The game had a problem: many people who did not respond to your actions (other than murder). This is fixed. Now you can sow panic and provoke the werewolf! 😉
LINK!

Hello and nice weekend to everyone,

I am writing on the behalf of my little shy monster he needs some help to reach his dreams. Becoming a Movie Star!

Help him by playing my entry, and if you feel like also rate it and comment it. For every that reply I always return the favour.

Hope you enjoy!!

Spoilers! Play the game before watching! This is for those who got stuck somewhere but still want to know how to get through without skipping a level.

In this game you are yeti struggling in icy forest to survive.
Now you can play it online, using Unity Web Player (sorry, no WebGL yet).
Thank you everyone for support!

Play and Rate

Hey guys! Thank you all for voting and leaving feedbacks, it’s been instructive and fun. Lots of you asked me about a bug in the drawer and I’ve fixed it. The second issue was about aiming, seems like that aiming without a crosshair was odd and hard so I’ve added this little feature.

Here’s the page of the entry, have fun and keep up leaving comments and votes! 😉

Play the game here!

We were a team of four people this time, though one person had to leave after the first night, and I was busy Saturday evening and Sunday morning. Since we were especially limited on time and resources we really needed a simple idea. Besides, I like simple ideas because it’s easier to focus on making one concept polished and fun. Of course all of our initial ideas were very complicated, until…

Once we had the idea, and we knew it was going to be a parody, then the issue was how to do the art in a way that paid tribute to the source without copying it. I do a lot of traditional/fine-art (My work: http://alwaysfromlife.com/) and I’d been thinking for a while that it would be interesting to do a game in a very painterly style. I did some quick sketches of mario in ArtRage and then used Aseprite animate them and export a tilesheet. It looked pretty good so we decided to go with it:

Even though we wanted a more organic look to the game, I decided to use Tiled to create the level, because that would make it easy to experiment with different layouts, and the excellent Tiled2Unity tool would generate the collision meshes for me. Once I had the level laid out in a way that worked well with the bouncing marios, I used Tiled’s “export to image” feature, and Ian used that as a reference to paint the lovely background that you see in the game.

Probably anyone who’s used Unity for 2D has made the mistake of leaving the “fixed rotation” option off on your sprite’s rigidbody and then watching your character spin and flop around unexpectedly. For this game I wanted mario to have a silly, clumsy quality, so I left it off intentionally. The challenge then was getting a reasonable amount of these clumsy marios to the end of the level. I used several invisible triggers to tell mario when to jump. Each trigger had a percent change of triggering, so we would end up with marios taking random paths through the level.

While Jesse made a mario spawner and worked on the plants, I painted the title screen as quickly as possible. I’m sure I didn’t spend more than 20 minutes on it. My plan was to hand paint the title text as well but that just would have taken too much time.

At the end of Saturday we were at the testing stage, and while it was already making us laugh (a good sign!), we had a lot of ideas for how to make it better. I assumed I wouldn’t have time for any of them. But Monday morning I was determined to add them. I added the “withering” plants feature and the heart counter as ways to add challenge and excitement to the game, and Brian added a score counter and cleverly tied the rate that marios spawned to your score, which leads to a hilarious avalanche of marios if you get far enough. At this point I think it went from being a silly game to one that was actually fun to play.

Of course I always forget how stressful the submission process is, especially when you’re already exhausted from lack of sleep. But in the end I’m very happy with what we made. There’s only a couple of minor things I would have done differently. Much gratitude to my team, and to everyone who has left feedback!
Adam

Play the game here!

Tags: art, jam, LD33, postmortem, process, tools

Thanks, again, for all the comments! Getting feedback on what I’ve made (and trying to write constructive and useful feedback to others) is one of the reasons I really like taking part of Ludum Dare! This community is the best!!

There are two main issues that people seem to be having with my entry: gameplay feels clunky and it doesn’t seem to relate with the theme. I’ll write another post to explain all the possible actions and how combat actually doesn’t works, all with animated GIFs to illustrate everything.

For now, I’ll address any lingering confusion about the theme (even though quite a lot of people seemed to get it).

But, before that, I’ll quickly talk about this game’s future. I really liked the original idea, and I’m quite happy with how the combat could work if fixed. Also, finally having big sprites is great after using small 16×16 sprites for so long.

So I do plan to extend this into a “full short-game”. Something that should take around a month to make (and I’ll probably take three or so), just to make it into what it was supposed to be. I may still fail, so it’s more of something I’ll try to do, but don’t get your hopes up (I’ve never been able to  finish a project that requires as many assets as this game will… and I’ve tried quite a few times, already…).

Now, on to talk about the theme! It will be a kind of spoilers, so be aware of that before reading on…

One of the issues is that the theme isn’t clear… and that’s intentional! I like to leave it to the player to interpret the game as they want… but that requires proper story telling, something that I usually fail do.

Adding the story quite late into the game’s development (I did it pretty much before the SFX, which was the last thing I did), also didn’t help. I didn’t want the story to take too long and the small virtual window (160×120) didn’t allow for a lot of text on screen at the same time… So I just decided to make the text scroll quickly and didn’t add a confirmation button afterward… Terrible decisions, I know…The resulting game is quite different from the original idea. It was supposed to be about a hero getting confused and despaired about the current situation (and then becoming a monster), but it came out like this:

You think you are a righteous hero. Sometimes, you do have doubts about yours instructions, but you follow them, nonetheless. This time, you were asked to kill “dangerous” monsters on the forest. When you get there, you find cute little slimes. After so many people passed through here and annoyed them, some of the slimes even did become aggressive. Instead of doing the right thing and letting the slimes be, you blindly follow the orders and begin to kill ’em all. No matter if they fight back or not… You are truly a monster…

Someone said on the comments that this would had been clearer if no slime fought back… and that guy was probably right… I didn’t think about this during the jam, but it would really had helped to tell this through the gameplay…
Well, I gotta keep trying! One day I will make an awesomely polished game that doesn’t fail to tell its story (nor has terrible gameplay).

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=57635

The Sacrifice (jam entry)
A cruel management game with amazing arts and music.

Cutthroat You, Homesick Me (jam entry)
A short story driven game with nice graphics and character design.

Separated (compo entry)
A sad and moody little exploration game with great gameboy-style pixel arts and music.

Monster (jam entry)
A well written interactive narrative dealing with some heavy topics.

Melody Muncher (compo entry)
A simple rhythm game with a generous soundtrack of 7 nice tunes (plus some loops).
That’s right, 7 tunes for a compo entry.

My own entry, Subterranean, is available here.

Puzzle terminology is unclear. One of my favorite game genres is what I used to call “puzzles” until I heard some games of chance referred to as puzzles. So these days I say “logic puzzles”. I can’t give you an exact definition but if you find yourself frequently thinking “but if I put that here, then this has to go there, but then that can’t go there, but… oh, er, hmmm…” while playing a game then there is a good chance that it is a logic puzzle. A few other characteristic features are:

• no hidden information – everything you need to solve the level is there on the screen in front of you
• always solvable and with completely deterministic gameplay (no chance element)
• no or very low requirement to think quickly or perform tricky actions
• solving them should require some level of ingenuity – so a standard maze doesn’t count, nor a puzzle where most of the difficulty is working out the mechanics
• physics puzzles and puzzle platformers generally don’t count, but it depends on the “but if I put that here…” factor

Logic puzzles can have a cult following but they aren’t so common so I thought I would share a list of such games that I have found this Ludum Dare so other like-minded players can find them easily. I’m listing these games in no particular order, although I’m excluding obviously incomplete games.

I’m super sure that the list is not exhaustive so please let me know of any others you find! (Suggestions for better terminology are also welcome!)

Logic puzzles (according to my meaning of the phrase):
BaseCase – Delicious Ships!
khahem – Detached
Draknek – Slime Saga
thegdr – Splat
madlee – Unfinished Piece
panda – You! Are the monster
lessmilk – Gravity Snake
sprawl – Entropy
VelvelaJade – Zevy’s Puzzlers
Fanaen – Mindvasion
reheated – Milky Helps People (that’s mine)

The following games combine logic puzzles with a component of observing enemy movement. They really are logic puzzles but not all the information is on-screen at once.
ehtd – Eat Sheep
person124 – A Monster Is You!
Jacic – Team S.T.E.A.L.T.H
lubos – Dungeons Deep

Other games with a major logic puzzle element:
daveh – Lure.Lair.Lunch
bowlercaptain – The Terror of the Night of Day
TMW – Quarantine Zone # 1
avultima – Collateral Choice
Open Rift – Shadow Wolf
966623 – RGBlob
MSiddeek – Monster and Hero

Timelapse time~

Play Primary Objective

I am incredibly happy with this summer’s Ludum Dare results. Not only feedback has been overwhelmingly positive in areas we only started experimenting in, the game managed to get 3.11 on kongregate which is huge new record for us and motivation to keep ever going.

Now, what is this game, you may ask?
It’s an interactive story with a somewhat uncommon interpretation of the theme: instead of straight up Godzilla-style destruction we went for the more subtle dictatorship-building kind.

What went well:

• We kept it simple. This may sound silly but it feels like the hardest part of every LD is planning small, then cutting most of it off to fit in time. We focused a lot on doing the MVP (Minimal Viable Product). We made just enough conversations and cutscenes for the story to have a beginning, an arc, an ending. We could have added so many more, had the ideas for them all. But rather than shipping a game with 8 incomplete and ugly and inconsistent levels, we decided to have the 4 we had and polish them.
  We added effects, refined the texts, had playtesters fish out the bugs and try to break the game by clicking everywhere they shouldn’t be clicking. This all ended in a much better experience all-together. Keep in mind, a longer game is not necessarily better.
• We dared to go for minimalism.
  This saved us both time, effort and probably made the game better all around.
  Instead of full figures and faces, we used silhoutettes. Easier to draw (art is a weaker side of our team compared to the visual wonders some others make here ) and it allows the player to place the characters of their own imaginings into their place. We had a very clear idea of how our monster would look but others from all around the world would probably have different ideas so we settled for an evil-looking hat.
  The other artistic decision was making the game full grayscale. It ties in well to the old-timey atmosphere and generally dark storyline and also saves us the color-picking effort.
• Teamwork. This is the 6th Ludum Dare the full team takes part in and by this point, we work together really well. There is a general sense of who is a master of what and how much progress we should be making by the nth day and the need to ask each other what we should be doing once we finished X task is smaller every time.
  Despite our scheludes being all over the place, we managed to make our best game yet.
• Shine, polish and juice. We added a bunch of effects that really help the atmosphere appear. See one below for example.

What went wrong:

• The aforementioned scheludes. We didn’t plan ahead enough for the LD and families and stuff so I believe if we had more working time we could have done some more features and scenes.
• Spaghetti code. We did not have a conversation-framework so we made one on the fly – making the final debate that has a large conversation tree instead of the randomly rolled standard kind of the first 3 was a lot of pain and copy-pasting. Seriously. For lack of better ideas to name them, I made 40 functions with the names one, two, three… forty.
• Recording device. Our music is praised a lot in comments but it was recorded with a camera that was lying around the house. It would probably be even more gorgeous with an actual microphone.

Very sinister!

Gameplay

Play the game by clicking here!

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

A lot of procrastinating in this one, mostly due to the lack of ideas. Enjoy! 😀

Here is my postmortem for the 33th edition of LudumDare. Theme was “You are the monster”. You can read it on the vikindie blog.

Synopsis

My game is a basic tycoon game where you have to organize the “triangular trade” : get soldiers in Europe to capture slaves in Africa and produce new world’s goods to send them to Europe.

Final game

Idea finding

When doing LudumDare, I try to be original in the theme interpretation. I’m a little disappointed because my game doesn’t reflect what I planned initially to match the theme. I was thinking about moral choices for the player (“Pay 100 for a medic or 10 slaves died”, …) and I wanted to have an authority in the game trying to fight slavery, with some navy tracking your ships, and laws passing like Habeas Corpus. The goal was to create frustration for the player so he could say “Oh, fuck, humans right bill passed”. The idea was that “YOU are the monster” don’t designate the game character but the player himself.
I love tycoon games and was very happy to create one for LudumDare (I usually create character centered games).

Technically

I used HaxeFlixel. It’s my 4th ludum dare game using that fantastic game engine. For the first time, I used it fluently (I praticed a lot last months). That was awesome.

The HTML5 export had never worked for me, so I planned to create a flash game. I live in France, so the end of the jam is at 3AM. Midnight, I said to myself “Hey, it could be a good idea to test if the game works with flash !”. Spoil: it didn’t. It was VERY slow and buttons was all the same color (the button’s color is an important thing, I will speak about it later). I spend some minutes to optimize the game but it was still too slow and buggy. So I tried the HTML5 export. I didn’t belived. It worked. That was awesome (let’s be honest, I don’t like flash).

I still use a proven and reliable IDE : vim, tmux and my personnal configuration ;-). If you are interested, here is my vimrc.

Graphics

I used Krita… and tried to do something. I spent one hour to draw the map (saturday night, 1AM, before bed). Probably something like one hour more to create all buildings and the boat. No animation, no different images when buildings upgrade, … That pretty sucks and lead to a static game. But I consider that graphics are not very important in a tycoon game, and I hate those business simulation games where graphics go AGAINST the game (think about Railroad Tycoon 3 where the 3D hype leads to unreadable informations).

Yes, this is a Mapmonde. This was my game before assets creation.

Music

It was the last thing I did. It was probably midnight past thirty, I plugged a MIDI keyboard, opened LMMS, then Pixitracker, tried to do something audible … Nothing came. So I used Abundant music, it generates music procedurally. In less than one hour I had one music that correctly fits my games. Really happy about it, the game without music would be boring. The main problem, there is only one music, no sound effects and the music don’t transparently loop (you can hear the transition).
Next step, learn how to tweak the generated midi to humanly customize it.

Gameplay

Honestly, I was very lucky, my game system pretty works. I created the concepts and tested them individually but I only tested to play a complete game once. I changed things after that and never tested again before submit.
After submit I saw some issues :
When harbour storage is full, it displays hundred same messages every seconds. Logger window become useless and it may hides informations (like events).
The soldier price is not updated when you upgrade barracks, so I suppose many persons didn’t understood why upgrade barracks. In fact, the soldier price raise each time you buy one. When you upgrade barracks, you divide by 4 the soldier price.
When a boat is in USA, it loads tobacco first, then sugar if space left. Unfortunately, you can have big reserve of sugar in America but you can’t sell it. As you don’t sell it, price raise. But you can’t sell it, so it’s very frustrating. (And the sugar price raise too fast).

My saturday afternoon fuel : carrots and sun.

Intuitivity

LudumDare games are usually played in something like less than five minutes and you have one minute to convince the player to continue his game session.
The best I could do would be an interactive tutorial, or at least, a visual help. I absolutly did nothing like that. The only help was a special screen with boring text.
To let people understand the game, I made color changing button depending of actions availables. With that, even if you don’t understand anything to the game, you just have to click green buttons and something good will happens.
The only exception is the boat parts which is always green but is not always a good choice to make.
My theory is that if the player randomly play by clicking on available actions, he will progessively understand what happens and the meaning of the actions (and of the game). After some time of random play, he will be able to do more intelligent actions because he saw what happened with his choices.
At the begining of the game development, the buttons which can’t be used (not enough gold, …) was hidden. This solution seems bad for me because the player is not aware of all actions available in the game and what to do to unlock them.

Theorically, there is a loose condition : if you don’t amass 5000 Gold until Jan 1700. There is an ending with a fucking awesome sentence, but nobody will see it because you can’t really loose. During my tests developements, I was able to do bad investments which leads to a situation where you can’t do anything (not enough money).
I didn’t want to frustrate the player which don’t know the game by letting him loose in the ten first seconds without telling him before 20 minutes of play. So I changed some part : now, all essentials first investments are done automatically : there is a village, a plantation and a slave. The first soldier is free. Even by doing whatever stupid, you will be able to slowly earn money to make better investments.

Conclusion

I’m very happy with this game. I hope you will enjoy playing it as much as me developing it. I wan’t to participate to october challenge, maybe I will reuse Slavery Simulator and continue the development, it depends on the users feedback, ideas to enhance the concept (already got some) and my motivation. Follow me on Twitter if it may interest you.

Here is my compo page : Slave Simulator 2015 . To play the game, it’s here.
Ps: don’t forget to look at Am I the monster?, game made by a friend who invited me in his appartment to do LudumDare and prepared me good tasting coffee.

Tags: compo, haXe, HaXeFlixel, postmortem

Hi! I’ve been working on my entry after the submission date and implementing many of the features suggested by users. While still it is not complete (you’ll find bugs), this is the changelog compared to the original jam entry:

• Quantity of potions has been reduced.
• Healing potions nerfed. Now they heal a random amount between 1 and 5 HP.
• Ascending one floor heals now 15 HP.
• Implemented FOV (albeit a very simple algorythm).
• Implemented SPEED (enemies faster than you will deal damage first).
• Implemented DIAGONALS (smarter enemy movement, ramped up difficulty).
• Enemies are tied now to certain depths. Ninjas will appear on last two floors.
• Added Infravision (+1 light radius) and Speed (+1 speed) potions.
• Added the ability of waiting one turn without moving.
• Implemented touch controls.

New and shiny version!

Still to-do:

• Proper procedural map generation. Working on it!
• Mix procedural and hand-created maps. I’d like first map to be the one in the intro. And the last one could be the town over the dungeon. Like in Angband.
• More different enemy types.
• Eyecandy: floating numbers, popups, speech bubbles, hit animation.
• Proper victory and game over screens. Popups are cheap.
• Proper intro.
• Different sets of music and tilesets based on depth (mines? underground forest? pirate ship?).
• Better FOV algorythm.
• Implementing STATES with cooldown counters, like POISON and BURN.
• Adding monster abilities (poisonous mist, random laser, autoevade and fury are planned).
• Of course, adding potions of mutation. Wouldn’t be cool to have several abilities at once?
• After implementing all of this, balance difficulty. A lot.

And some pro-tips:

• Don’t let enemies sorround you. You can now be attacked from up to 8 directions first.
• Use hallways to your advantage.
• Use skip turn key (S or SPACEBAR) to let foes approach and attack fist.
• If sorrounded, kill stronger foes first.
• Before entering a room, evaluate the risks and benefits.
• If low on HP, run to the stairs! You’ll recover 15 HP.

You can play the post-jam version HERE and the original jam version HERE.

Don’t forget to drop a comment if you liked it!

Tags: ldjam, roguelike, SSTP

Hello! In case you missed it, allow me to introduce our team’s submission for Ludum Dare 33 jam. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the monsta! 😉

It’s a homemade apocalyptic action game about handmade Martian with truly deadly heat ray. The setting is based on our childhood playing experience and also inspired by HG Wells and PJ Harvey. We think the game turned out very consistent and we hope you’ll have fun playing it.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=39357

Don’t hesitate to rate and comment! 😉

Yours, Schrödinger Games Team.

I have written a post-mortem for my compo game Hue and Cry, published on my website:

http://jpp39.user.srcf.net/2015/08/29/hue-and-cry-ld33-post-mortem/

We’re deeply sorry @MauiMc, @ziggy2764 just got 22 rounds in 66 seconds!

He scored while he was streaming his gameplay http://www.twitch.tv/imtheziggy/v/13075735 (7:14:00).

Who can beat the new record? Go for it!!

Tweet an image with your score on #itssundaybbg!

We have recieved a lot of feedback with a lot of positive comments, thank you so much!

Have you tried our game? Play It’s Sunday!

Hey friends: the post-comp version of Campaign Trail OF BODIES, now named Campaign Trail OF BLOOD, is almost done! I’ll be composing and recording the background music today, but in the meantime I’d love to get some testing eyes on this sucker (I’d love it if you could play and rate the comp version first, though).

You can play the post-comp testing build at:
http://inurashii.xyz/CToB

Please leave a comment if you find any typos or bugs.

Cheers,
Cae

If you haven’t played it yet, here is a gameplay video of Impassioned Fowl very kindly made by Freeware Games on Youtube, you can play the full game (in a browser if you so wish) here:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=49589