[Cross-posted from Tech Valley Game Space]

The Ludum Dare 32 Showcase at Tech Valley Game Space

Why a real-world meeting?

So this one is an important question: why would we have a real-world meeting for a game jam that prides itself in being online? The short answer is that a real-world gathering provides a number of distinct advantages, both for jammers and Compo participants, that wouldn’t be possible if one were to work from their own home. To explain these advantages, however, let’s start by discussing some spiritual differences between Ludum Dare and Global Game Jam.

As anyone who has attended both jams can attest, despite having very similar rulesets, Ludum Dare and Global Game Jam have some clear differences in the way they are conducted, and how they encourage the participants. For Ludum Dare, when the jam starts, the team (often created between a group of friends) are entirely on their own to determine the best process to construct their game. They are often left to figure out how to manage their own time, how to distribute their work, what elements to prioritize, and where to get feedback to improve their game. Global Game Jam, on the other hand, takes a more formal approach: while each site conducts their event differently, many include exercises to help form groups and set important milestones. This has some significant advantages compared to the on-your-own approach: it helps ease beginners into game development, while encouraging experienced individuals to team up with complete strangers. In other words, by having a formalized process, Global Game Jam encourages the budding developers to socialize and share their experiences with others, as well as empowering them to move out of their comfort zone and try new things.

So what advantages does Ludum Dare have that Global Game Jam doesn’t? It starts immediately after the jam ends: for Global Game Jam, the event… just ends, and teams are left to their own devices with regard to what they want to do with their game. Naturally, this leads a lot of teams to just abandon their game. For Ludum Dare, however, the end of the jam is merely the start of another vital journey in game development: marketing, receiving feedback from others, and actively improving their own game and development skills. For three weeks, participants are encouraged to player other Ludum Dare games, and to provide comments and criticism. In doing so, the team is making a name for itself and making them appear on the front page of the full Ludum Dare game listing, encouraging others to check out their games as well. Because the post-rating results are a vital part of the game jam, many people have come up with creative ways to advertise their game, using methods such as timelapses and live streams to display not just their development process, but also how they play and rate other people’s games. Even when the judging process ends, teams receive an aggregate score for their game, revealing what they did best and what needs improvement. By providing an extra task to handle after the event, Ludum Dare encourages developers to remain active and engaged with their game project well after the jam is finished.

With our real-world Ludum Dare meetings, we aim to provide the best of both worlds. The goal is to provide a formal process at the beginning of the jam, much like the Global Game Jam, as well as provide a schedule during the judging period to play, rate and comment on other people’s games. How did we do this?

What we did

When it came to advertising our gathering, we notified the Ludum Dare organizers of our location nearly a month in advance. Additionally, we contacted a local college’s game dev club to see if they were interested. While the latter didn’t seem to amount to much, the former caught the attention of a few participants.

Ludum Dare starts at 9:00 PM EST, yet we deliberately made sure the jam venue was open and accessible two hours early. On the first day we had ten people show up, a substantial improvement from last time where there were only three people in attendance for the kickoff. For the first hour, we simply introduced ourselves briefly and reminded the attendees that we would be having a presentation at 8:00. Other than that, we let everyone socialize and partake in some free snacks.

At 8:00 PM, we started our presentation by describing the rules of the jam, before having everyone introduce themselves to the group. We then asked all the people who were attending Ludum Dare for the first time ever to stand up, and receive a round of applause for making the initial leap to get involved. Next, we had all the programmers stand, then the artists, then the musicians and sound designers. The intent of this exercise was to help everyone see what the participants’ distribution was like, allowing jammers to carefully plan how to construct their team. Once this was done, we showed the keynote from Ludum Dare 31. Finally, we mentioned that we would also be hosting a showcase on Friday where participants could show their final results. This actually left us finished much earlier than expected: we were done by about 8:15, meaning we had at least 45 minutes left before the theme was presented. Whoops!

After the theme was announced (Unconventional Weapon), we had an hour-long brainstorming session, where we provided pens and paper to everyone. We recommended the “brain-dump method,” encouraging participants to write out a list of single-sentence descriptions of their game ideas. In the meantime, we also ordered some burritos because we were hungry!

After that, everyone presented their game ideas, with each person allowed to present as many ideas as they liked. From there, we announced that jammers should form teams based on the game idea they liked most. After realizing that teams weren’t forming cohesively, however, we switched gears and asked each of the jammers to write down a single idea on a big piece of paper, and have everyone else write their name down beside the idea they would be interested in working on. The latter method proved to be more successful, even though most jammers decided to strike out on their own anyway.

At the end of this exercise, we reminded everyone that the TVGS office would be closing at midnight, and encouraged teams to discuss their ideas in further detail. We also reminded everyone that, regardless of whether they were following the Compo or Jam rules, they should aim to have a prototype done by the next day.

Day 2 had five people come in, a precipitous decline from the day before. We let everyone work undisturbed until the 9:00 PM mark, at which point we announced that the Compo was at the halfway mark, and the Jam was one-third over. Naturally, we also reminded everyone that our suggested timeline indicated that they should have a functional prototype at this point, and should ideally be moving on to the content creation stage as soon as possible.

Day 3 had three people come in. At the 7:00 PM and 8:00 PM mark, we’ve reminded everyone doing Compo to start submitting their game.

Day 4 had four people come in. Like Day 3, we reminded everyone working under the Jam rules to start submitting their game at 7:00 PM and 8:00 PM. One participant wasn’t certain how to submit their game, so we’ve helped step them through the submission interface. When the submission process ended, we once again reminded everyone that there was a showcase on Friday where they could show off the game. We also encouraged everyone to rate and comment other people’s games so that they could get ratings, too. Finally, we announced that we would be starting a Twitch.tv stream of us playing and rating Ludum Dare games four times a week, and that they were encouraged to join in.

Naturally, the judging period of Ludum Dare consisted of us livestreaming our playthroughs of Ludum Dare games at the TVGS co-working studio. Although we successfully created 131 videos, only three of us who actually attended the real-world meeting joined in:

So how did it go? Did the participants like the meeting? We were able to contact a few who participated, and they seemed to have enjoyed themselves. Without sending a survey, however, the experience was hard to quantify. There is, however, one other method to tell whether the event went well…

What went well

A wide variety of games

As a game jam enthusiast, I’ve been to every Global Game Jam since 2010. As a weird tradition of mine, I’ve been to a different site each time I went to Global Game Jam. Naturally, some sites are better conducted than others, but for the best ones, they’ve all had a few results in common:

• They generated more games.
• The output of participants varied wildly in terms of both gameplay and aesthetics.

Ultimately, I’ve come to use this as a measure of figuring out whether a site was well-conducted or not. So what games were made here at the TVGS?

• My Voice is My Weapon
  A game about creating a political movement by convincing passersby to join your cause.
• Adaptation
  A top-down shooter that requires the player ship to intentionally weaken itself to increase its combat abilities and stave off an increasing number of enemies.
• Star Power
  A turn-based RPG where the player must strategically distribute star ratings among their party members and enemies each turn.
• Jammie Dodger
  An on-rails, skill based dodging game that involves using only mouse controls to dodge incoming, color-coded bullets.
• Unconventional Stick Swinging Simulator
  A silly simulator game about making every human character on the map stick to the player’s rod.
• Star Driller Ultra
  A star fighter game about locking on and drilling into enemy ships.

All the games are different from one another, and each one innovates in some way on previous game genres. For this lucky organizer, this is the most certain sign that we have conducted our event well, even if there was a big drop-off with those who attended the event site as the days progressed. Ironically, this organizer’s games were probably the least innovative within the ones listed above, so if anything, I need to get my creativity back into gear!

New game developers!

Have we mentioned that for the My Voice is My Weapon and Adaptation creators, this was their first completed game ever? As a young game development community aiming to foster an encouraging, inclusive environment, we couldn’t be more proud with these results. There’s something beautiful to be able to assist curious minds to become creators themselves. Both have expressed enthusiasm about their resulting game projects, having learned a lot from the experience. Additionally, one of them is actively developing an improved version of their game.

Having a social space

Even though, like all game jams, most of us remained quiet through the development, there were a few special moments where developers from different teams conversed about their games and provided each other with some important feedback. Many veteran jammers know how critical these moments are: even while operating under a strict deadline, people were able to ask others for playtesting and feedback about their game in its current condition. It’s special moments like these that help a real-wold meeting stand out from working by yourself in an online game jam.

Plenty of (junk) food

Starting from the initial set of goodies we provided, our snack table somehow became an ever-expanding potluck that grew to encompass every variety of junk food imaginable. This was great, and we can say with confidence that nobody went hungry throughout the event. Whether everyone maintained a healthy diet is another story, however…

Well-slept

When we started our meeting, we made it clear that the TVGS studio would only be open from 8:00 AM to midnight. This was mostly out of practicality: the key-holders to the location can only stay up for so long, which meant that a strict time limit was necessary. However, this also had residual benefits for those who did manage to attend the physical location regularly: the closing time acted as a useful reminder that they needed to get some sleep. Consequently, it was rare to see anyone who looked sleep-deprived at the jam site.

What can be improved

Better timing

As mentioned in our previous description of how we conducted the event, there were a few moments where things could have gone more smoothly. Most importantly, the gap between our initial presentation finishing versus and the theme being announced could have been shortened significantly. It was a bit awkward for everyone to be stuck waiting throughout the 45 minutes we had left before the jam actually began.

Equally in need of improvement was our approach to team-building. Originally, we remained hands-off on how people should form teams, but it seems we need to formalize this process more rather than relying on teams to form organically. Thankfully, the aforementioned “write a single idea on a piece of paper” method, originally copied from how the George Mason University in Maryland conducted their Global Game Jam, seemed to have been an effective course correction, and we plan to use this method in the next jam.

Boring ice breakers

During the introductory exercises, things weren’t all that exciting. We had everyone introduce their name and their favorite game genre (intended to provide different perspectives and highlight the individual tastes of attendees), but this portion didn’t seem to engage the participants as much. Rather than settling on a “dry but informative” presentation format, it might be a better idea to look into how to make the ice-breaker moments more interesting, such as how the University of Albany’s Global Game Jam organizers gamified the introduction process and encouraged everyone to actively engage in the process of getting to know each other.

Encouraging more people to revisit the location

As each day passed, less people came in to work at our location. We’re not sure why this is happening (something a survey could have helped us figure out), but our guess is that there wasn’t a clear enough incentive for participants to revisit our location once the teams had been created. This may mean that we need to focus more on how to make the advantages of a real-world meeting more apparent. Taking a page from how American University in Maryland conducts their Global Game Jam, one idea we have for next time is to establish a “show and tell” period when developers are encouraged to put their pencils down briefly, and walk around to check out the other games being made and provide feedback that can help teams to re-prioritize on their next set of tasks.

Ineffective at encouraging participants to play other Ludum Dare games

As mentioned earlier, our Twitch.tv live stream was primarily intended to encourage participants, especially first-time developers, to play and rate other people’s games. Unfortunately, this completely failed produce the intended result. Instead, verbally reminding first-time developers to play and rate other games proved to be much more effective. This is troubling because it takes a considerable amount of time and dedication to put together these streams.

What the stream did do was provide some publicity to our location, as well as allowing us to interact more directly with other Ludum Dare participants and provide them with some real-time feedback. Since the stream did serve a valuable purpose in this regard, we’ll most likely be continuing the program next time around, albeit with a less aggressive schedule. At the same time, we may want to look into other ways to encourage people to market their game as well, such as using our open office hours to obtain additional help and advice about promotion from other developers at TVGS.

What to prepare for next Ludum Dare

With another successful jam under our belt, and many lessons learned, it’s probably a good time to document our process and our future plans in an easy-to-recall way. We intend to get in contact with IGDA Albany, the organizers of the University of Albany’s Global Game Jam, to see if they can help us improve our ice-breaker exercises for next time. Furthermore, we plan on advertising to a much wider range of locations next time around as opposed to just a single local college.

In terms of the finer details, we plan on using the paper method for the team-building exercise next. For incentivizing repeated visits, we wanted to try devoting at least an hour on the second day for peer playtesting and feedback. Lastly, we will be looking into new methods to better assist developers in marketing their games throughout the judging process.

We want to thank everyone who participated in our location for Ludum Dare 32, and we look forward to seeing you again in August!

Tags: ld32 postmortem, post-mortem, postmortem, real world, Tech Valley Game Space, TVGS

This is the start of my entity framework project that I’ve started (and will hopefully finish). It will be open source and free to download should you want to use it. Hopefully it will cooperate with other libraries.

Usually I am quite early with writing my post mortems, but between work, deadlines, and of course more game development, I didn’t really have the time to write one. Frankly, I don’t really have time either way, but writing these is always so much fun. So here we go!

Ludum Dare #32 was… interesting. I think I have had the most fun with LD32 as I ever had with a game jam. This is actually somewhat surprising. Ever since I started doing Ludum Dares (only since LD28, I am still a greenie in that respect) I said to myself I would participate in each and every one of them from then on. Sadly, at LD31 my schedule did not allow participating, and it seemed that circumstances would also prevent me from making a game this time around. However, between celebrating birthdays and obligatory family visits, I managed to put something together: Satellites vs Aliens was born.

From the decision to actually start working on a game, things went very well. After two failures regarding graphics, I finally figured out something that worked, and the gameplay mechanics came along nicely as well. At the start of the first day, I hate a pretty nifty working prototype.

There was one big problem though: it was way too hard to control, and frustrating was a better word to describe the game with than fun. This caused me to make major changes to the gameplay during the second day. This took away the time to actually do some of the cool polishing effects I wanted to, and also the balancing was a bit last-moment work, but eventually I ended up with a pretty cool game.

Since I took so long with writing my post mortem, I actually have the scores to discuss, so let’s quickly go over the categories.

#279 Innovation 3.50
Not too bad a score. A solid seven on a 1-10 scale. I think my idea was pretty innovative, but I admit that the general concept is not as original as some other people can come up with. Still, I think this is a decent score, and I am pretty happy overall with the related ranking.

#515 Fun 3.10
My lowest score and lowest rating of all categories, and you know what, I agree. The fun factor in the game was not as obvious. The concept was mainly focussed on humour and innovation: in the end the difficulty of playing the game made the fun factor a bit less. I think it would have been a lot worse if I had not changed over the gameplay the second day.

All in all, I think to make the game really fun, it would have required more tension, more things to do, more depth. This all was not feasible within a gameplay. I do not see any quick fixes that could have been made, and maybe this mean the concept itself was flawed. All in all, a 3.10 as lowest rating is still very respectable, and it once again makes it clear that fun is one of the hardest things to get right in a game on which you are only allowed to spend 48 hours.

#70 Theme 4.05
This must be the highest rating I have ever received! And on theme as well! This one got me pretty excited. I think it is really easy to just take a concept and fit it to a theme, instead of the other way around. This time around, I really got the idea from the theme; not something pulled of my huge list of existing ideas.

This (amongst – spoiler alert – audio) is probably also my first top 100 rating in any category ever, and I am really proud of it being the “Theme” category. To me, this feels like a victory on its own.

#197 Graphics 3.71
As I have already mentioned before, graphics was also one of my struggling points. During the first Ludum Dare, I started doing pixel art, but the mistake I made was making everything too big and detailed, thus spending a lot of time on it that should have been spent otherwise. This got slightly better during my second entry, where I just winged it to spend time on the areas I was better at. Only now was I able to establish a graphics style in my game that worked: it’s consistent, it’s clear, it does the job, and gives an atmosphere to the game. In addition, I only spent a small amount of time on the graphics, which meant that in the end, the graphics were probably done in the most time-efficient way of all aspects of the game.

#53 Audio 3.88
So… this is the category I understood least. Sure, I didn’t have too bad music and I am really happy with how well the sound effects turned out. Of course, space games are relatively easy to make sounds for I think, since there is a lot of pews and boops and booms and bleeps. The audio… I didn’t spend too much time on it. In the end I decided to just go with it because I was out of time. Apparently people enjoyed what I did anyway, or maybe they liked to give me a high score for the mute button in the corner to turn off the awful music 😛 Either way, I think music would be the category I could most improved on, so despite already scoring high here, I will try and set some time aside to get more used to using music generation tools and software like Garageband.

#344 Humor 3.13
Probably the most disappointing score, since I think the idea of sending skyscrapers with boosters duct-taped to them to push satellites out of orbit is brilliant. Alright, maybe not the most practical idea ever, why not blow the aliens to pieces with the skyscrapers itself, and then why are the skyscrapers still needed, but who cares? I thought humor was about not making any sense at all. Either way, what I get from this is that the humor wasn’t really noticeable in the game itself, and that is definitely something to consider next time around. Good idea, poor execution?

#152 Mood 3.53
What is there to say about mood… there is no storytelling in my game, there is no emotion in my game, and who knows the exact definition of “vibe”?

#231 Overall 3.55
Overall, I am really happy with the result. My game scored better than ever before, and I really feel that I am making progress in adapting skills that are outside of my comfort zone. I seem to finally have gotten the hang of making simplified graphics that work. I am still really surprised by my high score for Theme, and this only makes me feel even better about the whole experience, and it makes me wonder what I could have done with the full time.

This time around I did not livestream. In a way this really makes things easier, because you are slightly more flexible. It is also easier to focus with a livestream on though, so I am not sure yet whether I prefer with or without. Something I will definitely look into is making a timelapse, because that seems to be a thing, and we’ll see what comes from that.

In the end, I had a great weekend, I have added a great experience to my repertoire. I am definitely looking forward to further develop my skills and to be able to apply that in my real life occupation. Despite working on this game in some spare hours squeezed between other obligations, and thus not really being part of the community this time, I want to thank everyone for making this Ludum Dare another success, and hopefully I’ll be back for real next time!

View my entry here

Tags: game, ld32, Ludum Dare, post-mortem, postmortem

[Cross-posted from Omiya Games]

So with Ludum Dare 32 judging results released, let’s take a look at our game’s ratings!

First, how did Star Driller Ultra, a project I worked on solo for 48-hours, do?

2 categories that made it to the top 100, and 1 that made it to top 25? I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t good. Still, to be honest, I was a little disheartened by these ratings for a day or two. I should be a little more careful about my expectations next time.

Given these ratings, it’s clear that I delivered with the overall presentation of the game, with graphics being the main highlight. As I have initially suspected in the post-mortem, the fun factor was weaker than the presentation, a big problem for a space-combat action game. And I did pretty badly with innovation and theme, despite proudly proclaiming to be an experimental indie developer. It seems those need a little help.

As an aside, there were several things Star Driller Ultra achieved, including an IndieGames.com article, and 3 different Let’s Plays. It was pretty cool to see all these opinions and gameplays from different people.

Next, let’s look over how these ratings compares to previous entries. The last Ludum Dare I received ratings was Ludum Dare 31’s Laundry Day. Here’s how my ratings seems to be trending.

Almost universally positive! Although the comparison is pretty unfair: Laundry Day was supposed to be a satire of social games, and wasn’t intended to be rated highly. Additionally, it was the first time our team was learning Construct 2, while for Star Driller Ultra, I already had 5 years of experience with Unity. Regardless, the overall increase in ratings is certainly a positive sign. The only eye-catching exception is innovation dropping, which looks like something I need to improve on (I’m less concerned with humor and theme).

I’ve also calculated how I compared to others, using percentiles (ranking divided by total number of entries).

We see the same trend as ratings, so that indicates that ratings are a pretty good measure of performance.

How about the Unconventional Stick Swinging Simulator, another project I worked on solo, but this time within 12 hours?

The audio and graphics were removed since the music and the character animations were taken from pre-made sources. Still, the ratings doesn’t look good at all. To be honest, I’m not surprised: the game was deliberately designed to be poor, similar to the Goat Simulator it was taking it’s inspiration from. At the time, I only had 12 hours, so the goal was simply to make something working and game-like. Even though I’m proud with what I’ve created within those limits, I fully agree with those polarizing comments: it is a bad game.

So color me surprised when I managed to dig up a couple of Let’s Plays, mostly positive, despite having less promotional effort. There’s one that gave an honorable mention to his top 5 Ludum Dare game list, another who loved it, one that figured out the whole game is intended to be asexual innuendo, and one that didn’t like it at all (and ironically is my favorite Let’s Play of the bunch).

Compared to Laundry Day, it looks like this:

Yikes! It seemed either Laundry Day had some subtlety in its presentation that more people liked, or Unconventional Stick Swinging Simulator was just too slapstick. Or I didn’t rate other games using this account, and it simply got polarizing ratings. I can’t say for sure…

Obviously, ranking percentile isn’t any better.

But I had fun making it! That’s what counts the most.

Play it here! or click one of the gifs.

I decided to use Java for my MiniLD #59 entry and I’ve had a lot of fun with the theme so far.

Watch it in action (GIF)

The image loader source (Gist)

Hi, any links for grate sprite sheets for 2d platformers?

Starting at 12 Am my game will go on sale for 80% off.  So go on a join the fun!! Well of course at 12 Am.

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

Working on my MiniLD#59 game! It will be a puzzle, you play as a traffic warden and you need to help snails and snakes drive to their destination by controlling traffic lights.

Here is how it kinda looks (still WIP):

And here is my tileset:

The game is not complete, so I won’t submit the tileset yet. But you can copy it and insert into your game!

Getting there bit by bit with this one, made my sprite sheet first then decided, okay, I’ll try and make something playable with it. I’ve ended up going down the route of a pseudo-randomnly generated dungeon game, where the player wanders around in search of hats, or anything really, whilst dealing with enemies spawning in from set locations. Of course, charge shots are a must for me with this game, I love them so much 😛

Also, using some odd methods to get Unity to play nicely in 2d without using unity sprites, which were just getting on my nerves, so I wrote my own stuff instead, works okay so far!

First of all, congratulation to every one. Managing to create an entire game in 48-72 hours is a huge achievement, be proud. The work provided by the winners of this LD 32 is just amazing.

One week has past since the results and I think it’s time for a last post over “Just A dream”. An almost not submitted entry turned out to be my best experience on Ludum Dare so far .

It still lacks of everything : decent graphics, sound, music, solid gameplay and content.

First time I score below #200 in one category, happy.

But it brings some mood and innovation.

Knowing that the game itself would not bring me glory, I turned the marketing engine on.

I promoted it by any means available:

• Marketing content : Post-Mortem, timelapse video…
• Posts on some indie game developers Groups on Facebook
• Tweets
• 7 promotional messages here on the homepage

The result still surprises me.

GameJolt Statistics :

More than 450 people played my game. This is more than my #LD30  and #LD31 entries combined. I got some nice ratings too.

First time ever I receive ratings on GameJolt

This brought light on my two previous entries as well. Ho, and I earned 0.15 € in advertising.

Here on Ludumdare.com :

“Just a dream”  appears in two jamer’s TOP

1. @farwyler’s TOP 5
2. @OmiyaGames’ recommandations

99 people rated “Just a Dream”, it’s more than the previous two combined. According to http://ludumdare.itch.io/, It places “Just a Dream” #77 in terms of number of rating. On 2800 entries ? Hard to believe. But Thank you very anyway for this.

To briefly conclude this post, delivering the game before the deadline is just the tip of the iceberg. Be proud of it, talk about it, promote it, bring some well deserved light on it.

See you in 94 days.

Hello,

so i have completed the art today and i have made my plan for the game. The plan, which was created by a tool, which you can see there (It says i wont finish all thing in the two weeks, which is hopefully a lie). Not much planned, but i want to dive in creating some music. I want to ask now if someone knows a good free tool to make music. Thanks. To end this post, i post my sheet.

I’m trying to create a “flow” algorithm, like how water and magma flow in Dwarf Fortress.

I’m having a surprisingly(?) difficult time of it…

Tags: MiniLD59

So 29th May 96h Jam with rules starts. I hope somebody from LD will participate.

Yes I know it’s takes time to participate in Jam (and you aren’t ready). So you may suggest Theme/Rule or play and rate games in Jam.
But you should hurry for suggestion because tomorrow after 10:00 (BSD) suggestion won’t be possible and theme/rules voting will begin.

Please, write you thoughts here (make comment on this post) – I’m open to new ideas.

Tags: 96 Jam with rules, jam

SUCCESS

WIP flow algorithm

(Those confused may refer to my earlier post.)

Tags: MiniLD59

So I was looking at my stats for my MiniLD game and comparing them to my regular LD game, something felt weird about this:

MiniLD59:

Click to go to itch.io page! (This was posted early in the day so the views/downloads for today are comparatively low.)

LD32:

Click to go to itch.io page!

My miniLD game has way less time put into it overall, I spent 24-ish hours on it, while my LD32 game had around 30-36 hours put into it, and I won’t even get voting results for my MiniLD game.

Is there any way the MiniLDs could get some form of voting on them too? I feel like I’m missing out on stats…

Our entry to Ludum Dare 32, Glorch’s Great Escape: Walking is for Chumps, has been refined with improved controls, more levels, updated art/sound, and we are continuing general polish now. We’ve submitted to Greenlight, so if you liked the game from LD32 and would like to see a finished version available on Steam, lend us your votes!

Vote for us on Greenlight here!

Here are some gratuitous screenshots:

Thanks for your support fellow jammers! Shameless self-promotion over.

OK the game is Simple Squares, a game where you dodge squares and get the highest score as possible. Below is a link to the download page. Please leave meaningful comments and suggestions, meaning leave harsh comments if need to be. Also if you come across any bugs please mention them in full detail. Thanks.

LINK: http://rd124p77.itch.io/simple-squares/download/nBSQLl4JEl7HvceZJ4t8j2MDB5Y1MjxS5HlX3bc8

So, the game i’m planning to post on mini-LD59 is almost ready… EXCEPT IT ISNT, it’s my first LD entry, so i want to make a really nice game, with all my love and passion, but bugs keep appearing, and the more i fix, more show up, like an Hidra. I’m developing in Java with LibGDX and Box2D, but the major problem is that the screen keeps flickering after a certain time, and its really annoying to play the game with that flick, well, it only starts after 2 our 3 days in-game (wich is a couple minutes). i tried to implement lighting too with box2dlights, but it only gave me headaches, i’m really newbie in game developing, but my dream is work at Blizzard, so i have to keep practicing and never give up. Here are some screenshots of the game. its all done. i just have to figure out how to end with these flickering.
Also: english is not my native language, so i apologize for grammar mistakes

View post on imgur.com

Yeah, the menu is crap, i’m not good at art

View post on imgur.com

There is this “no-enemy” area where you can buy upgrades to your character

View post on imgur.com

I’ve only made some minor changes on the spritesheet, only made a fireball, and a ice flake, and improved the tiles a bit with TileStudio.

View post on imgur.com

Tags: java, libgdx, MiniLD59