As an avid gamer, I enjoy playing games as much as making them. I finally reached my goal of playing and rating 10% of all entrants today. Here is some more of the cream that rose to the top.

Bears and Bees

I was very lucky to have played this game first. It’s a freakin’ hilarious HTML5 game that you can play in your browser without the hassle of Unity!

Limb by Limb

Rip your limbs from your body, use them as utilities, and reclaim them later. Enjoyable game. 5/5 in WTF.

The Murderers of Originality

This game will have you screaming “STFU kid!” Well done example of a short but sweet compo entry.

slappy the frog goes to town

Cute game, another perfectly short LD entry that is somewhere between adventurer and puzzler.

Udom Nebdon

Very well done game using shaders to give it that retro CGA/EGA style of graphics. I just wish it had a run button!

Nuclear Autumn

Fun platformer that reminds me of Metroid.

The Song of Aria

Best use of “sound as a weapon” that I played. BTW, I have no idea why this game is marked as possibly offensive.

Killer Moves

Perform the key combinations before the red bar fills up. A bit buggy in that you and your opponent can never truly be defeated (as to be expected for a LD entrant), but a perfect example of a 5/5 mood in a game. In case you were wondering, the soundtrack is Virtual Riot’s Prove Them Wrong.

Soulstealer

I was fortunate to have played this game as my 282nd game… the very last of the 10% of games I played. Very interesting play on the theme and another fun platformer. Stuck? Just try going to the farthest corners of the map and pressing Z. The mandrakes are sometimes hard to spot; all you can see is their top leafy stem.

We took on this project, but it was too big of a project for us, but the game works for the most part short of a few bugs, I wouldn’t say it’s really fun ATM, but for a LD game its pretty fun. but we have HUGE future plans for this game

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=44294

And the game itself runs on my twitch channel you get there through the LD game link. it requires 6 people to play and hopeing many of you will see this and come hang out and play and rate our game ^^

Big thanks to these two guys for giving Joe a bash. Going forward I plan to release a post-LDJam version of the mini platformer with title screen, checkpointing and an actual ending this weekend.

For those that can’t wait play it here

STAY TUNED!

Well honestly I planned to add in a lot of features but I am just burned out and am beginning to hate my own game now. Time to stop and just put out a more well polished version of GSBoD. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed working on this game and I’m proud of what I have done, but it has to end somewhere.

First of all, still on windows, not much I can do with that. Keyboard controls but no controller support as my controller at home is broken so I was unable to test the controls…

Second, the game now runs ONE MILLION TIMES FASTER!!! Well not really but at  least twice as fast, which makes a huge difference.

Play the new version of my game.

and while you are there don’t hesitate to play my LD version for comparison.

*Shameless self promotion (^__^) *

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I would like to thank everyone who has played, rated my game and left  some very nice and encouraging comments! This was my first Ludum Dare and I will definitely be coming back for next time, rain or shine! Now here are a few gifs of my work in progress from the start of the Ludum Dare to now.

My first time using GameMaker’s physics engine

The gif used for my finished LD version of the game

The new enemy I added Post LD

The game I made for the past Ludum Dare has just arrived to Android Play Store –https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.madtriangle.fourdots.

Four Dots is a challenging arcade game where you have to match the falling balls with the core just by tapping left or right. Can you beat my highscore?

Download here!

I don’t like writing post-mortems before the end of the voting. How can I say if the game is good or bad if I don’t know if people liked it? So, here is a pre-post-mortem + timelapse.

Wordskill

Idea.

I expected this theme to win, so I made up an idea beforehand. So, it’s a game a game about a cowboy, whose gun is made for suiciding only. What, is my game is not about it? I figured out it would be too relying at graphics. So, I made up a new idea pretty quickly, and I liked it. However, the actual game is not about fighting, I should’ve added a healthbar for the enemy/friend or something like that, just to make the theme usage a bit more clear.

Coding.

And again, my code is crap. I feel sorry for those who want to understand more about the game and look at the source code. However, it’s not hopeless, I wasn’t hurt by it being too messy.

Time-management.

Actually, I was ill during the LD, so I had a lot of free time. However, I had less time left by the end of the compo. I think, it was the only time I didn’t have time to make any music. Other than that, I have no complaints, I balanced sleeping, coding and designing well. Well, maybe I was a bit too careless, because I didn’t have a working demo for a long time.

Graphics.

Oh, a big thing. I used pixelart this time. Well, I always use pixelart. Not because I like it a lot, just because it’s easier. I use it as an excuse. I went McPixel-inspired and made each level have 2 frames of animation, so it looks like I can draw. Actually, I wasn’t able to make it perfectly pixelated, you might notice borders of speech/though bubbles are blurry. I couldn’t fix that.

Level design.

I knew my game needs a twist (not like it’s already twisted enough), so I made a smaller speech area for some levels, a bigger one for others, some syllable counting in forms of poetry and haiku e.t.c. Actually, the poet is Alexander Pushkin, though I’m afraid he doesn’t look alike. I also wanted to make a singing level featuring Freddie Mercury, but everything went well without it.

Title.

I made up a name quickly: “Words kill, words give life”. I drew the logo in the last couple of hours, and accidentally put “Words” and “kill” words too close. And I noticed they can be read as “Word” and “skill”! I quickly chopped of the second half of the title, making it “Wordskill”.

Rating entries.

I wasn’t able to play 100 games for some LDs, and I’m not close this time as well. But this time I made a thing I didn’t do before: during the compo and the jam, I bookmarked games I would like to play when they are released.

Timelapsing.

Nothing to say, just watch:

And here are some game highlights with little ratings:

Quality Television,

a compo entry by crazya02.

The TV is extremely addicting, but not for you! You your TV set to stun guards and escape the prison!

Mouton,

a compo entry by Noisette.

Trick the shepherd and get to the paddock! Or be a shepherd yourself, and kill those sheep! And it’s multiplayer!

Seamus’ Gun,

a jam entry by 01101101.

Use your paint-shooting gun to kill the enemies! But be careful, you only need a certain paint color!

Hi there! We’re No Wand Studios, a Spanish indie video game development studio. The Jonbar Point had been the game we created on our first Ludum Dare participation. It was sort of a challenge for us because it was our first time in a jam and we only had less than 60 hours instead of 72, but still wanted to make a game as good as if we would dedicate the full 72 hours to it. Finally, we made it and we could upload a fully playable version for the jam in time. And that’s one of the things we’re proud of.

+ “Making the games we want to play”: That’s one of our main goals when we created this studio, so our first jam video game had to accomplish this requirement. We think The Jonbar Point has a very interesting starting point and concept. In fact, we would like to make the full game one day if people are really interested in it.

+ No Wanders assemble!: This Ludum Dare was a real test for our teamwork. Until now, we know about our individual skills and we have worked with no time pressures making a video game, but we had never need to work together at this levels. With the final result we can say that we have a perfect team composition.

+ Time management: One of our concernings before getting to work was how to deal with time and work distribution. In the brainstorming we came up with a lot of great ideas for the game (more holograms and upgrades, enemies outside the library, a bigger map…). But there wasn’t time for all that! We know very well our limits for this Ludum Dare and we can say that we nailed it at this point!

Mostly nothing! But if we have to say something…

– Bugs (obviously): They are always here. But in this particular case we have no time for many test… Nevertheless, they are not very annoying bugs or at least people haven’t complained very much about this.

–A broken programmer: And an underslept art designer as well. We reach the uploading deadline quite tired. But happy. Maybe it was caffeine or maybe it was the feeling about see your little game working and being finished in time. Maybe next time we have to put some sleeping time in our schedule… or maybe not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

– You always can do better!: We have to close our eyes with some issues and put it in the final version because we didn’t have enough time (#nollegamos, a Spanish translation for #WeDon’tArrive). Music could be better fitted and less repetitive, pixel art has some scope for improving and other stuff like that. We’re quite self-demanding with our work and maybe this makes a bit influence in this feeling.

We are very happy with the result of this first Ludum Dare for us. People who had played and commented the game says nice things about it and that’s what we want to create: a little prologue for a possible bigger story, if enough people are interested in this concept. The experience in this jam was very enriching for us, and we can’t wait until the next edition of Ludum Dare comes.

Stay tunned!

Tags: first jam, No Wand Studios, post-mortem, The Jonbar Point

Seeing as I’ve rated over 100 games this Ludum Dare, I might as well share my personal top 5 entries in no particular order (apparently based on the ratings I’ve given so no backtracking now) because that’s what everyone is doing these days:

Chromagun

Sun Wukong

Weapon Shortage

Drone-a-pult

Tundra

Also since there’s only five days to go until voting ends, my Google Form (if you would like me to play/rate your entry) is still up plus my own entry (Beacons) could do with some more ratings 😉

Click the pic to play!!

Have you tried SPINNICUS? No?!? No problem! Play and rate HERE!

I decided to make a post compo version now! It’s a lot better

You can see the gameplay > Here <

(2015/05/02) Post Compo Version!
[Fixed] Hand Collisions
[Changed] You no longer have to press ‘X’ in order to pick up an item
[Changed] You are not sliding around like a crazy idiot anymore 😀
[Changed] The Maximum speed is now slower.
[Changed] The Gravitation power is now weaker.
[Changed] The Jetpack flypower is now weaker.
[Changed] Some small changes in the Highscore menu
[Changed] All sounds have been improved!
[Changed] Some graphics have been improved.
[Added] An arrow to see where you are if you fly outside the screen.
[Added] Fuel Item – You get more fuel by walking on this item!
[Added] Push – Push away your enemies if you are in trouble!
[Added] Push animation.
[Added] A new Logo!

You can play it here: Robo Attack

Tags: 2D, compo, game, ld32, Ludum Dare, post-compo, Robo Attack

The VLASKOV KOMMONWEALTH and VICTORY EMPIRE want YOU to play our game!
Do it for your country, your pride, your people and for FREEDOM! 

@IndieGamePromo  plays Dr. U and the bottomless Pit.

We might pick up on the voice over idea 😉

So it’s the final few days of the judging process and I’ve had some right fun playing the games! I still need a few more so I can get to that lovely number 100! I guess I’ll take a day off tomorrow and get to that!

Anyway, it was a fun jam over all, tempted to carry on and make a post jam version of SUPER BRO THROW down the line if people are interested. (We’ll see if peeps are with the results!) Hope everyone had fun this jam and enjoyed playing me game, and other peeps games.

But I’ll leave with some screenshots and crappy quality GIF of me second LDjam:

Oh and remember, be safe when throwing your bro… Wear like a protective hat or something!

-Joel

Hey Everyone. I just need 3 more ratings to reach 50! Please rate my game here and help me get there.

I will rate your game back (if i can, i only have OS X).

Contains these guys

Once again into the fray. Once again writing about this awesome experience that Ludum Dare is.

And once again writing another finished game post mortem. And it feels good

Here is how it all went:

Initial panic

As usual, and since I live in Europe, I decided to sleep in instead of waiting for the theme announcement at around 3AM, so I woke up “early” and ran up to my computer to see which one had been chosen out of the list.

Then I saw it: “An unconventional weapon” it was.

Crap.

It’s not that it is a bad theme, because it isn’t. Let’s just say that I was not really into it and I didn’t have any great ideas or interest in it.

But hey, Ludum Dare is completely about overcoming your limits and tackling difficult and daunting tasks, just like this one. So I got a cup of coffee and set out to think and brainstorm about what could be achieved and done with the chosen theme.

After spending a good 2 hours “working” on it I hadn’t come up with anything interesting or worth doing. I was a bit stressed and I started to think that maybe I should just give up this time and try to spend my weekend outdoors, considering that the weather was amazing at the moment.

But before doing so I thought It would be cool to check out what other people were doing and posting about on the LD blog. I started looking around and found some neat -but very scarce- interesting concepts and a lot of dull and boring ideas. I felt as if I wasn’t the only one strugling with the theme and I felt a bit pissed at me for not being able to come up with anything.

And the inspiration hit me like a train wreck.

Now we have a plan

My concept was really simple but I thought it would fit the theme quite nicely. It consists of a 2D side scroller action game, in the style of the MegaMan games where you play as a character called CurseMan.

CurseMan attacks his enemies by throwing terrible cursewords in the form of giant speech bubbles with swearwords inside (very comic like).

Also, to boost the quirkyness of t he concept I wanted to do really simple and raw graphics with bright colors that would stand out for not being really fit for almost anything. It would give players the impression of the whole game being a joke about itself.

My main inspiration for the graphic style came from the excellent Electric Retard comics, that you should totally watch right now (Yes, they are NSFW on steroids and we love them that way).

Since I wanted to recreate a somewhat “realistic” 2D world I set out to code up my tilemap system, with support for different layers that will help me build a rich and interesting level and add a bit of depth to the scene.

After a few hours coding I had an early prototype with CurseMan jumping and swearing all over the place:

Early cursing prototype

Working policy

I’m fairly comfy with my current set of tools for game development. HaxeFlixel works like a charm and I love developing with it more with each day that passes. The same goes for Sublime Text and Pixen, which is a breeze to use (except for some random bugs here and there but oh well). Tiled is also extremely useful when building maps and by this point I’m quite fast building things with it.

DA PLAN

Knowing this, and using what I have learned from past LDs, I decided to plan things out rifght from the start.

I set to code the game engine and mechanics during the whole first day, using placeholder art while developing every functionality and then spend the whole second day creating maps, enemy layout, graphics, sound and so on.

This polciy worked pretty well, and I’m sure I couldn’t have made it in time with so much content in the game if it weren’t for it.

But it also had its drawbacks. For example, I had to spend some more time coding during the second day because I hadn’t planned everything as toroughly as I thought, and some functionalty was still needed to be coded up and fine tuned.

This policy also left me with almost no time to test everything out until almost the las few hours, and the game turned out to be a bit boring and could have used a few new mechanics for defense and avoiding attacks. Sadly I didn’t have the time to implement them, because I was busy putting everything together and recording sounds for the game.

And this is precisely why I liked working in this “organized” way for once. I set my standards a bit higher, and I wanted a complete game that was beatable, that had an ending, that had sound effect for everything, diferent enemy types and even music.

And I managed to achieve all of this, which makes me really happy

CurseMan’s world is a rough one

Some trouble along the way

I faced a few problems, specially whit the resolution of the HUD group for the player health and on screen messages. They turned out to scale up in a complete different way when exporting the game to flash, and this forced me to make some choppy hardcoded stuff that I woulddn’t recognise as mine in public.

Also, I spent a full half hour fighting against a bug that crashed the game when using different attacks. Turns out the “key” parameter on a FlxSprite is rather important, and you shouldn’t change an object’s graphic when there are more instances of this class using it and having it named with the same key.

Now I know that. Ouch.

All in all, these were minor things that are minimal in comparison with I have faced on past LD’s (I’m looking at you, enchant.js).

The bad

– The theme.

– The game is funny and amusing, but it doesn’t have much lasting appeal.

– The mechanics could have been fine tuned and also adding a defensive move would have improved the gameplay a lot.

– Music is there, but sucks hard. I really need to spend more than 5 minutes punching notes in.

– Those #$%&! grannies.

The good

– Being able to complete a full game with player progression, varied enemies, music and two different endings.

– Coming up with a weird but funny idea out of a theme that I didn’t like that much.

– Having a big map full of detail and grumpy enemies.

– Almost no bugs at all.

Conclusion

This Ludum Dare has been a bit of a rollercoaster for me. I was dissappointed at first, stressed during its course and happy on the end. It has served meto test my abilities, which in comparison to prior compos have been inmensly improved. I feel a lot more secure doing this kind of thing, and this feeling of accomplishment and joy of creating things is really difficult to match in any other place.

And the best part of it all is that the best is yet to come!

Also, don’t forget to give CurseMan’s adventures a try, and if you like it (or if you don’t) please feel free to rate it as well.

PLAY+RATE CURSEMAN

Thanks for reading!

Tags: compo, CurseMan, ld32

Hey guys, just wanted to let you know that I really enjoyed my LD32 Jam entry and am now working to make it into a full game. It won’t be very big, but I promise it will be fun!

I redid the camera controls and now I’m adding shadows:

Thanks to everyone’s feedback, I could improve the gameplay and the overall feel of the controls. This version is not up yet, but in the meantime you can play and rate my entry right here. I have only 40 votes, so if you want to help me with your votes/feedback I’d really appreciate it!

Play and rate Maggie!

Hey folks, I made some significant changes to my #LDJAM entry, Stand and Deliver.

I updated the graphics, added some more GUI elements, improved gameplay.

You can check it out here:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/hinkmania/stand-and-deliver-special-delivery

Tags: #LDJAM32, ldjam, post comp

Play and rate Wok Quest! right here! =)

Tags: LD JAM, ogre pixel, pixel art, wok quest

I just rated hundred games!

And thanks to tips in comments, most of them were really good! So, now i have mood for some atmosphere driven games! Something with lots of mood 😀 If you made game like that OR know game like that, put link in comment i play and rate them all :3

And, if you have mood for some cool retro megaman styled  platformer shooting game, try my entry.

I have a backlog of 30 games to try and rate. Procastinating, man. Even while playing games you can’t escape it. 😀 I hope my motivation to get to 100 rates will prevail. 😀 But first, sleep!