those who voted and commented!!

Hey all. Just wanted to mention you can try my LD31 entry on the go with the Dino Dash: Rex’s Run mobile edition! Come to think of it, this turns it into a real handheld game.

This goes out to a buddy of mine who wanted to try the game but couldn’t easily get to a computer. The Phaser library made it easy! Anyway, feel free to hit the Mobile link on my entry page to try it out. Enjoy!

Controls:
Touch left side of screen to jump
right side to do downward bite attack.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=29150

taken from my blog at www.qu-be.co.uk

On the 5th December I took part in the Ludum Dare 72 Hour Jam. The theme this time was ‘Entire Game on one screen’. In the earlier voting rounds the theme of ‘Snowman’ had been popular and we spent Friday night up to the announcement looking for ideas based around this. Then at 02:00 Saturday morning the theme was revealed and we had to come up with another idea. After sleeping on it, it was decided to do a Beat ’em up style game of children against Snowmen (I had found some pictures on Pinterest which we really liked and wanted to use in the game)

I was joining @Garethiw and @gredgie, The plan was that I would come up with the sound and other areas that were normally rushed near the end of their previous Jams. As Eddie Izzard put it  when talking about his Clarinet playing in a band, I would be doing ‘the bits that were left over’.

So we had a theme and off we went. Garethiw wrote all of the game code in Unity and Gredgie created the graphics, while I came up with sound effects, some of the UI and the bodycount scoreboard scripts. Our work was committed to Github which seemed to work well apart from some issues with prefabs.

I had great fun over the weekend especially when creating the voices for some of the creatures in the game. As with my previous entry I marvel at the ability of my friends and that they let me join them.

Play and rate our game

Gameplay footage:

Click here to play Mini Minotaur via the browser or windows exe

There’s been some really fantastic feedback for Mini Minotaur and I wanted to thank everyone who’s played and taken their time to write a comment. It has really inspired me to continue working on this. This past week I have been working on adding touch controls, there’s still some work to go, if I plan to release this on mobile/tablet the touch controls have to be totally solid, but I’m going in the right direction.

Instead of moving with WASD, you simple click on the arrows to travel through doors into the next room.

Alongside that I’ve also improved the minotaur’s pathfinding and a brand new trailer! Check it out:

 Click here to play Mini Minotaur via the browser or windows exe

Tags: luke perkin, miniminotaur

“rogodo” is now available on Android and Amazon Fire.

please, vote for our game.
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=47530

Spent the last 2 days working on a whole new Shopping mechanic for my ld31 game TMO – Tiny Multiplayer Online, a game where you play as a game designer of an MMO RPG.

Progress is good! No update to the post comp link just yet though. Checklist:

If you have a cool idea that you think will fit into an MMO city builder type game lemme know!

This is the postmortem for my LD31 entry “When Snowmen Attack”.

Play it here

I’m pretty happy with how my game turned out. This was my second ludum dare and I wanted to make sure I improved in the areas that didn’t go so well the first time around.

What Went Right

Time management

I took the first night to figure out what I was going to do and then started Saturday morning. I spent Saturday getting the majority of the mechanics working and spent Sunday finalizing the mechanics, cleaning up my sprites and writing the music. I was able to finish the game in the 48hrs (although just barely).

Graphics

I spent a lot more time on my graphics (probably more than I should have), and it’s one of the things that people seamed to like. I also used placeholder art (which I hadn’t done before) during development so I could get the mechanics working earlier and give me more time to spend tweaking my sprites later. This helped me decide which actions I was going to use so I didn’t draw out any art I wouldn’t need.

Player Character from LD30

Player Character from LD31

Mechanics

Not overly complicated but it played well, and in most of the feedback people said they enjoyed it. I think I did pretty good at introducing new enemies and having the difficulty ramp up at a decent pace.

Timelapse

I liked watching ones that other people had posted last year and really wanted to do one this time around. I think it came out alright, although I made a lot of mistakes. Next time I’d probably cut more of the boring stuff out and put up more messages for what I’m doing so it’s not so confusing. Also, I did almost all of my sprite work on my iPad using SpriteSomething, so there are a lot of periods where my screen just sits there until I import the sprites in. So lots to improve on for next time, but I’m still glad I did it.

What Went Wrong

Graphics

Yeah, I know I put this in what went right as well…lol. I’m still learning so I made some mistakes like not keeping my pixel ratio consistent among all my sprites, this was probably the biggest complaint about my art.

Too Short

Another complaint was that the game wasn’t very long. I did most of my play testing on Sunday and I didn’t want to add waves I hadn’t balanced so I kept the game to only 10 waves.

Music

I think I did a better job on this in my last ludum dare. I’m not completely happy with the music. I feel I rushed it and I think it shows, reviews were kind of mixed some people liked it some didn’t.

For Next Time

I’d like to stream my development next time. I really wanted to this time but I was afraid it would be distracting and in the end opted to not take on that additional stress.

Think I might join a team and do a jam entry .  I’ve only ever designed games on my own, so working as part of a team would be cool.

Thanks Guys!

Thanks to everyone who commented/rated my game, your feedback has been really helpful.  I’m working on implementing your suggestions in my post comp version which I hope to post soon.  See you all again next time

It only relies on the HTML5 API and does not require graphics assets.

Might Greeny GRUB be the shortest entry in this JAM?

What about yours?

Feeling a little under the weather today — but that doesn’t mean I can’t play some games!

Not been too great today. As we get closer to Christmas, it starts turning into a perpetual wave of get-togethers and celebrations and food and a lack of a spare 6-8 hours where I can sit and give more feedback! I’m getting close to the end of my list though. Once I run out of games (I’ve played, rated and given loads of feedback to 79 games at present), or when I make it to 100 (whichever comes first, dependent on how many people continue to add to the list and how many games I’ve had my eye on but haven’t played yet), I will stop. I need to get back to my RL work — oh. And —

THE FULL POST-LD VERSION OF “A FINE WHITE LINE” IS IMMANENT!

That’s right, everyone!! I’ve finally gotten some things straightened out, and a full-on, post-LD version of “A Fine White Line” is NOW in production!

(I swear I WILL make a Post-Mortem. Eventually.)

Don’t forget to play, rate and comment on the LD entry!

Daniel Snd , who worked on “BUGGED OUT” during this LD has been graciously taking his time to help me with a well-thought out programming structure for the game. I have so much heart-felt appreciation for this, like you WOULDN’T BELIEVE.

Go! Play “Bugged Out” if you haven’t yet!! It’s fantastic!

Check out Daniel Snd’s YooToobs! He makes tutorials! GOOD ones!

Tags: #31, a fine white line, afwl, bugged out, daniel snd, feedback, ld, stream, twitch

LD30 was my first entry, and I had only heard about the competition a month or so prior to it. I was excited to join and became quite happy with the game I made. Somehow I thought that would be the end of it, but that’s when I discovered the whole voting system. It hadn’t even crossed my mind all of these thousands of games would need to be rated. I think the system itself is genius – the more you rate, the more you get rated. It’s the perfect incentive. So I started rating games. Every game I played was something new, something that someone put real effort into – and that alone was amazing to me. I learned so much just looking at all these different interpretations of the theme, the different ways of approaching the creation of a game. Verbalizing what in my opinion was great and what could be improved was great practice. I stumbled upon everything from absolutely wonderful, incredible games to the opposite end of the scale. This was when it hit me.

Normally on the Internet, when I see something that’s perhaps not up to par, I barely want to look at the comments. People have no inhibitions destroying whatever they get a chance to. Personally, I never think the opposite end of the scale is just crap. Someone with an idea, a person that has put real effort into something, has created something specific, and although it might not have turned out amazing, there’s still work that’s been done and an aspiration to go somewhere. Here’s what amazed me then and does this time around as well: Everyone agreed.

In Ludum Dare, it doesn’t matter what you’ve created. No one is out to destroy you. I don’t have that much time to rate and play, but throughout these two competitions I’ve rated close to 100 games, and I have not seen one single destructive comment. Everyone is constructive, and even one game in the previous competition where I felt like there was nothing I could say, I started reading the comments and found plenty of awesome suggestions, all related to the very base of computer game creation, and it inspired me to find something to add to the suggestions.

With every game I rate, and with every rating I get, I learn something. This community is impossible to beat, and I’m proud to be part of it.

(PS: *Commercial warning*: If you want to try out and rate my game for LD31, it’s available here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=38819)

I have made some gameplay tweaks to make the game easier.
So now you can beat the game and add comments to previous players like:

====================================================
Well, Okay, here’s the truth, I’ve only got 43 ratings by now, That’s just too few. And I only want it to at least reach 50.
So, I would be very thankful if you could spare some time to play and rate it. Thank you.

PLAY DETECTIVE VS KILLERS

Post-Compo version of BEAT+TRAK is on it’s way

• new graphics
• multiple color schemes
• more TRAKs
• more songs
• actual on-beat notes
• more player feedback
• SFXs
• new color switching mechanic!

 Click Image for Better Resolution

Hey guys,

after some technical challenges “you are lost” is now available on itch.io.

I didn’t know itch.io before this jam, now i can’t recommend it enough. It is an awesome platform and putting you game up there is very simple.

You can play it here.

Looks easy but hard to master.

Game Link

Hello everyone!

If any of you uses OS/X or Linux I would be very happy if you could tell me if my game works on those OS: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=9596

I never had a chance to actually test the builds I made for Linux and OS/X and maybe something is missing or I should give instructions or anything.

Thanks

We have almost played and rated a hundred games now. So far it was a lot of fun and i hope we will have the chance to play a lot more over the holidays. But for now i thought i might quickly share my absolute personal favourites. These three are pretty much responsible for me not having enough time to play the rest

Avoid Rage

Swotch

Ricochet Heroes

Hi everyone, thanks for you comments, support and votes!
(for those who didn’t tried it so far, give it a try here)

Maybe it’s too late for a post mortem but I’ll do it anyway. LD #31 was my third participation at the main event in a row. I started preparing quite early (about two days ahead). Why? Because I had time. I was lucky that I had Friday and Thursday afternoon some free time. So I looked up all the themes that made it to the finale round of voting and I started collecting ideas. I almost had at least one idea per theme. I had a fantastic idea about an adventure game which somhow included all 20 themes of the last round. But there was this one the only one were I had no idea what I should do.

So time was slowly ticking to LD’s start line and I was very excited. I didn’t bother that I had this one theme I wasn’t prepared for. Why should I? I did everything you should do for LD’s preperation. Write down some ideas about the possible themes (check), download and install updates/versions of your software (check), have someone for you food supply (check), read and watch some tutorials to improve you knowledge about some useful features for your game (check) and finaly be in a good mood (check). And then waiting was over and the theme was announced. I was shocked! My mood fall from the Mount Everest right into the Mariana Trench. Why? Well, do you remember that I had only one theme with no ideas? Yes this theme was picked by the majority as LD #31 theme. (Entire Game on One Screen)

After the first shock I started collecting ideas. An hour later I had two directions I could go. Behind door #1 was a tycoonish game (like “Game Dev Tycoon”). Behind door #2 was a MOBA game (like “LOL” and “Dota 2”). So which way should I go? Isn’t it obvious? I choose door #2. Why? Maybe because I like to do new things or maybe because it’s the more challenging one (Why should I go the easy way? 😉 ). I knew making a MOBA game in 48 hours is a bit too much so I decided to make only a MOBA (battle arena game) with no multiplayer component at all.

So after an hour of collecting ideas and planning I jumped right into programming. I started slowly but after a couple of hours I was picking up speed. And then about five hours into LD something happend that I totaly wasn’t prepared for. My hard drive died. Not the OS hard drive but my hard drive with all my programming savings and git version control saves. So instead of programming, working on artwork or sound I had to fix my computer. The hard drive was quite new. I used it only for about a year. So for the next hours I check and replaced cabels and all the other possibilities for a malfunctioned hard drive I could think of. At the end of day one I stoped checking my computer and started programming my game all over again. So an entire day was consumed without almost any progress. 😥

On the second day everything went smoothly. But I had to realize that I lost so much time that I couldn’t participate in the compo. Therefore I entered the jam. In retrospective I would’ve probably switched to the jam anyway (even without my  problems). Oh! I wonder what I could’ve achieve with an additional day. Well, we’ll never know.

Now let’s talk about the good:
– I’m pleased with my skills of working with the tools. Yes, there is room for improvements (isn’t there always room for improvements?) but I pretty much knew what I needed to know for my game.- I learned my lesson! Always prepare for the unthinkable.

The bad:
– Early on, I made some bad design choices that resulted in a not intuitiv readable code. And this was the reason for a couple of bugs that costs me a lot of time to fix.
– In retrospective this project was a bit too ambitious for a 48 hour timeframe and without any preperation upfront. I mean that I didn’t thought about all the things and mechanics such a game requires. And this resulted in bad design choices.

The ugly:
– If you read the introduction you already know the ugly. Oh and for all that are intrested, at the end of day 2 my hard drive thought I had enough rest I can do my job again.

For all those out there who are thinking I had no fun at all, I can assure you that I had my funny moments too. So for me it was a typical not so typical ludum dare.

For those who still want to try my game, you can find my entry here.

One part of really wanting to provide constructively criticism to every game I play is that it takes forever 😛

Finally I’ve played and rated my 100th, so I think it’s high time to highlight some of my favourites THAT I HAVEN’T SEEN MUCH LISTED BY OTHER PEOPLE (because it’s better than telling everyone about the same games over and over again), in no particular order:

Compo:

Approaching Grace

Sam Oates Games (82)
This one had some really smart design despite it being very derivative of Binding of Isaac. The dual characters + obstacles really gave a sense of needing to protect “each other”.

birdsong

Managore (203)
The Shader work that made this a reality is AMAZING. Backed by really good production value and great mechanics. Superb.

The Operator

little-burrito (43)
This was the game that had the least game, but damn what little game there was, I LOVED all of it. Amazing concept. Gave me a sense of awe. Great.

Gridception

Hammers (40)
Another one of those games that gave me a “huh, what’s the fuss ab… OMFG” moment. Really cool.

Maze Escape

Gins (62)
Amazingly designed, shares a similar greatness with Ball Room from the Jam entries below.

Snowball juggling Olympio

Benjamin (133)
Incredible game, incredible mechanics, amazing details, it’s basically a complete product. With things to discover too. And really conveys its theme so well through its mechanic, I love *that*.

Jam:

Ball Room

BroCade (45)
Superbly well designed platforming and puzzling mesh. Love it to bits, and it’s even got a atraditional twist to the platforming.

Ring Ring Ring

InHelli (39)
The way this game toys with your emotions with so few elements is incredible. FEAR. Delicious pixel fear.

Bionic Bliss

Mechamew (70)
So well written, so well executed, so cute It’s not the deepest game ever but it has heart, and that’s great.

Laundry Day

Omiya Games (56)
A really surprising game. Takes a mundane concept and makes it… mundane, but there’s a lot of fun in that mundanity

Farm Invaders!

Reyn (32)
Surprisingly well designed for such a tiny thing. All the elements come together in a cohesive form like a great boardgames, but without the wait.

Then of course there’s my own Compo game, which is pretty damn good too, if I do say so myself

No More Boxes

A deceptively cute multiplayer arena platformer physic-em-up that came out “different” because I thought really really really hard about the theme and restrictions

Well done LD 31! You’ve been amazing as usual! Looking forward to the next one already! 😀

Hello people!

I made a game for LD31. It is a good game! 😀

I would really like it if you played it. Please play it. 😀

Play Doll house: q-Be or not q-Be

Doll house: q-Be or not q-Be, a game by LIME :D

If you would like to see a list of the other games I recommend, see one of my earlier posts. Thanks! 😀

Oh you mean melting the snowmen. I thought when you said Puddle Maker and I saw little circles of yellow in the screenshots…. Nevermind… Larry might just have a dirty mind! Let’s go kill some wasteland marauders shall we? Don’t forget to bring your wind sword!

The Murderdome by Ryan Nielson

Puddle Maker by MrHill

Marelda by Peach Pie Productions

Got a spiffy game? Share away! Im going to be creating showcase videos throughout the voting period. So I’d love to add some more to the list. I’ll be trying to shuffle them in regularly.

You can also keep up to date with the latest episodes via the [Ludum Dare 31 Chupacabra Playlist]

Cheers All!

Tags: Game Review, ld31, Video Showcase

2014 has been the year of many game jams (for me, relatively), and one consistent trend has been that each jam gets more and more chill than the last. LD31 is probably the most low-key, easy-going jam I’ve done to date. All the same, I’m quite pleased with our game, One Does Not Simply Walk Into More Doors.

Looking back on why this jam felt so relaxed,  I think most of it came down to experience and attitude and how that shaped our process. Also, figuring out a jam workflow between two designers who have different game-making tool preferences ended up being really efficient…

For the attitude part, I was on vacation visiting Adriel under strict orders from my boss to relax, so we knew up front that we wouldn’t be killing ourselves over this and that the intent was to just have fun and make a game together with very little pressure. Experience-wise, we had a lot of weaponry to wield. Besides just doing a bunch of other jams this year, it also marks 5 1/2 years of me working in the games industry. Adriel of course just wrapped up making a game a week for an entire year. Joonas is such an experienced sound designer that he whipped up all his sounds for our game in 45 minutes on the last day, because that’s how he rolls.  The experience thing comes into play not just in implementation, but in understanding scope control.

Process Observations

We spent a loooong time turning ideas over before picking one and actually getting started. When the theme was announced, we spent about an hour with general brainstorming, then slept (we were in CET). In the morning I spent several hours just making little prototypes of mechanics we’d discussed, and fleshing out logistics for some bigger ideas. We didn’t go anywhere with these ideas but it let us filter things out early before picking something and getting a good ways in before realizing the idea wasn’t great. (I should note that this first morning of prototypes was very focused and efficient because I didn’t have internet access for several hours)

A key was landing on an idea that we were both excited to explore. I feel like we each had a few that we were individually quite interested in, but were good about yielding when we saw the other person was a bit “meh” on them. It can be very easy, in a jam setting, to jump in on the first idea that springs up out of fear of time ticking away, but I really believe it’s worthwhile to give a lot of time in the idea phase before jumping in. Anyway, we eventually both were excited about this prospect of screen-wrap where you exited it at unpredictable locations, and ran with that.

We didn’t figure out the whole ghost theme thing until quite a ways in, though, and had a second brainstorming and idea hashing session midway through to try and work out what the character was, what these doors were, what the setting was, what you were trying to collect, etc. The ghost thing is pretty weird but it solved a bunch of problems for us (ghosts just go straight through doors so no need for a door open/close animation. And the doors fly around because it’s a haunted house. Logic! Ship it!)

I feel that it is important to re-iterate the low-stress nature of this jam. We both got plenty of sleep and took many breaks, and made sure to still devote a lot of time to my vacation (there were many hours spent just lazing and watching American Horror Story, and we took most of the last day to go on a Dutch food tour). When I say this was a low-key jam I really mean it.

Double Designer Workflow

Working with Adriel was interesting and different from pretty much any group jam I’ve ever done. We are both designers, but have different tools-of-choice when it comes to jams (I love Construct 2 for jamming whereas she is a Unity wizard), so one challenge was figuring out how we were going to divide our workflow. It would be trickier than just someone doing programming, someone doing art, etc.

In the end I think we came up with a system that worked really well. We decided the final game would be in Unity, and Adriel got started implementing systems we *knew* we were going to have (like the doors). Meanwhile, I jumped into Construct 2 and built a prototype to do some fast iteration on mechanics. By the time she had some baseline stuff implemented, I had tried a bunch of things in the prototype that she could play, and together we figured out what was going to be fun and what the overall game structure should be.

The Prototype

This initial process is what I think kept our scope waaaay down. We’d talked about a bunch of ideas for mechanics and features, but since I was slamming a prototype while she was setting up base functionality, we were able to see what the minimum necessary features were to make what felt like a complete game, and cut a bunch of stuff up front. Meanwhile there wasn’t that worrying sense of spending too much time on the prototype, because in that time work on the final game was still getting done.

Once Adriel started in on the heavy implementation, I spent most of my time making art and placeholder sounds, but there were still several times where I revisited the Construct 2 prototype and worked in there to solve design problems while Adriel was busy programming and working on game-feel-type-stuff. This was stuff like “okay, what does a good wave structure feel like? What things need to be taught and what is the order we should teach them? What are the one-off wave segments going to need to be before we get into standard waves?” This proved to be a good way for two designers to work in parallel. Meanwhile, there were still times when I could jump into Unity and help out on implementation as well (I was super jetlagged, so kept waking up stupid early. I’d spend several hours implementing stuff before Adriel got up and then passed things back off to her).

One-off state flow

Figuring out this workflow for working with a teammate with a lot of overlapping skillsets may have been the most valuable thing I learned from the jam.

Observations about the game itself

• I was really happy with the sort of frantic, vulnerable feel that we got in with the poor little ghost and the fact that you had to constantly be escaping through doors to stay alive.
• We were both surprised and delighted with how much more depth Joonas’s sound effects gave to the personality of the game. He really made that little ghost come alive! (HAHAHAHA…ahem…hm)
• The one little mechanic thing I wish we’d gotten in was a delay on input after you go through a door. We had this in the Construct 2 prototype and it helped you mentally remap which door you had just come out of before moving again, which helped prevent accidental movement into doom or into another door when you teleported. We didn’t have time to get that into the Unity version (someone suggested another way of getting this effect would be to just reset movement through the door so that you would have to lift your finger and press again to move)
• Finding that kazoo music really solidified the tone of the whole game for us. I was just browsing through things and stumbled upon it, and couldn’t stop laughing. Then I showed it to Adriel and she couldn’t stop laughing either. The tune still gets stuck in my head sometimes.
• Permadeath was a harsh choice, but we went with it anyway because Adriel wanted to explore that balance of challenge and frustration. I think the biggest challenge with this is getting someone back into the game quickly (someone suggested that after a certain score threshold, restarting would just throw you in at the standard wave part and skip all the intro. This sounds intriguing in theory but may have some problems in practice.)
• Just a funny note, in the prototype I made the main enemy a random chompy monster, but after we picked the ghost theme for awhile it was a big dude with a pin running around trying to poke you. We were having some problems with the rotation of the sprite looking terrible, though, and realized that fixing it so it felt good via code or doing a bunch of animations for his facings would be time-consuming, so we went back to a chompy monster that looks okay when rotated (which I randomly colored the same as the candy. So she became mama candy, protecting her young). Adriel notes that this is a good example of picking your battles in a jam setting.

Conclusion

I enjoyed working on this jam immensely. Adriel is one of my closest friends and though we have had endless design conversations for months and months, this was the first time we actually made a game together, and so it is quite special to me. Having Joonas lend us his sound sorcery was also amazing, because he is one of my all-time favorite sound designers. I learned new insights about working with teammates who have overlapping skillsets. We made a game in a relaxed way that shows how jams don’t have to be about killing yourself to get something done. But overall I’m happy that this was a low-stress end to my year of jamming!

Tags: ld31, post-mortem, postmortem

My favourite game.

Link

We, Tech Valley Game Space, will be playing your Ludum Dare games live on Twitch.tv tonight! We’ll be jamming from 4:00 PM till midnight, Eastern Time, so keep those games coming! Check us out on the link below:
http://www.twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace

Interested in getting your game streamed? I have a form up in the link below, so go right on ahead! http://goo.gl/forms/8IkM8aU5eK

The games I’ve played so far are listed here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RbvfWHMb-vWmYBagjjnfVAMKugG1vgQ41QFQ_Wa4YjE/edit?usp=sharing

Want to see our previous streams? We’ve split them into highlights on our Twitch.tv stream profile and on Youtube, so check them out!

Tags: live stream, Twitch.tv

Hey Everyone!

Well that sure was fun!  I’ve participated in other game jams before but this was my first LD!  The feedback and overall turnout on this event is just amazing.  So fun playing many of the entries.

Great job to everyone and thanks a lot to the community for the feedback I have received already!

If anyone wants to test out their mouse, you can check out my strategy clicker game:  http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=45690

We, Tech Valley Game Space, are playing your Ludum Dare games live on Twitch.tv right now! We’ll be jamming from 4:00 PM till midnight, Eastern Time, so keep those games coming! Check us out on the link below:
http://www.twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace

Interested in getting your game streamed? I have a form up in the link below, so go right on ahead! http://goo.gl/forms/8IkM8aU5eK

The games I’ve played so far are listed here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RbvfWHMb-vWmYBagjjnfVAMKugG1vgQ41QFQ_Wa4YjE/edit?usp=sharing

Want to see our previous streams? We’ve split them into highlights on our Twitch.tv stream profile and on Youtube, so check them out!

I decided to do some streaming of my post compo work. I’ll probably move on to playing and rating compo games later tonight as well.

You can watch it here

Looks easy but hard to master.

Game Link

In the new version of Cobot you can now choose between “Normal Mode” and “Hardcore Mode”. In “Normal Mode” there are checkpoints, in “Hardcore Mode” there are none.
In addition I improoved the controls and the physics, so the gameplay feels better and is a bit easier.

Controls: Move: arrow keys, Jump: y or z, Exit: Escape

Hi Ludum dare.

After this awesome week-end. We learn a lot. We see a lot of what, do the other guys and teams.
That’s cool! Well we also show part of code of “how to do this” or “that is made with”.

There is somethings simple to fell but hard to explain. That i would like to talk with you. Those moment where you fell your soul growing by making…
well these little moments where you have this sensation of touching start, when the keyboard moves at the end of your fingers.

We all experiment this felling, “before I don’t really understand how does it work, but now hell yeah ! It ensures my back”
and more than I creating something in less than one week with it! …

For me it was when i finish mastered this coffee/js mixin pattern who help me to organise the whole project.
I was so happy then i put it everywhere thinking “now guest what i going to add a new mixin ! tada ! ”

I know it’s not something we can see in the final project and most of our friend and familly wouldn’t get it.
But it’s here and you know that this day you do it with this kind of “je ne sais quoi”..

And you what was your moment of grace during the creation of your game ?