This was cool!  I released a full game, although it is not a “full” game in the sense that it seems like a small part of a real game.  Nevertheless, I can have a sense of fulfillment by the fact that I made a game with sound, art, and game play!  However, I feel like not enough people are offering feedback, and by effect playing it.  Please do:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=43281

Hello everybody!!!

We are very happy with this ludum dare (our first) and the results of our first game. We are learning a lot! And with the comments of the people we realized lot of things. In addition, after sleeping a bit, we have seen things that have to be changed 😛

Right now, there is a new post-jam version. I think that this one is easier but funnier and for the people that played it before but didn’t completely get the mechanics I recommend to try it again! If you do that and leave us feedback about the improvements we will be very happy!!!!!

Again, thanks everybody for this great LD. We have seen awesome games and we will be in the next LD for sure!

We was received a lot of nice feedback on our monster run and decide to implement it to v2.0.

I hope it’s okey for jam, because we loves our mini game and hope you’ll like improvements.

Enjoy to play our Elemental Monster 2.0

Updated:

• Added main theme
• Improve generating and bugfix with no gfx in some cases
• Improve gameplay balance for more attractive flow
• Change ui style to flat
• Tweak post-process

Play and rate it

So much positive feedback! Here’s a thank you from our favourite Intergalactic Love Machine character

Intergalactic Love Machine

-> TWITCH.TV – HERE <-

Hello fellow game programmers !

Link in the stream comments your game and watch how I play it.

I’m going to be live every day from :

20:00 / 8 PM -> Bucharest, Romania Time / East Europe Time
13:00 / 1 AM -> New York, USA Time / East USA Time
10:00 / 10 AM -> Los Angeles, USA Time / West USA Time
(What time will be on your region when I stream)

Live gameplay / commentary of your Ludumdare games !

Hit that tasty follow button to see when I stream.

-> TWITCH.TV – HERE <-

It was my 2nd time taking part in a Ludum Dare, and I was pretty excited by the theme! The idea of playing a guy in a costume whose job is to play the monster in a video game popped during the initial meeting with the team, and everyone thought it was cool! I think it fits the them well. Without further explanations, I present you “Internship Adventure”:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=39644

The biggest challenge for me was to make something funny, with catchy dialogs, and a good gameplay on top of that. Would we have time to do all that in only 3 days? Also, being the only programmer in the team, I was worried that I wouldn’t have the time to integrate all the assets from the artists, because that’s was happened during my last LD. (play “Effraction” here).

Before the Jam

We gathered at my place on Friday evening to discuss many things before the jam starts. What kind of tools we will be using, do we want to make a 2D game, or a 3D game? What would the game look like ? What do the music composers want to do? We also created a SVN repository and installed the communication tools (Skype, etc.). We’re located in Europe, so for us, the theme would be announced at 3am on Saturday morning. Time to go to sleep early! Needless to say, I couldn’t sleep well due to excitement (also… it was 10pm).

Day 1

Got up at 7:30, made coffee and had a breakfast with the team. It was composed of 2 artists, 2 music composers and myself (coding). When we agreed on the theme, everyone has to install the tools, checkout the SVN repo, and so on. It tooks almost 3 hours before everyone could start working for real.

Here’s what we had after a full day of work (we went to sleep at 1am):

• the basic gameplay was working. The player could move, attack, jump and play dead. The hero behavior was almost completely done. I has spent an awful time to make it work but I was glad of the result.
• we had the first version of the forest graphics
• the jazzy music and the forest music were almost done!
• some of the animations of the Hero were done
• the player was still a placeholder red square

It was good, but the whole dialog/mission system was not started at all. I panicked a little since I had only 2 days left to program it, for the 3 levels! Yeah we initially planned to make 3 levels.

Day 2

Got up at 7:30 and worked until 1am. This day was quite stressful for me, because I had to write a lot of code and dialogs while everyone asked me to integrate their assets into the game

What was the game progress after this second day?

• The mission system was working, the first 2 missions were almost complete, the 3rd one was coded but there was no dialogs…
• All the songs were almost finished and the voices were recorded and integrated into the game
• We had all the animations for the Hero, almost all for the caterpillar. the second monster was in progress but not integrated
• The day/night animation was functional!
• The level 2 was barely started…

We decided to drop level 3 and focus on level 2 for the last day.

Day 3

Got up at 8:00 and worked until the final submission at 3am. What can I say about this day ? To my surprise, it wasn’t hell I mean less than my previous jam. We really focused on making things right instead of making a lot of stuff, so we had to cut a lot of features. I didn’t have time to write all the dialogs I wanted, and level 2 had only 2 missions (the first one has 3).

Around 23pm-00pm we stopped adding things and just polished the game. I finished writing all the dialogs while the artists made a lot of enhancement on the graphics.

A lot of testing and balancing were done too. Some missions were too easy, some were too hard, and we really didn’t want players to quit the game before the end because a mission was too difficult. I think it went pretty right.

What went right

This is my best jam so far, and I’m proud of it! Let me thanks everyone in the team for their incredible work: Pascal, Roxane, Louis and Victor! A few things went right:

• The teamwork. It’s hard to define, but when everyone manage to work together efficiently, it is really motivating
• The art, the music, the gameplay, the humor. I was very concerned that my dialogs were not funny enough and that people would just say “dude, that was a poor attempt to make something fun”.
• The general polishing of the game. As I said before, we spent a lot of time testing and improving all the aspects of the game. It is a little short, but seems pro.
• We had enough sleep and didn’t eat so much junk food (we even ate vegetables!)

What went wrong

• As always during a game jam, you plan features but there’s never really enough time to implement all of them..
• We used XNA to build the game, and it doesn’t come with an editor. Every time an artist wants to improve something, he had to ask me to add it in the game, and everyone lose time. Maybe next time we’ll go with Unity, but I’ll have to learn it first!

Conclusion

That was a long piece of text, hope it wasn’t boring :p To finish, here’s some statistics about our game.

Follow me on twitter! @bousquetm

Tags: postmortem

Today moring when i logined the homepage

just  a gently drag ! there are 3-5 topic about Tentacle/Octopus appeared in my sight.

link: http://ludumdare.com/compo/2015/08/26/496031/#comments

link: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=18775

link: http://ludumdare.com/compo/2015/08/26/troopers-starship/

link:http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=54824

this is the first tentacle game i seen thesedays, and it is also the reason why i notice these similar games 😀

my friends just talked about it  in chatgroup the other day( what a coincidence that we meet each other again)

I love  Tentacle-monster, it let me hope to see more.

——————

8.29

during the late stages of this game ,their weapon all change to lazer!! ~pew pew pew

when i finished this game , my appetite improved dramatically

UI, controll feeling ,and  the types of enemies… all pretty Cool~!

[9]

link: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=16507

48hours welldone!

Play Here

This was an interesting LDJAM for me. In a way it brought things full circle back to my first LD, LD1. That was what, over a decade ago?

The first ludumdare game I made was called “zillagame”. The theme was “Guardian” and the game involved protecting a small, seaside community from an attacking godzilla.

This time, the theme was “You are the monster” and so I decided to revisit that idea, but from the perspective of the Godzilla. My game is called “Hugzilla”. The hugging angle only came up after I modeled the zilla with outstretched arms and noticed it looked like he was trying to hug the buildings. The best components in any creative endeavor are alway from these kinds of happy accidents.

Some differences stand out immediately. I got a little better at 3d modeling, I realized the importance of picking a good color palette, and it’s pretty cool that you can run this in a web browser these days. But pretty much, I made the same game (or incomplete half-game). Thirty-three ludumdares (well, I didn’t join all of them, probably 2/3s) and I’ve got basically a monster that moves around the landscape, buildings that take damage and some nice scenery, with little in the way of actual gameplay.

What does this mean? That I spend too much time on engine features (I remember I spend a lot of time on PNG loading in LD1, this time I spent a while on object mouse picking which went unused). That 3D is untenable without a huge engine like Unity or UE? Maybe that I am just a slow learner?

Not really. I don’t do these game jams to try and win. My huge collection of unfinished prototypes is my trophy shelf.  But most of the time, I’m doing LD to expand my boundaries, either to learn or try a new tool, or to push the limits of whatever tool I’m using. It’s a way of battle-testing a tool or process. I also tend to focus on the graphics rather than the gameplay, which makes sense because that’s my background (tools and graphics programming). I wonder what would happen if I made a game with nothing but cubes. In face, my 2nd ludumdare game was sort of all cubes, but I did get carried away and ended up writing a pseudo-3d level editor and convex polygon tessellator for it. I guess you can’t change who you are, and LD, like any creative expression, is a way to find and reveal that.

Anyways, I should probably do the traditional postmortem lists here:

What went right:

• Luxe engine, Haxe language. Once again, this turned out to be a very productive tool. 3D support is still in very early days but Luxe and Haxe feel like a very, very good fit for game dev, both for jams and larger projects.
• Blender Exporting. I spent a little bit of time beforehand getting a bare-bones blender export script working. That was hugely helpful, for the first time I wasn’t manually exporting and importing everything which always takes a lot more time than it should.
• “Tilemap Texturing” I came up with a very interesting trick to use a uvmap similar to a tilemap in blender. I’ll write up a full blog post about this soon, but this trick alone was worth the entire weekend.
• “Matcap” materials. I threw in a “matcap” style shader, which lets you render a material sphere and use that to fake a material. It worked great. I didn’t have time to use it for other than giving things a little sheen but for future contests this seems like a good way to make a bunch of materials quickly.

example of matap. That sphere is actually a render out of blender/cycles, but this trick works great with hand-painted material spheres too.

What went wrong-o:

• Vague game design and mechanics. I only had a vague idea of what the gameplay would be like, I was imagining RTS-style controls at first and so I spend several hours doing 3d picking code and stuff I would need for that. However, I didn’t end up actually needing that. If I would have nailed down my gameplay a bit more on paper first, I would have realized this earlier on.
• Last-minute shadows: I had some shadow code that I was working on before the compo (as part of my basecode). With twenty minutes left I decided to try and throw that in there. I had barely enough time to get it working and no time to tune it, so there are all kind of weird shadow artifacts, so it looked worse than if there were no shadows at all. I’m honestly a little jealous of the unity folks who can just check a “shadows on” checkbox. Anyways, I’ve tuned these since the compo, so the post compo version will have nice looking shadows, and hopefully I’ll have this to use in the future.
• Anti-social. I did spend a bit of time on the Snowkit Community chat, but overall I felt a bit isolated. There was just too much volume on the ld site to follow other people’s projects, twitter wasn’t too lively this time around, and I didn’t join the IRC chat this time. Next time I will try to spend more time in IRC and maybe attend a meetup if there is one nearby.

Anyways, I’m probably not going to do much more with this game at least anytime soon. But I’m taking some of the tech and code for this and am going back to revisit an earlier ludumdare game that was one of my favorites (from LD13), maybe that will turn into something tangible.

See you all next time! –Jovoc

It makes me glad that people still love point-and-click adventures. I think they should make a comeback!

Thanks to everyone for the comments and bug reports on the original submission!
## Post Comp Fixes
+ The coffee cup falls sideways when spilled, and the security guard no longer says “hands off” when you try to take it (even when he was knocked out by the gas).
+ Fixed the shape-shift animation glitch.
+ Prevent guards and scientists from saying something random when there are words on screen.
+ Lower music volume. It overpowered the game sounds.
+ Loop game music when it ends, instead of restarting the music when re-entering the hallway.
+ Better placement of the lab exit hotspot.
+ After the scientist tells you not to touch the knockout gas, resume his working animation.
+ Restart the game on fail, instead of exiting.

## Additions
+ Draw pictures on the security room tv’s. Add descriptions for the tv’s and bulletin board.
+ Replace the key with a security pass.
+ Add the level exit as a new room. The door requires a security pass.

Rate my original entry

Post comp GNU / Linux

Post comp win32

(Instructions included with readme.md)

Tags: point-and-click, post-compo

We happened to be recording game-play footage when I made my highest score thus far! Whooo-hooo!

(Recorded using the Ludum Dare Windows version)

Tags: Crazy Minnow Studio, Run OGRE Run

I’ve made a trailer to show off my Ludumdare33 submission RPG Director.

Its your objective to create the greatest RPG of all time.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/662509

Hope you guys like.

I made some post jam updates to Unwelcome Presence to prepare it for Oculus Share release. You can check the progress of the update here.

Keep in mind that game doesn’t require Oculus Rift, so you can still enjoy it with your old fashioned 21:9 4k IPS monitor.

More Info Here!

I’ll be hosting a Ludum Dare super stream tonight at 8PM EDT on my Twitch, YouTube and Hitbox channels.  Submissions will be taken both through my Submission Form and during the event itself.  Please concider putting your game forward!

I’m working on a post-jam version of my entry.

I already have a working implementation of Field of View algorithm. Of course the extremely rare potions of infravision are in the game too, adding +1 to the player’s view range.

It’s a known fact that trolls short-sighted

I’ll post a link to the new version once it is finished.

BTW, I have a question. As I just added touch controls to the new version, would backporting that feature (in order to add an Android version) to the original jam entry be allowed?

Tags: LD33, ldjam, roguelike

Some that have played, consider this game the monster. Why?
Play to find out
Don’t forget to also rate

Monsters Vs. Cookies

Tags: 2D, compo, game, jam, kidando, LD33, Ludum Dare, video

Hello guys, I’ve just created this playthrough video for my game 

And if you haven’t done it yet

3.500 screenshots of fun…

The game :here

I have started to work on my post-compo version and have made tweaks for more easy controls, with less confusion about the collision areas.

And there is also a new level!
You’ll find it in the Post-compo version:

Undetected

Hey guys, I’m going to be streaming and rating some Ludum Dare entries. If you want to stop by and have me play your game, feel free!

http://www.twitch.tv/bam191