I made a timelapse for my LD game “Silence”. The timelapse itself is not silent, but has music by the amazing Super Guitar Bros. Check it out right here:

Also, the awesome Rialgar (check his game here) made the first let’s play of any of my games ever (that I know of). It feels great to watch someone play and like your game.

If you like what you see you might consider trying the game yourself.

PS: Yes, I need to feel like a wizard sometimes.

Hi folks

Just a few words so as to share with you my real joy. This LudumDare session was very cool and pleasant. I have discovered many interesting games and projects which seem to me sometimes amazing. Maybe do you have tried my own game – a tiny platform game? If you want test this entry I will be happy. Please rate my project. For the LD31, 74 members have voted. I would like to beat my previous record. I need you. I wish you the best. See you later for the next Ludum Dare session – LD33 ++

Remote Control by Geckoo1337

I decided to upload a video of the last level of my entry, in case anyone has trouble / is to lazy to actually try the game.

If you like chiptune music and physics games,

Try the game

Otherwise,

Watch the video

This was my first LudumDare, and I’m amazed at how everyone in this community interacts positively to make LD the great experience that it is. So, this is a warm thank you to burlapjack, JenniNexus, Taunia_Sabanski for their little reviews on my game LIGHT. Go support your fellow LD LetsPlayers!

Don’t forget to check burlapjack‘s playthrough:

Play and Rate LIGHT!

Tags: ld32, playthrough, unconventional, weapon

Okay, so I did jam, not compo… but the title worked too well!

I just hired a pixel artist, and we’re going to be doing a rework on my Ludum Dare 32 title! I’m going to completely overhaul the graphics, and take the lessons I learned from the LD32 feedback I’ve been getting so far. If you’ve played my game before, thank you so much!  Look for the changes below. If not, my game can be found here at the Ludum Dare entry.

1. Complete graphics overhaul! Woo! No samples yet, but I’m still really excited.

2. The Ludum Dare version is going to be adjusted for difficulty, and renamed “Fury Mode”.

3. I’m going to insert a level selection, and have progress be gradually unlocked when players master what has come before, instead of the frantic pace of my existing gameplay.

4. I’m still figuring out how to redo the UI, but I’m sure I’ll figure something out.

If you have some comments on my Ludum Dare entry, I really would love to hear them before I get to work on the post-jam version! Thanks so much for your attention. I’m going to start posting again on my twitter, @brendankeating2. Thanks again, and have fun daring!

I have finally finished my game that I have been working on for a while. You should check it out here http://rd124p77.itch.io/simple-squares.

Play it here

It’s bigger, better and cuter! My post LD/ Indie Cade build for pillow fight is finished and I’m really pleased with how it came out.

New Features:

-Game Pad Support

-New moving and jumping mechanics

-Awesome new combo system

-Less audio bugs 😀

-A whole new camera system

-Bigger level design

-More particles!!!

http://mandolinquinn.itch.io/pillow-fight

Anyway, tell me what you think about my fire effect and what I might do to improve it.

There is only few Textual Adventure Game on the Ludum Dare, so take a look at these two :

TLDR OTT by wooltech.

Escape The Killer by me.

PS : I’m searching for someone who can help me proofreading my textual games, show yourself if you’re interested !

Tags: ld32, Ludum Dare

So here is Mandolin (who made Pillow Fight) completing it in 5:00 without losing a single life:

As a side-note, X-11 “Gust Gunner” was made to emulate NES-era difficulty and aesthetic, meaning you will die A LOT, and consequently, you will blame it on the game.  Originally, I was going to have a stock of three lives to complete the game, otherwise you had to start from the beginning.  Some people called that “sadistic”, and I bowed and agreed… the game is in the EASY state it is now because I understand that there is a wide variety of types of gamers who will play a Ludum Dare submission, and not all of them want to be tantalized for their skill level at twitchy platformers.  Essentially, what I’m saying is that the game IS NOT hard, because you can never truly fail.  You have infinite lives, mid-level checkpoints, and a nerf’d boss.  The mechanics are different.  That is the point of the LD for me!  Innovation!  Every time somebody tells me that they died too much because of the “mechanics” not being tightened up enough, I slam my face against the wall.  The mechanics (with a few exceptions, namely, the boss bullet hell being too avoidable) are exactly what we intended them to be.  We spent most of our time fine-tuning the player’s controls.  It just takes time to get used to playing something you aren’t used to playing.  My supporting argument:  the video above.  Mandolin has not played this game as much as either of us have, but they managed to do something even we haven’t done yet:  a perfect run.  If a game is able to have a flawless run by someone who has only played the game for a couple of weeks, then it is not a difficult game.

Cheers!

-C

What that Hell-ish Black Sheep?!?!

Try the “new update” version of Scaresheep!
Scaresheep

Enjoy!

http://rd124p77.itch.io/simple-squares

Welcome, fellow Ludum Darer!
Do you wish that somebody would try your game on stream? Wish no further, for I am here just for that purpose!
Come to my stream, enter your game in the chat and watch! I shall proceed on a first come – first served basis.

www.twitch.tv/eemmbbeerr
And if you wanted to repay me for my kindness, look no further than my/our Drunken Quest for the One Vodka game, found in the link below. I hope you will enjoy playing it!
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=26778

EDIT: Done for today, thanks for watching!

I reviewed a game called Drop It on my channel.  Check it out,  and give the developers some love. Null DIES

So I’d say enough time has elapsed since I released Quality Television for me to look back on it. The concept is simple yet silly: your only weapon is a television, and placing it anywhere will hypnotize any guards caught in its entrancing rays. Developing this thing was a lot of fun, as you might imagine! First up, the development process:

1. First afternoon- Brainstorming! It actually only took about 5 minutes of brainstorming for this idea to pop into my head. My first idea was a JRPG where you use words as a weapon, but I’m terrible at JRPG design. My next idea was BANANARANG!, which is exactly what it sounds like, but that seemed too indistinguishable (mechanically speaking) from a normal boomerang. Then I hit upon the TV idea, loved it, and started prototyping. It was all engine work today, but not much else.
2. Second day- I made a phenomenal amount of progress on the second day; most of the content you see in game is from this stage of development. Level design was top priority, and I finished all but level 8 (which was a story level more than anything else).
3. Final hours- From here was the aforementioned level 8, the beginning and ending sequences, and sound and music. I wasn’t as productive here as I was the previous day, but I’d say I’m pretty happy with how complete the game feels.

I guess I’ll go straight to what went well and what didn’t:

PROS:

• Core Gameplay: The core mechanics of the game worked out really well. I ended up with the game alternating between action and puzzle levels, with the final levels (Levels 6 and 7) being an effective mix of both. I feel like the Level 4 difficulty spike was a bit too much though, maybe I should have had an additional level to better teach the unusual light mechanics.
• Technical Stuff: Aside from a Windows version crash that was fixed within a couple hours after release, there weren’t any major bugs.
• Sound and Music: I had enough free time on the final day to put together a decent (albeit short) soundtrack in Renoise. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that additional instruments come in when the TV is in play. I even made the added instruments low-quality and static-y, as if they were coming from the TV itself.
• Art: Well, it was there. I do think that its simplicity worked well.
• Story: This was a lot of fun. The story is, again, simple, but the opening text really set the tone, featuring the “Sinister Governing Body” (or SGB). I’d rather not spoil the ending here, but suffice it to say that it’s pretty crazy– and a natural extension of the game’s mechanics, too!

CONS:

• Scope: Generally, when you see “scope” in the “cons” section of a LD postmortem, you expect the author to have overstretched themselves. In fact, the opposite ended up happening. There are only 8 levels, the last of which is entirely story-oriented. I feel like I could have done a lot more with the concept with the time allotted.

So here we have the pros vastly outweighing the cons. What a successful success this success has successfully been! Successful.

Download Quality Television here. Successfully.

I wanted to create a digital board game in Unity. Not having much experience in Unity here’s what I ended up with.

While working on Scoria, I had a simple goal to finish the game, make sure there was sound,music and graphics. I  had  base gameplay in mind where I would build a tactics style game where the background would attack you. Originally there were going to be graves everywhere and hands would come up and grab random surrounding tiles. The goal was going to be to push your opponent towards the hands and attacking background elements. Once basic moving was put in place I realized it was almost impossible to push in the desired directions hoping to get the right cards. So how did I get that far before coming to this?

Well I started with this baby. I decided as soon as I heard the theme to go to the local store and buy a notebook to ONLY work on this game with. I sketched out some basic ideas for what the cards would look like as well as concept’d out turn orders… etc. Seemed fun on paper. WRONG.

The AI problem
If you’ve played the current version of the game, you’ll see that the action is very slow. It’s hard to get the cards you want in order to move the way you want. That being said, I had to design AI around this as well. It was completely frustrating. With the AI trying to attempt to use the attack cards that it had, there was a lot of moving left and right, discarding random cards to try and get what it wants. The AI basically stood in the same square discarding the entire game unless approached by the player, or moving left and right repeatedly.  That eliminated the “also get to the treasure chest” objective.

The blank board problem
I originally planned to design out a full board with tombstones and pillars and… shrimp dogs, flaming cars… all that kinda stuff. Then I realized I only had 72 hours(It being my first Ludum Dare I didn’t really want to chance 48 hours) so all of it was scrapped. So I ended up with a huge blank area with nothing to do but move forward and attack.

The super(unconventional) weapon
Since I didn’t have the stage with the reaching hands and flying pillars, etc. but I still wanted a weapon that the player didn’t control attacking. So I went with a death laser in space. I created targets that would appear on the ground every four turns, and it would fire after the player and ai moved. That was very hard to see/understand without reading the page then using your imagination. This lead to another problem, things made perfect sense to me but confused others.

Things aren’t as clear as I thought
Part of the design of this game was to have no text at all. I wanted everything to be iconic. The back of the cards were originally suppose to show off the 3 card types. Red – Attack, Green – Magic/Skill, Blue – Movement. The Go button was suppose to be an icon that says “use this card”, and the trash button was suppose to symbolize discarding. After spending a good amount of time thinking of how to do such icons, I realized anything magic and skill would HAVE to be explained. The two buttons for “use” and “discard” would’ve required a tutorial. There wasn’t enough time for all of that.

The Deck
Currently the game works with a shared deck. While developing I kept track of the cards on paper while playing out the enemies turns trying to balance out the cards. I couldn’t accept the thought of each player (IRL) bringing their own decks to the table to play this game, so I took the easy road and had one shared deck. In retrospect, it might be more fun not being able to card count what has been played.

The Cards
Once again, there were green cards planned that would do cooler things but they required text. I think I’ll revisit the no text thing if it makes the game that much cooler in the long run. Also I planned on having stats that allowed you to use various cards. For example, a move card that allows you to move 3 spaces requires a move of 3. Once I dumped the idea character selecting(To speed up dev time) for the jam, I realized that doing that gave me more empty space on the cards. So, I trimmed the cards of all unused space. A lot of choices like that caused me to have to change-

The Graphics
I avoided Photoshop like the plague on this project. I think I opened it maybe twice the entire weekend. I didn’t want to play with textures and I didn’t really have proper 3d software anyway(Blender and I aren’t on speaking terms right now). So I used the voxel tool Qubicle to do everything. Yup. Absolutely everything in the game is 3d voxels, I was planning on spinning cards around and everything. It didn’t look as cool as it did in my head though.

Future Plans
I plan on continuing this game, I’ve even made notes! I wanted this game to focus on being very much so a board game as well as a video game. I wanted to make something that four players could play and move around a board and race to a treasure… or try and kill the other players first. I’m waiting until after voting is done though, because that’s when I’ll have the most feedback on everything. I’m kicking around the idea of shrinking the board size and or having multiple levels to choose from. I’d also like to have 2D sprites instead of 3d modeled characters. I’ve always been a big fan of Final Fantasy Tactics.

In closing, I had a lot of fun participating in this Ludum Dare and I’m almost positive I’ll participate in future ones as well. Thanks for the read!

Here’s another link in case you don’t feel like scrolling.

Have you had a chance to try out Chroma Watcher yet? It’s probably one of the more difficult games this LD, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes very rewarding!

Try and see if you can beat 200 points.

Unfortunately the timelapse is for the first day only, as my computer decided to collapse in the middle of day 2!

I was lucky to salvage this lot…

Hope you enjoy it!

And remember to play and rate my game SLICK LICKER!

I have made a post compo of my game, The Landscape Processor.

If you wanna try it, go ahead

I don’t like the word “Post mortem”. It indirectly implies that something is dead on delivery. A game comes alive first when it is played. That said, here are a few key observations from creating Fjuffy teh kloud so that others can learn from my experience.

The silence is falling
Audio programming in general has always been my blind spot. The DIY compo rule makes I even trickier because sites like Open game art can not be used. The fact that there is no audio feedback at all makes time spent with Flyffy dry and stiff. Just a few “pings” and “swishes” would have made a lot of difference. I will have to put some extra effort into this part skill set before the  LD33.

Pomodoro? More like Pomodorocks!
The “Pomodoro technique” is a way of keeping focused. The rules are simple: Divide work into smaller task and work on one task at in intervals of 25 minutes (aka a “pomodoro”) with 5 minute breaks between them. Take a longer break after 4 pomorodos. Count your pomodoros. That is all.

Using this technique not only helped me keep focus. Counting the pomodoros also alerted me when something was taking to much time and this helped me re-plan when needed. This is something I will do again on LD 33 and I do recommend everyone who wants to be more efficient to try it.

Plan A and B
As the genius DevOps Borat puts it :

“Make of sure you have strong plan C. Plan A and B are never work.”

My original Plan A was to make an non-geometric game. By non-geometrical I’m referring to games that do not value positions, collisions, updates per second etc. Examples would be text-adventures, VN:s, some simulators and RPG:s. I was prepared fr this! But the first (and only) good  idea I came up was an action game, plan A failed.

Plan B was to make a game about encircling particles. You would fly around as a little cloud and make rings and other cool shapes. Unfortunately I have not dabbled with vector mathematics in over a year so having to quickly reboot those brain parts was not easy. Detecting what is inside a (possibly concave) shape is a hard problem. With only very basic vector code to reuse it was hard enough to just detect two lines intersecting.  This is why fluffy cleans the air near the jet stream intersection, not inside the loop. I think it works sort of well, even it it was not my original intent.

Minimal playable product
The day after LD was a regular 8:30-17 work day for me, so staying up coding untill the last minute was never an option. I did manage to cram stuff like a score and a “game over” screen in my very last pomodoros, making it an actual game (and not just unchallanging interactive art). I should probably have done this part sooner in the development process.

Firsts times a Charmander?
This was my first LD and my third Game Jam ever. I usually miss events like these and it always annoys me. Actually participating on the other hand was really a lot of fun! The time limit makes you scope down, and that means you finish your game. It got me fired up! I had ideas! I had to implement them all!

If you never been in LD before and you’re reading thing thinning “darn it, I missed it again.. oh.. well.. I might not have enjoyed it anyway.. Q-Q” then take this as my final advice for this time: The next Ludum Dare is in AUGUST, burn this into your MIND and CALENDAR.