On April 15th I wrote:

I’ll challenge myself to make better graphics.
And change genre to something different (my 30 and 31 entries were platformers).

Here are the results:

YAY! You all seem to like the soundtrack, so I uploaded it: https://soundcloud.com/lion123/weapon-of-choice-ost

Link to my entry on LD32

Tags: 144, music

For my first go at Ludum Dare, I really enjoyed it! Was real good fun, and I learnt a few different things too! Thanks for all those you rated my game! And if you haven’t played it, let us know what you think 😀
Only 100 more days until Ludum Dare 33, then I will get an idea if I am improving or not.
In the meantime, time to work on another project to improve my skills and uniqueness.

Ludum Dare has given me the motivation I needed to be able to finish a game! Big accomplishment for me! Most of previous games were just ideas that never got finished. Until next time!!

Get the Cookies Back – Ludum Dare 32

Hey there !

So we finally got those ratings we’ve been waiting for the last 3 weeks ! And I have to say : I am happy with the score of my game “Happy !” !

Here’s what I got ! (52 players rated my game)

As I am pretty new with game development (it was actually the first game I have ever finished), I am really satisfied with my ratings ! After all, I am in the first half in every category !

Theme, mood, graphics and even fun went well, and this is a real satisfaction, because that’s what I have been focusing on. I am even surprised I got 2.72 in audio (come on guys, sounds were pretty sh*t, it didn’t even deserve a star !).

Well, now I have a reference and I need to improve things next time ! Can’t wait for it !

If you still want to play Happy !, here’s the LD page. You can also read my devblog (in French).

Finally, I am currently working on rewriting the code, adding features and fixing the difficulty progression and will release an improved version of Happy ! soon, so feel free to follow the development on IndieDB ! 😉

See ya next time ! Be Happy !

My game Skull Bomb managed to score in the top 100 for both Audio and Mood! (*happy dance*) I’m very grateful for the chance to participate and for the people who checked out the game and gave feedback. What an awesome community!

To those who are struggling with the feedback they got or lack of recognition, here’s a quote I love from Ira Glass:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

So in participating, you’re getting that much closer to where you want to be. Yes it stings to not be recognized, but please, don’t give up! The only way to fail is to quit. Doing good things is hard and takes time and energy. Although I haven’t been making games for that long I’ve been doing audio, writing and film making for 17 years so I do know something about the struggle

I haven’t really done much since Ludum Dare. I did some HTML5 here and there, but it’s been a while since I used the language and library I have most fun with: Java + Slick2D. Well, this is what happens when I try to refresh myself…

I’m happy enough with how I did for my first LD.

I’ll tell you what though, watching someone play your game in a video when the game play is not clicking for them is the most painful thing on Earth. Better instructions, better examples, clearer game play, that is my LD33 manifesto.

Halfway done with my MiniLD sprite sheet! Any comments/criticisms/etc?

Hello!I really Loved the Ludum dare 32!Lots of awesome games.
For my first Ludum dare entry(the first big jam I have ever entered) I thought people loved new ideas and not awesome gameplay but I was wrong…If I knew that I would male my game extremely perfect!

Here is my results of my gameMusical Trip.

Coolness 53% //yeah I didnt have time to play more games….Sorry!
#163 Audio(Jam) 3.57 //Wow so good!My brother sure makes good music!
#386 Overall(Jam) 3.37 //Perfect!I didnt expect to be in top 500!
#391 Graphics(Jam) 3.55 //not bad since I didnt really work on the graphics….
#404 Fun(Jam) 3.21 //um…..It’s a bit low…
#442 Mood(Jam) 3.17 //ok….I thought you will get to that freaky tence!
#495 Theme(Jam) 3.38 //:|
#637 Innovation(Jam) 2.90 //Ok it was a nice idea was it not?:(
#686 Humor(Jam) 2.50//no diggy biggy here!

Thank you all for reading!:D

Well, my first ludum dare is done. I feel pretty happy with the score I got; I though I would be in the thousands as a novice programmer and this being my first ludum dare. I supposed 33 place out of about 300 people is good right?

Is this a respectable score?

the serious entry

the glitched version

the word generator

the gory one

Where do I begin? How can I thank you Ludum Dare? We at Givit Game Studios are still very young in the game development area. We are a South African based company and would like to bring game development more to south side of the world, although there are a lot of developers here in South Africa, we urge you to do more and develop more.

Our game was The Yellow Jacket Man, and the response was good. We are thinking of making the game a complete game and make it commercial. So we would like you guys to go play our game again and write in the comments if it is worthy to be a commercial game.

So thank you again Ludum Dare this was amazing.

Play it now!!! http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=40092

So far I have made a tilemap system, and random tilesheet functionality at runtime.

Still need to figure out what I want to do for the actual game though (pfft).

Tags: MiniLD59, tilesheet

Finally finished my sprite sheet for miniLD. Hopefully it looks good in someone’s game!

(what were the black and red circles supposed to be anyway?)

So this is what i heve came up with. Man PixelArt is hard. But hopefully, it’ll be fun

Hello,

I was in the last 2 big Ludum Dares and my last game Zombie Slaughter, wasn’t as good as my previous game, because of the engine change.

I like the idea behind this MiniLD, number 59, and i want to make a game for this.

My Idea would be a combination of Tetris and a Defence-The-Flag-Game.

You will drop Block and they shoort something in a direction, damaging enemies.

I will start today with the graphics.

I have to say, I’m very happy and surprised at the fact that I managed to come in the top 100 for two categories because I can’t say I thought I’d beat 1000 in anything 😀

Hello I’m new here and I participated in LD32 with My game Ham-er Time (Play it here http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=23123)

I got these scores and I was wondering how bad I did.

Thanks

Really liking the way the shops look in different sheets.

Here’s a short gameplay gif of what I have now! 😀

Todo:

-Name

-Sounds

-???

-Profit?

First things first: the fantastic timelapse!

(This is a crosspost from my blog. Read the nicely formatted original here)

Now that the madness has moved from the dev’s programming caves, to the Ludum Dare voting pits, and finally out of the voting pits, everyone has had some time to evaluate his participation in Ludum Dare 32. And indeed, so have I. In this post I’ll talk about some of the cool stuff, some of the less cool stuff, and an outlook on the next gamejam. Read on!

Ludum dare entry page of my game

Ludum Dare 32 results for my game “A Nuclear Crossroads”

The thing I’m most proud of this gamejam is my scripting interface. You read it right! In 48h I created my personal little scripting language, specifically for my game. It uses json so I could use a json loader for parsing, and is space-delimited where parameters are needed. It felt so cool to start with a little parser/interpreter, spend almost a day on it, and once finished crank out a game in about ~10 hours. It’s not perfect and some constructions leave stuff to be desired (like conditionals – implementing them backwards was the cause of lots of copy-pasting -_-‘). It’s been on my mind for a while and I’m glad I finally found the opportunity to implement it. After my json-powered omnilang follows my first hands-on experience with Inkscape. The things I actually produced probably made most people cringe and run away crying. And they should! I know I can’t art, but that’s why you practice right? Inkscape had also been on my mind for quite some time so it was nice to finally go ahead and do it. I think the most interesting part is that you can actually see me improve the further you progress into the game, heh. It’s been an interesting and fun experience, I will certainly use it again. The last awesome thing about the weekend was that Walnoot  participated with me, which meant I got to distract him with pointless Inkscape questions every 5 seconds and cooking pancakes together! Thanks for the cool weekend, Walnoot ??!

Now, not everything is roses and pizza. However proud I am of my custom scripting language, it still needs to be said that making a scripting language feels like a lot of overkill. I probably could’ve gotten away with leaving only the styling/markup in the json files, and doing all the logic in the code. It was a lot of fun and I learnt a lot, but I’d like to avoid massive technical timehogs next time. If I had saved time on the scripting backend, I would’ve had more time for sound, gameplay, and maybe some backstory. This is relevant for the second thing I’m less happy about: I finished really close to the deadline. This was mostly because in the end I had to finish up lots of little things: finishing touches to backgrounds, simple gameplay triggers, the final scene (very important, lol), main menu, fade-in/-out transitions, that kind of stuff. It was all really easy because of the scripting language (!), but the last hour felt like a stressed-out hell. I usually manage to avoid this, so next time I’m going to be extra careful to make sure I do.

A big reason for me to participate in this Ludum Dare besides the jam was using a few custom tools (see the Pre-Mortem for more details). I’m mostly pretty happy with how that worked out. capjam.py (the tool that takes screenshots, webcam captures, and keeps track of various statistics) worked pretty well. Sometimes ffmpeg would hang, resulting in some missed frames and needing to restart the script. This was probably a problem with my webcam however, I hope updating my drivers will fix this. TinkyWinky worked pretty well also (it didn’t even crash onde a playlist!) and nicely played most things I threw at it. It was kind of clunky here and there so I’ll have to improve it for practical use. For a 48h-jam it turned out to work good enough though! Regarding Nuts ‘n Bolts, ofcourse I discovered lots of shortcomings and deficiencies. As usual. This is actually not bad – it means I have stuff to work on, which is always a good thing It also didn’t impair me too much so it wasn’t a big nuisance.

Now, what’s gonna happen next? I’m getting used to working with SDL2 and 2D games, so I’m thinking of expanding to OpenGL and 3D. I’m going to keep using SDL2 for windowing and events – it really got that stuff nailed down good. Ofcourse I’m going to keep working on NnB, and make sure it has lots of facilities for OpenGL! I’ll probably improve capjam.py a bit more (but not too much! It’s actually mostly finished, it turns out) and make TinkyWinky a bit less clunky to work with. I’m actually quite suprised they both worked so well – turns out simple tools are not *that* hard.

Oh, and maybe I’m gonna try and not invent a programming language for a gamejam. Or maybe I will. Who knows (: