As we near the end of an amazing experience, I look back at what we made, and smile;

Click to gif

it was an amazing experience, and I learnt a lot from it. Can’t wait to do it again next time.

Shopping riot was certainly one of our better concepts

I’ve added a Post-Compo version of Throw Junk at Aliens!  And if you haven’t already, please play and rate the compo version!

Play the Post-Compo Update or read more below.

This update has added a lot of the things I originally wanted to have in the compo version.  The aliens have more complex behaviors and there are other humans running around to distract them.  You can also take down the UFO now (and of course you can then throw it at other UFOs).

Additionally, I spent some time improving the feel of the original features.  I got a lot of feedback on the movement, aiming, and player feedback, all of which I’ve tried to address.  The collisions have also been improved with tons of new particles and improved sounds.  It’s surprising how this makes throwing things so much more satisfying!

Here’s a list of some of the things I’ve added and changed:

• Aliens now panic and run away when low on health or surprised.
• Humans occasionally pop out of their houses, especially when thrown.
• Destroy the UFO, throw it at another UFO.
• So many particles! (And perhaps worse performance on slower computers, but look at the particles!)
• Music!
• View the trajectory before you throw.
• Camera rotation.
• Faster movement.

Thanks for all the feedback and thanks for checking out the update!

Hey, have you played our latest Ludum Dare entry? It’s called Tsurara Donna (that’s pronounced sue-RA-ra DOH-nah), and it’s nifty! I’ve only been doing Ludum Dare for about a year, but I’m very proud of this game.

Before I start this postmortem up for realsies, a reminder: the song from this game is available on my Bandcamp page, and it’s TOTALLY FREE! Go play it in the background and see if you can guess what song I was shamelessly ripping off when I composed it. I mean, you won’t guess it because you’re presumably not an obsessive Sondheimite like yours truly, but you can certainly make an attempt. I’m digressing here. Alright; Tsurara Donna postmortem. Here we go.

How’d You Come Up With This Wacky Idea?

I had a pretty cool idea for the “Companion” theme called “Rosalind” which I immediately had to scrap once “An Unconventional Weapon” became the theme. My immediate thought for the theme was to use an icicle as a murder weapon. You’ve likely all heard about a hypothetical murderer stabbing someone with an icicle, which would then melt, removing all the evidence of your crime. Well, unless there were witnesses or security footage or… you get the point. Eventually I decided on an arcade game where you stabbed people with icicles by ground pounding them onto your enemies’ heads.

I vaguely remembered a figure in Japanese mythology called the Tsurara Onna or icicle woman; this led me to find a lot of similar monsters who became this game’s enemies. The Yukinba and Oshiroi Baba both turned into monsters for you to fight.

What Went Well? Quite a lot, surprisingly.

• The game feels complete. This wasn’t an issue to begin with, since I always intended for this game to be an endless old-school arcade game in the vein of Mario Bros or Ice Climber (hence Tsurara’s visual similarity to Popo) and thus it was impossible to have a concrete ending. This was a bit of an issue with Rare Earth (my LD31 entry) where beating the game would get you… a generic popup saying “Congrats” and your time of completion. Whoops.
• The graphics are very polished! The ice looks very, very, very nice, and it makes juicy little shards when the icicles shatter. I got the 8-bit font working properly, which makes the whole game look pretty authentic; Tsurara’s little body is adorable.
• Novel gameplay. The core mechanic here is pretty cool, and I feel like it could be expanded into a full game very easily.
• The music! This game only has one song, but it’s a pretty cool one. I’m a sucker for songs in weird time signatures, and this one is in 13/8! The song’s melody was based partially on “Poems” from the musical Pacific Overtures, the soundtrack to which I listened to get into the mood for this game. It sounds very, very nice; I composed the whole thing on the subway Monday afternoon, then tapped it out in about half an hour in Famitracker. It was really nice to not use DPCM for the bassline like I usually do; the whole song sounds really clean, and it always keeps the player on their toes despite otherwise being fairly peaceful.

What Went Wrong? Quite a lot, unsurprisingly.

• Weird controls. I thought there was nice symmetry between having to double tap to do either of your attacks, but it mostly proved annoying. The other reason I wanted the game to work with just WASD controls was for the two-player mode I wanted to implement. Speaking of which:
• Single player only. I wanted a second player to be able to help you. In hindsight, I should have had the second player be able to assist you by attacking with the mouse; throwing snowballs or something.
• People didn’t ground pound. I found that people were more willing to shoot everyone with icicles then ground pound their enemies, either because the timing was hard or because they had to jump into enemies to do it or because half of the enemies were immune to them. This was a pretty glaring error, in hindsight; I could have added a little shockwave when the icicles hit the ground in case they missed, but I didn’t. Can’t blame myself for that, though.
• I misspelled the protagonist’s name in the HUD. Whoops! Fixed that pretty fast, though.

In any case, this game went very, very well. I’m not sure I’d say it was head and shoulders above my last two entries, and being better than Dr Pepsi Marriage Consultant isn’t a feat so much as it is a necessity for any serious programmer. But it’s still pretty good. So go play it!

… Please go vote for my game Robo Mission Here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=44497

If you post a comment I will try to rate yours back!

Good luck with the ratings!

It´s a metroidvania where your only weapon is screaming. This is my first ever Jam, and making this “minigame” was really fun.

I´m working on the Postjam version, adding a new whole area to explore, more abilities and working on the “screaming mechanics” to make them a lot better. I have a lot to do these days so  I don´t think I´ll finish it before the LD32 party is over.  

But well, the solo-jam version is still waiting for you, so if you have time: please enjoy 😉

Scream(But not too much) by Embalaje – Jam Entry

Tags: 2d platformer, art, cave, embalaje, ld32, metroid, metroidvania, pixel, scream

If you have a buddy around and feel like having some fun, make sure you play my game Eyed. It came out exactly like I intended – an eye dodgeball, so let’s say dodge-eye.

The rules are simple, but a bit tricky at first – you throw your eye in direction of your movement, and it immediately becomes “angry”, therefore killing your enemies and even you. You have to wait until it slows down and becomes calm again and then you can pick it up. But, you can also pick an eye of your enemy, and that’s the biggest fun! The big eyes watches you!

Play here!

I feel a bit guilty about not yet releasing the post-compo version yet, because I have already a ton of hilarious sounds recorded and edited (took about 12 hours already) plus soundtrack samples recorded, but the time is so precious nowadays, so it will come in a week or so… Also, I would like to add score counter, add more maps with some extra eyes around etc. If you like it, make sure to check out the post-compo later on!

The Grand Carpet Hotel inspired (by anticipation) Warner Bros!

Voting is Coming to an end so why not juice it up a little?

I present to you the most juiciest games of all juicy games. Do you Dare To JuiceTM?

I bet you do! So come and playand rate my really short but juicy game!

Game Here!

Also, if you like it and want more, you can follow it on Gamejolt. I am working on bugfixes and expansion right now and all sugestinos are appreciated!

So this has been my first #LudumDare and I loved it! Thank you all! I LOVE making Games! <3

Screenshot From Quest for the Golden Spork

Evidently, begging for last minute votes is a thing here. So be sure to play and rate Quest for the Golden Spork. Also, I’m supposed to link to my favorite game. I particularly enjoyed Wounded by Words.

Now that that’s over with, I’m going to expand on my earlier post mortem. I’ll start by listing off what happened each day.

Night 0:

The competition started at 9:00 for us, so we didn’t have much time the first night. However, we were able to get a lot done. The original idea was that Trevor was buying a golden spork, but the mall was attacked by terrorists. The terrorists took the spork, and Trevor chased after them. Originally, the world was also going to be steampunk.

Steampunk Shopping Cart

Original Terrorist Sprite

There were going to be four worlds, each with five levels. We also planned out around 20 weapons. We get ambitious at midnight On the programming side, movement got done which help a ton.

Day 1:

We kept working, until someone started a conversation about the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Our artist whipped up this:

The Definition of Beauty

When you end up with a sprite like that, you have to use it. We decided to make it the boss for the game. It didn’t make sense for terrorists to be fighting for him, so we changed them to cultists. All music was written this day, and all narration was recorded. We also made a line for the boss, which didn’t make it into the game.

Cultist Sprite

Programming wise, half the day was spent trying to make path finding work. We gave up on that, and just used some basic steering. The other half was spent on combat.

Day 2:

We finished animating sprites on day 2. Our level designer made a version of the forest level, but the tiled map format doesn’t like being sent for some reason. The level was also way to large, and at that point enemies were defined in hand-written json. Most of the art and sound was put into the game. The block weapon was implemented. We were nearly finished.

Day 3:

Monday left us with very little time. In that time, the rest of the levels were made by the programmer, as well as the boss battle. Level switching and narration was also added. The last thing to be changed was the font, as it had earlier been nearly unreadable. You can rate and play this version of the game here.

Last minute forest level. Thank goodness for random placement mode!

Post LD:

The first thing improved was enemy placement. It can now be done from the editor, instead of handwritten json. The most common complaint for our game was the lack of feedback in combat. Some hit sounds were added after submission. We also added a mechanism to grab the cart, and changed the reset button to reset the cart, not the level. The game was also made slightly easier. Download this version here.

Bonus: Warmup

To warmup the weekend before, I made this. Be sure to play until, well you’ll see. Use the mouse to aim and shoot, and WASD to move. Art for this game was not made by us, it was just a programming warmup.

Once again, be sure to play and rate Quest for the Golden Spork!

Hi, my goal this LD is to get 100 votes 😀 So, pretty please can you play and rate my game here? 😀 Also, if you want to exchange votes, put link to your game to comments. I play and rate it asap. (because there is no time! 😀 )

And, here some obligatory screens.

And because this is my last begging post, i need to say to you one thing…

Thank you

Thanks Mike

And Thank you mom!

There’s still a lot of games out there that need a few extra votes, but here’s five of my personal favourites that still haven’t reached the needed threshold.

A la lumiere d’hiver (14 votes, Windows): An atmospheric first person game, with a bit of a horror touch. Hold down the mouse button to close your eyes so you can look away from the screens!

Sticks N Stones (12 votes, Windows/OSX/Linux): A simple comedy game with visuals and sound effects that suit it perfectly. Use insults as your weapon of choice!

Bob’s Got A Cold (17 votes, Windows/OSX): Something of a silly little game, but with excellent voice acting! It goes to show how much good audio can do for a game!

Crystal Ball Chaos (16 votes, Windows): Something between a puzzle game and an action game. Drag the ball and release to clear the blocks. The difficulty is a little wonky, but there’s a lot of interesting ideas here!

Exhaust (8 votes, Web): Vector graphics, and the difficulty to match. This game really reminded me of playing old games as a kid. Just be careful when you try to land your rocket!

If you’ve found any wonderful games that haven’t met their rating score yet, let me know in the comments.

Good rating, everyone!

Our team was not really excited by the theme of an “unconventional weapon”. The first ideas were about conventional weapons like guns versus un-conventional weapons like nukes and sarin gas. A big food fight also seemed like a good idea, so I announced it here (more food fight RTS art at: http://blubberquark.tumblr.com/tagged/food-fight-rts).

While the food idea sounds funny, it was also really really obvious. In order to stand out between all the food shooters, we needed to do something different. After some brainstorming we decided on Tetris stones as a weapon. Unlike food, this idea is not only a funny re-skinning of the weapons of an existing game. Weaponizing adds new mechanics and dynamics to an old puzzle game.

The end result was  Tetrominions.

During rating, I found that there really are lots of games that just use food or conventions as the theme. Although many interpreted the theme similarly, it is not that monotonous: Games with the same take on the theme often have drastically different gameplay.

Food

•  Bubble Becky (platformer)
• Candy Factory (economy simulation)
• Run, Jump, Deliver (platformer)
• Banana Nana (zeldalike)
• The Cheeseburgermogrifier (top-down shooter)

Un-Conventional (The other meanings of Convention)

• Negotiation Tactics (ecomomy/political simulation)
• Cosplay Chase (stealth/action)
• Bioterrorism (turn based tactics)
• The N.I.D Project (stealth/adventure?)
• Nuclear Autumn (metroidvania)

Love

• Suprématie de l’amour (real time strategy)
• Hug Arena (top-down hug-em-up?)
• Power of the Flower (shooter)

Words/Thoughts

• Billy McMath (quick-time-event visual novel)
• TypeFighter (sidescrolling typing shooter)
• What They Want to Hear (typing?)

Boomerangs

• Banana Nana (zeldalike)
• B000merang (action?)

Poop

• This Fart of Mine (one-button)
• Unconventional George (top-down shooter)

Of these games, I think the best take on the theme was Bubble Becky. Chewing gum is not usually a weapon, but the game used chewing gum not just instead of bullets, but emphasized the unconventional stickyness that gums up the robots.

Not in the list of common themes is Quiet Riot. I think this game has the most unconventional interpretation of the theme. Go play it!

I am curious to hear what you think about themes and their obviousness. Did you like the theme? Did you like what others made of it? Dis you find more or less variety compared to the last LD?

My compo entry was unfinished, and my 4 “unconventional weapons” were not implemented. But all is not bad, and like always with this type of challenge, participating is already a win.
At start, I was not very inspired by the theme. But my main goal was to create something in 2D and use what I’ve learn with the excellent tutorials from Chris Hildenbrand of 2D game Art for Programmers.

While looking at the Unity standard Assets 2D package, I’ve thought that a 2D platformer game could a good idea. My taste for smileys and robots has defined the protagonists of the game. The idea about weapons came from a vision of poor smileys in slavery, kept by oppressive robots and forced to do ungrateful tasks. Of course, they need a rebellion, and they could use only what they have for weapons, bakery ingredients, in the case of our hero:
– Honey pot : could stick robots in place.
– Floor bag : could blind robots.
– Oil bottle : should make robots slip.
– Pot of water : should shortcut robots if they stay enough time on it.
With all these ideas in mind, I’ve started to work on the main character.

What went good:

• I was very happy to draw and animate the main character. With my skills, the result was hard to obtain, but very cheerful.
• The projectile launch, animation and bursting was again hard to obtain, but very near what I’ve initially expected.

What went wrong:

• The TIME ! Tired by a week of software engineering at my day job, I enjoyed so much the art part of my weekend game that I have forgotten the coding part.
  Like someone said in a comment about my entry, you have to “Kill your Darlings”. So start by doing the core part of the game, and then, prettify it if you can.
• The robot were only added a couple of hours before the end of the compo!
• There is no sound, nor music.
• No menu, no goal, no score, no levels …etc.

Conclusion:

The conclusion depend of your mood. For a Ludum Dare Compo entry, I clearly missed the goal. But for a busy worker, married and father of 3 children who don’t have the time he wants for his personal projects, It’s a victory.
I’m now sure I can enjoy the art part of my projects, and with the good resources, I know that I can obtain decent graphics for my needs. I’m also convinced that with my limited artistic skills, it is easier to obtain decent graphic artworks with vector tools than with bitmap, particularly if I follow the Chris Hildenbrand lessons.

PS: sorry for my bad English, like for artworks, I try to improve myself 😉

You can fix that by pressing the link below! Pretty please with pixels on top!

Right Here. Yes here!

I’m not sure what genre this is in but it’s a top down game where you launch aliens into space and hopefully not yourself, what’s not to love! Save the crew and get all four pieces of the teleporters circuitry to move on to the next level, all while avoiding aliens but BEWARE the hardest part of the games is the last three levels…                                     Because I ran out of time and could not test them OOOOhhhh spoooooky!!!

Am I being replaced?

You can follow the progress of the post-LD version of RELIC on Facebook or Twitter.

Sorry for the alliteration!

My text adventure has had some great feedback but I would still love for more people to play it:

Click Here!

Post-Mortem

Also, a few of my text games (You can play them right now here!), including this one are going to be part of indiegamestand.com‘s new freeware section when that comes out, so that’s cool.

Anyway, thanks for everything, and PLAY MY GAME PLEASE!!

Tags: final, ld32, postmortem, Twine

Thanks to everyone who voted for Scarecrow, the games this ludum dare were very entertaining, at least I enjoyed several of them.
I can’t wait for the next edition 😀

This is the first video I made to show how the game is today. Sorry for the video quality, my pc is not very good to record screen videos

Play the new version!

Rate the compo version!

Tags: Construct2, gillenew, ld32, pixel art, shooter, stoned scarecrow

OK, I swear, last self-promo.

I need twelve brave players to rate my entry.  Are you mighty enough to catch the Evil Teddy ? Click here.

Don’t hesitate to put your game in the comments, I’m looking for games to rate ;-).

Thanks a lot,

Now that the stream is done, we’re working hard on exporting all of the games we’ve played on the stream into Youtube videos. Apologize that it took so long: we have so much material to go through. In any case, the playlist below is updated automatically whenever we have a new game out, so you can keep track of it here:

We also tweet when a new video is up at @tvgamespace.

Specifically on my end, the Tech Valley Game Space (TVGS) real-world meeting post-mortem and the Unconventional Stick Swinging Simulator post-mortem are overdue, so I’ll need to get those done soon!

In the meantime, check out the games created at TVGS:

Jammie Dodger

A basic shmup with a twist: all of your ship’s movement is performed by firing your weapon.

As the pilot of the Jammie Dodger, your mission is to guide your tiny ship along the two different-colored tracks to avoid being hit by flying asteroids.

How long can you survive?

My Voice is My Weapon

Use the power of protest to convert citizens to your cause, while avoiding getting busted! Current locations from the Capital District of New York State. This is my first game ever.

Star Power

In “Star Power,” You play as the leader of a party of three adventurers exploring a goblin filled dungeon

Your party consists of:

EDRIC, THE ORANGE PALADIN who fights with his sword
Edric is also impervious to hammers.

LANA, THE PURPLE ROGUE who fights with her shurikens
Lana is also impevious to arrows

ERIYAL, THE BLUE MAGE who fights with her electric magic.
Eriyal is also impervious to axes.

and YOU, THE SLIGHTLY SLEEP DEPRIVED LD CONTESTANT who fights with ratings.
How does fighting with ratings work? Like this:

At the start of your turn, you may apply ratings to your party and to the enemies they face. When you hit “CONFIRM,” the following things will happen:

-enemies will attack first. They will attack with the weapon that you gave them the highest rating on, because that is the weapon they will feel most confident with. They will deal damage equal to their rating on that weapon. Enemies also target the lowest rated members of your party, because they appear the most vulnerable.

-players will attack second. Players will also target enemies with the lowest total star rating, and deal damage equal to their player rating.

-Finally, enemies will receive bonuses to any weapons that you rated with only one star. Receiving such a low rating makes them self-conscious, and motivates them to train more and increase their skill with that weapon. The bonus gets factored into their damage and their rating with the weapon when choosing how to attack.

Adaptation

You control the heroic main ship. Every hit you take from the enemies brings you closer to destruction… but also makes you stronger. Coming in contact with enemies and their weapons forces your ship to adapt and become more powerful.

Unconventional Stick Swinging Simulator

Ever wanted to swing a stick unconventionally? Now you can!

Experience the true art of swinging your really-long stick. Work hard to make it longer!

Star Driller Ultra

Drill through space and destroy your enemies to claim yourself as the king of the galaxy! Star Driller Ultra is a Star Fox-inspired space combat game where your play as a neon-colored drill to obliterate evil space ships.

Hey guys,

although we haven’t been able to participate in Ludum Dare this time we still would like to show you our last game, which would have been quite fitting for this theme…you are a bunny defending a giant carrot and killing mutants with, well, CARROTS! 😀 We have been working on our last LD31 Jam entry “Of Carrots And Blood” and we have released it on itch.io for free for Windows and Mac and it is also coming out on Desura soon. We have added powerups, different enemy types, a global highscore for the single player and we have also added a local 2 player Co-op mode (which is the most fun) with a big boss fight surprise in the end! So please check it out

Download OF CARROTS AND BLOOD on itch.io here!

And for those of you who already know the Jam version, it would be really cool, if you could compare the two versions and tell us here in the comments, if we applied your feedback for the better or worse 😉 More feedback much appreciated!

Download OF CARROTS AND BLOOD on itch.io here!

Thanks, have fun playing

Chris and Sebastian

Tags: 2D, final, game, jam, ld31, ld32, Ludum Dare, post-mortem, postmortem, screenshot, unity3d, update, video