Hey guys, I have to catch up rating some games from people that have rated mine, but I’ll be online for a few hours at least so anyone who rates and leaves a comment for my game, I’ll do the same for yours (so long as it’s on the web or for OSX).  Mine takes approximately 5 minutes or less 😀

Both links in tutorial:
Dan Fessler

2D Will Never Die

Now Come try my none pixel art game and rate!
Derek Thrupp : LD33 Game

I’m still working on the post-jam version of Someone stole the Princess!.

So far I have finished implementing the new speed stat. Also added a speed potion (for a grand total of 7 potion types, for now), which adds +1 speed to the player. Speed affects combat, as the speedier character will attack first.

Let’s put the troll as an example: the troll is very strong and has lots of hp, but unless he drinks lots of speed potions he will be hit by enemies before dealing damage.

Another finished feature is different behaviors for enemy types. The ninja, for example, is faster that the player by default and can attack TWICE!!! Luckily for the player that enemy will only appear in the two last floors, where the player should should already be stronger.

Ouch! Ninjas pack a punch now.

Tags: roguelike, SSTP

I usually write down a comment for every game I try, saying what I like and if there are some bugs or solvable problems..

Why most people doesn’t? Without writing a comment I see a vote emptied of much of its essence…

I voted until now 80 games and I did as many comments and it took me hours of my little free time.

I’m pretty skeptical of certain developers with coolness really exagerated..  Meh…

People please, comment! A comment is like a pretty flower, everybody likes it ;D

And now.. My entry 😀 (yay, some free visibility! Wiiiiiii)

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=12659

Well, I had a pretty good time last weekend despite not being enthused by the theme, I ended up making a game based around the idiom “A Wolf in Sheep’s clothing” and it turned out all right!

Design

My basic concept was you eat sheep, the more you eat, the more wool you wear and so the sheep are less scared of you, but you move slower. I had a few ideas of how the wool would be removed, like  other wolves thinking you’re a sheep, taking damage (wire fences, angry farmers, charging rams) and maybe I’ll add a shearing sequence if I had time (I didn’t!)

Visuals

I wanted it to look cute and simple but I wasn’t sure I could make it work, so I broke my one rule and made graphics before any sort of code. This wasn’t so bad as the simple style worked and was quite quick to make, plus the cute art really contrasted against the brutal sheep murder that the game is.  yay.

Conclusion

I worked almost non stop on the Sunday, but looking back, it would’ve been a good idea to have done a lot more on Saturday, maybe next time I’ll skip sleeping, I always feel at the end I’m always 2 hours short of time ): Due to this I never managed to test it properly and realise how necessary the shearing event was, I’ve since uploaded a post-compo version with it in and it really adds to the challenge of the game. Overall, I’m really pleased with the game, much more than my previous entry, going to definitely stick to 2D games  when going solo, 3D is just too painful.

I’ve had some great feedback so far, thanks to all who’ve played it, and for those who haven’t….

Play it here 😉 

I’d like to introduce my 10th LD game.

Play/Rate Earth Was a Bad Choice

Play as an alien who hoped to vacation on Earth, but quickly found out the inhabitants are hostile. Race back to your ship through 10 levels of pixelated explosions.  Can you make it?

I was fortunate to have enough time to add a proper ending to the game.  I hope you get to see it! For you competitive types, can you beat these high scores*:

• Biggest Combo – 30
• Longest Airtime – 21.9s

Edit: Within about 15 minutes of me posting this, someone already beat the originally posted scores.  The above scores have been updated.

Thanks to everyone who submitted games! It’s going to be a great time. I will be unable to monitor Youtube chat due to complications, but Twitch Chat will be on stream, and monitored closely. Stop on by and say hi.

Watch from any of these:
Watch/Chat On Twitch
Watch on YouTube
Watch on Hitbox

Enjoy the show!
-Highsight

Reading the comments I noticed several people missed the ability to wait a turn by pressing a key. This feature is now added to the post-jam version I’m working on.

You’ve got the power of a Time Lord but no TARDIS. Sorry.

As this change made the game even easier I’m thinking about enabling diagonal movement. The possibility of being attacked from up 8 directions simultaneously should ramp up the difficulty quite a bit.

You can play the now obsolete jam version [HERE].

Since people liked the particle systems and sky shader used in my compo entry, I made a tool that exposes the shader uniforms and particle system properties so they’re editable in the browser. Check it out: http://samcodes.itch.io/sky-shader-editor

Sky shader preset

Another preset

The editor works in Firefox and Chrome, but not IE.

So I participated in my first ever Ludum Dare last weekend. I had made two other games for the last mini Ludum Dares, but this was my first real jam on here.

I think the end result was rather good (game here). We were originally planning on using LibGDX, but a few events on the Friday of the jam made us have to resort to Java2D.

Things that went well:
-The game is functional and was made entirely within the time frame (including most of the engine).
-The only theme we didn’t think about beforehand ended up winning, but I think we came up with a good idea on the fly.
-The art went a lot better than I expected. The team consisted of only computer scientists.
-The mechanics are pretty solid.
-The body of the serpent has pretty good movement considering we had never coded something like it before.
-Recreational biting.
-Cory.

Things I wish I could have improved:
-There is no way to pause the game.
-The game immediately hops to the main menu when you die. There is not game over notification.
-The game does not have a ton of replay ability and becomes somewhat tedious in later rounds.
-There are slight bugs with the head of the serpent when he is at the top of the water.
-There is no music and the sound effects aren’t the best.

Ah well. Cheers to the next competition in December.

Since all the cool kids are doing it.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=35477

View post on imgur.com

Hey guys I made a game! I wanted to try a genre that I don’t normally do, so why not survival? Human Within is very heavily influenced by games like Oregon Trail. Here’s pretty much what it looks like:

If you want to give it a try: awesome! You can play it HERE.

I hope you like it, but if you don’t, please tell me why so I can make a better game next time! Thanks.

The Red Planet by Zccc

Fantastic aesthetic! Reminded me of Doom and the story telling was nicely implemented

Grave by uheartbeast

This one has both – great gameplay and great looks!
Possibly the best 2D animation I’ve seen so far

Seperated by rxi

Amazing mood that’s supported by equally amazing pixel art

The Bear Hunter by Devark

A great short experience that tells a gloomy story

Sewer Monster City by bitslap

Great classic game idea fully polished. Enjoy.

and maybe check out my game too:

We are loving the comments and feedbacks you are given to us! If you didn’t try yet, click on the link below and let a comment!

>> ACCESS ENTRY <<

A two player game about turn everything into shit!! Yay!!! Make shit together is way better!!!!!

Excremonsters!!!!
Excremonsters!!!!
Excremonsters!!!!

Well, it’s that time! This has been my first Ludum Dare, and it has been great so far. Thank you for all the support! Right, now onto the important stuff.

Play “Out West” here!

The Concept:

My goal with this first Ludum Dare was to make something small that could be developed, finished, and played without any major bugs. I had been experimenting with text adventures and pixel art, so I chose Twine as my tool, since it’s very easy to use, can be expanded upon, can incorporate art, and is contained completely in one HTML file that can be hosted anywhere and played by anyone.

Once this choice was made, I decided my secondary goal was to try and create a very tense and atmospheric mood with only text, art, and time, disproving the common notion that text adventures are perceived as boring slogs which appeal to a certain niche audience (myself among them). Granted, I cheated a little by including art, but as a picture is worth a thousand words, I felt it would enhance the gameplay immeasurably.

The Bad:

• The game is very short. I needed to keep myself in check; my games are prone to feature creep (which is one reason I participated in this jam) and tend to balloon into iii development nightmares which can’t realistically be handled by one person. Even so, I nearly didn’t make the deadline. There are three possible choices early on, and then another three later: These immediately necessitate nine different endings, plus different factors which dictate other variables that require separate endings, plus these all tie into the main ending, which must take into account everything that’s happened in the journey. Due to the exponential complexity being created, I had to cut off many ideas I wanted to incorporate and focus on making satisfying endings for what I had. That isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but it forced the game to become minuscule, which is a bit more of a problem with text adventures, there being a finite amount of content with a definite end, as opposed to Pacman.
• There was no time to add in any complex game mechanics. I know: Game mechanics, in a text adventure? Surely you jest! In all seriousness though, I wanted to add in even more interactivity through JavaScript enhancements. Unfortunately, there was no time to properly code anything myself or learn someone’s mod. I worked with what I had, and from the feedback it appears that effort’s been appreciated; But I would have liked to do something like roaming AI characters in the town, with random conversations as possibilities.
• Almost no animation in the art. Again, this was time related. I didn’t want huge cutscenes, just little touches of animation that would enhance the world, like having the landscape bob up and down as if you were galloping on a horse, or animating flames, weapons, movement, villagers, that sort of thing. Repeating gifs, mostly.
• The game is very linear. This is partially due to writing and the nature of Twine; the story requires a certain progression, and the creation of atmosphere and mood also require a certain amount of control. That being said, there perhaps could be a free-roam period before the start of this particular sequence which allows you to explore the world a little, or some other stuff which could expand the illusion of choice and open world gameplay.
• The art. Some have commented how they enjoyed the pixel art, and I’m very happy they do – I’m almost a complete novice at it. In general, I’m quite happy with what I was able to achieve with a fire under my butt and limited art skills. I would like to get a bit better at pixel art and go back and polish up some of the imagery to facilitate better immersion in the world.

The Good:

• The art. Again, I’m a pixel art beginner, and I’m frankly amazed that I was able to finish up all of it in time, and that it’s all decent. Nothing looks horribly out of place, and I’m actually a little proud of the final image that’s revealed at the very end. Gives me hope of improvement in the future.
• The writing. This wasn’t my opinion all the way through; as I was writing the adventure I was horribly aware that, since it’s a text adventure, everything relies on the writing, and if I messed it up or it simply wasn’t good, the whole thing would collapse with almost nothing to salvage. That said, the feedback that I’ve received about the writing has been positive, with several mentions of it being very well written. I breath a sign of relief. Moving on.
• I finished it. As with many game development beginners, I fall into the trap of being overly ambitious, even with text adventures. I am glad I put down my foot and had a very strict goal in mind. Though I had to work until the deadline because the art took more time that I anticipated, I still managed to incorporate all the stuff I had planned for this tiny little thing.
• People seem to enjoy it! I’ll be honest, this was a nerve-wracking experience for me (especially ticking the little “Anonymous Feedback” box). I have never done a game jam before, and had no idea what would be said about something I made. I wasn’t expecting anything, but just the fact that someone enjoyed the experience the way I attempted to craft it is a wonderful feeling. Thank you all again for your feedback. It’s appreciated. And thanks to everyone who’s games I’ve played: They’re all wonderful, fascinating and strange! Well done!

Conclusion:

I think I’ll work on this some more, give it a bit more of an edge. I’ll have to be careful: I don’t want to bloat the experience or dilute the atmosphere. We’ll see where it goes. Five minutes of story is vastly different from a three act structure. Either way, this has been an eye opening experience. If you play Out West, I hope you enjoy it. Good luck to everyone!

Tags: compo, final, LD33, Ludum Dare, pixelart, post-mortem, postmortem, Twine

It is an intrigging short strory in a 2D sidescroller and i hope you play all the way to the end : p

( we didin´t updated yet so it have some bugs when you die X) and the end is not a crash it is just the lack of a menu)

it had the pleasure to be streamed and the reactions was just amazing!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=56160

hope you have fun

Hey everyone, I’m Jacob and one of the three developers who worked on our first Ludum Dare title P-Type. Working on this project was really fun; we had worked on one title before using Unity engine but this was our first fully-fledged game.

Our game was made in the style of classic sidescrolling and top-down SHMUPs where you’d fight against some unknown alien race. Inspired a bit by enemies like the Bydo I thought it would be a perfect fit for the idea of you being the monster. You would play as the alien constantly hopping from ship to ship, using their own weapons against them. It allows for an interesting gameplay dynamic to emerge while also being fitting to the theme of a parasitic race. Overall I’m really happy with the design of the game from both a theme and gameplay perspective.

What worked?

Extensibility Focused: We’ve managed to create a system that makes it easy to rapidly throw in new ships with different shot patterns by using good OOP-principles. Every ship in the game inherits from a Base Ship class which defines some default behavior and statistics like movespeed as well as basic movement and death functions. Each ship then has an AI script associated with it, so it’s easy to swap out behaviors and ships to create more unique variations.

Core Gameplay: Infesting ships makes sense! You can attach yourself to any ship in the game and gain access to things like how the ship shoots or moves. This allows for emergent gameplay because you can choose to play defensively and retain a good ship, or constantly jump from ship to ship abusing your invincibility and life regen. One of the things we wanted to do was get ship persistence between stages but unfortunately another issue we ran out of time on. Also, there’s a few small secrets (though I don’t know if I should call them that?) in the game but they’re a pretty low chance to occur.

Level Creation: We use simple spawners that create enemies as they approach the outer walls of the playable gamespace. These are attached to another background surface that moves constantly to the left; this keeps the camera consistently in one spot while also making it easy to visually create levels and layouts.

What didn’t?

Length of the Game: There’s unfortunately only three levels. We ran out of time near the end and while we could’ve thrown in more levels it was not worth the potential issues popping up right near the deadline. We were scrambling to fix last-minute issues before the submission!

The File Structure: Our overall game is incredibly messy! Files are kinda just thrown wherever which means it can be difficult to discern what’s still useful or obsolete.

Constant Refactoring: In the beginning we were just throwing code against the wall and seeing what sticks. As a result we ended up having to comb through older code and refactor it a bit in order to make it more consistent as well as extendible. While I’m happy with the end result there are still some minor refactoring problems and we spent a lot of time cleaning up code.

Sound Design: There’s no music in the game and only a handful of sounds. We put that off until the final day and by then it was really too late to get anything in there.

Art Design: None of us are really artists, so most of the ships were just very simple 8×8 sprites put together quickly for testing. A solid piece of artwork even just for the title screen would’ve been a big help.

Conclusion

I’m a big fan of R-Type so the chance to work on something like this with some great friends was incredible.  I think we’re going to leave the game as-is but in the future I might revisit the core concepts and take some of the stuff I learned to apply it to a full experience. Either way, bring on the next Ludum Dare!

If you’d like to try our game click HERE

Yeah I’m playing games again. Just leave a link to your game in the comments to this post and I’ll be sure to check it out! Also, being the dirty businessman that I am, I’ll leave a link to my own so that you can try it. Warning: It’s rushed as hell:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=43866

Now that some days have passed since submission, and we have received considerable feedback, i feel the time is right for a post.

So firstly a bit about us :

This was our first LD, and we pretty much entered it unprepared, using a framework we had never looked at, in a language we we’re barely familiar with, and to top it off we we’re only available for maybe half of the 72Hrs.

With this in mind we had 1 simple objective, make something vaguely gamelike that’s playable, and submit it.

On that basis we we’re pretty pleased with our outcome, we even found time to add a few things beyond our initial design, such as the plane that drops dummies(pacifiers for US folks) and bombs, and arrives at intervals depending on other game elements. A particle emitter for blood effects. And subtle parallax background scrolling.

In fact scrolling, in any form was a stretch goal for us, we would have been happy with a single screen level, indeed that’s how it was for much of the time we spent on it, cameras we’re added very late.

Feedback :

So overall feedback has been mostly positive.

People seem to like our choices of sounds effects, the retro feel, and the high but not impossible difficulty.

However some have been confused by some gameplay elements(i’ll clarify these shortly), and a few small glitches such as  overlapping background music.

The Game :

So the aim of the game is simple, get to the door at the end of the level. trying to eat as many babies as possible along the way.

You are a baby eating monstrous orc. And as such you get bonus point for mutilating them(big bonus @ 100%).

Obviously it’s not that simple, because it features robot police droids, that insta-kill you on contact. And yes, no lives, no second chances, that’s game over

The droids ordinarily patrol, but they have a sight range in front of them.

And this is where maybe some things will be clarified for some players :

The must be more or less(don’t want to give too much detail 😉 ) on their height level, and within a certain distance, in front of them. Then they leave patrol mode & enter pursuit mode. So how do you escape once they are pursuing you ask? we’ll there’s a few options : You can get far enough away, that they lose sight of you(note. this is further than the initial spotting range), Lure them to their deaths, or use those fables pacifiers/dummies!

The aforementioned reset aggro on ALL enemies when collected. However, if you are still within the sight-cone of any, they will immediately spot you again, and resume pursuit – so you need to get smart about when you collect them.

One other thing some people have been confused about is that sometimes they turn around ‘suddenly’ when you are behind them. This is a deliberate mechanic, and there are sound cues, but clearly it’s still not clear. It happens when you first make contact with a baby, this baby may be happily asleep or otherwise unaware, in which case all is good. The other option, is the baby realizes you are a monster, and cries out. This alerts all on-screen droids.

One other thing that can drop from the plane, is bombs, they kill everything in blast radius, everything! That includes, police droids, babies, other drops, and YOU(game over) so yea by all means lure things there to get rid of them, but don’t get hit

What’s next :

Well as it happens, we now plan to take this game further, and include more levels, and procedural generation of platforms, obviously address any issues people have spotted. And add a couple more enemy types. So watch this space!

For those who haven’t come across it yet, here’s the link, and a few screenshots.

Thank you for reading!

Nipper Nosher entry link