Hey, so is the 2nd time i tried 

At LD32 i had the goal to get into rank 100 in any category, maybe it was to high of a gold, but i got

so i wasn’t disappointed 

So i figured i could do a bit better this time. So i tried my best again. I had a few more problems then last time, i planed too much and had too less time do to anything i had planed. So i got no music, and there are some other minor thing i would have changed with more time.

But in the end i am happy with my game and hope you can enjoy it. I did draw some (not so) pretty pictures with my mouse this time, please have a look

->To the game entry<-

Hello fellow indie developers!

First of all thanks to all of you who tried our game and all who will try it in the future, this has been our first Ludum Dare and the first finished game for all of us. A few weeks ago one of our programmers had to insist a lot on participating, we finally did and we couldn’t be happier with the decision.

How did it go?

So, after a long working day, all of us got together, setting up the room for the upcoming 72hours, the closer the countdown was to 0, the more nervous we felt. After the topic was announced we spent about two hours deciding what to do, good and bad ideas, in or out of the topic, they all seemed too hard for us. It was already 4am and we headed home feeling our own defeat. Next morning (9:30am) we came out with a rough idea, spent about an hour figuring out the mechanics and what had to be done… but not deeply enough.

The first few hours of coding went well (we have 2 programmers in the team), the so called “pair-programming” was working wonders as they both connected as a true hive mind, at least while it lasted. Everything started to rumble after a few hours, as everyone worked from their computer, we then realized that the preproduction on the programming side wasn’t enough, so the “spaghetti” became the true monster of our game. No version control was used, and so, as soon as both codes were put together half of it had to be reorganized to fit the other half.

When it comes to graphics, we really messed up on the aspect ratio. It was all designed keeping in mind that it should be usable on mobile devices (for the future) and computers, so we ended up making it 1:1. Obviously this isn’t the answer for any of both platforms, provably the solution would be to draw everything separately and to put it all together with a relatively large background (wouldn’t it be?). Also, with better managing of time, we would have done more animations and a better hit reaction for the “victim”.

The sound design went alright, everything but the alarm noise and the “tic-tac” on the song was made by us. The main song came out quite quickly, which is nice. But we lacked on testing the sounds straight in the game, we waited until a whole bunch of them were ready and polished only to realize that they didn’t fit.

GOOD:

– Ludum dare in general, we had fun, we all survived, it’s something yeeeey!

– General idea of the game, simple, easy to make (+1for preproduction).

– The fun factor and sense of humour turned to be the main factor.

– There’s not much on the game, but what’s there, is solid and works fine (at least for what we have seen)

– We are very happy with the result, even with all the bad stuff I’m about to write below…

BAD:

– No version control was used for programming.

– Tutorial needs to be more comprehensive as some testers ends up spamming the mouse button as well as the space bar to raise the bar (the space bar can be spammed, but only has an effect once the bar gets to the target zone).

– Preproduction for programming was far from enough (-1 for preproduction)

– The drawn scene screen (canvas) ratio was horrible (-1 for preproduction)

– Ended up making more music and sounds that what we finally implemented (-1 for preproduction)

– We should have prepared all our food the day before… ehem… les pizza next time ehem…

– Well skill and speed will improve eventually, won’t they? :C

…

Preproduction result: -3     ->HORRIBLU!

NEW VERSION 1.1.0 comme 14.9.2015

http://gamejolt.com/games/monsters-card-game/88439

• 20 NEW cards
• 4 NEW cards functions
• 1 NEW card (Artifacts)
• SHOP
• 12 repainted cards
• SLIZZIGNOT (new currency)
• 1 NEW oponent
• displaying ATTACK and DEFENCE
• SAVE/LOAD

Tags: card games, monsters

Hey,

my game is nearly at 50 votes and I would love it if it could reach that milestone.

You can play it here!

Thank you!

Hello to everyone reading this!
This was a fun contest and my first time participating ( I heard of it 1 Month ago and instantly decided to take part in it!).
This also is one of my first finished games and the first one someone really played!

Unnecessary Informations

So I decided to take part in it, but I didn’t want to try it alone because I wasn’t sure if I could finish something in time
so I asked a friend of mine if he wanted to participate with me in the jam
But he had a power cut so he wasn’t able to take part.
After being hyped so much I thought , why not take part in the contest but alone 😀

The contest happened 3am saturday in the holidays for me so I waited till that time with someone else.
After seeing the theme and being confused I decided to play a Counter Strike match and brainstorm while doing so
I thought about one word: CHICKENS!

And while watching a stream I finished the last of it.
The only thing worth meaning was the fact that I almost forgot to add a boss and added it in the last 1h

The Game itself

The idea of the game was basic: You play a fox who is hunting chickens and later gets the ability to steal the enemy’s skills.
I already had a basic engine written so I decided to go with it which lead to a rather slow paced fighting.
I don’t think it was too bad but at least on some points plain boring. Adding dialogs was rather hard for me because I never did that before but I guess it went ok.
While making the art for the game I followed the design of another game assets I made so picking colors and so on wasn’t too hard and I was able to get quick results.
Music was the hardest part for me. I just copied another thing I made earlier and altered it and changing the speed of it in different levels.
Sounds were made with a generator so it didn’t take too much time. Programming was the easiest part on my side because I’m quite fast at writing such stuff but
because a game isn’t just some complicated features I had quite a hard time making something “fun”.
Porting was something new to me. I never had a need to be able to run my Programms/Games on Linux/MacOS so making it compatible was a complete new thing for me but having it work on
almost every system is something nice to say about a java application 😀

Conclusion

What went right:
– Finishing a game
– Making Graphics for my game
– Having enough levels
– Having fun making it

What went wrong:
– Too slow paced fighting
– Not enough instructions and explanations
– Linux and Mac OS compatible (fixed later)

Well I don’t think I did too good but I had a real good time making this!
Also I never had so much feedback for something I made!
And I had much fun playing games others made 😀

I hope I’ll get time to participate next time as well! 😀

So thanks to everyone who read this post, played my games ( especially everyone who commented) and everyone who made a game I played 😀
Oh and I hope you don’t mind my bad english ^^

If someone wants to play it:

Click here

New forum – Game Dev Team Finder – Find teams and people for your teams. http://gamedevteamfinder.haymanquarterly.com 

It’s a brand new forum, so there are no listings yet.  Just trying to spread the word and provide a helpful service to the game dev community.

Alright, it’s about time I wrote a post mortem. It’s my second (successful) ludum dare, and although I had to skip the compo and go for the jam, I’m really happy with the results.

‘Artifacts Of Monstrosity’ is a top down zelda style action-rpg / shoot em up (I guess), with a big world to explore and a stupid boss to defeat after collecting 4 mostly useless items.

SOME THINGS THAT WENT RIGHT

Code Reuse:

I had already been messing around porting my LD28 game from C++ to Javascript, so I just borrowed code from that as needed. It was pretty tightly coupled to the other game, and I ended up needing to rewrite a lot of stuff, but it still saved me a ton of time.

Graphics And Animation:

I’m kind of surprised with how well the animation came out for the main character. I guess all those pixel art tutorials I read sunk in somehow. As nice as everything looks though, I’m thinking of adopting a simpler style for future dares, to have more time to spend on gameplay.

Level Design:

I used Tiled for my level editing, which has its annoyances but overall was infinitely nicer than what I did for my last LD game, which was png images with colors keyed to tiles and objects.

With the extra time from choosing to go for the jam, I went nuts making whole bunch of interesting areas to explore, helping create a sense of adventure.

Simple Gameplay:

My original ideas were over-ambitious: I wanted inventory menus, equippable gear, shops, minibosses, etc. and I had to cut it all. The end game is really simple, but still fun, I think.

Ludum dare helps you realize games don’t need a lot of ‘stuff’ as long as the fundamentals are right

THINGS THAT WENT NOT SO RIGHT

Motivation:

I was way more motivated for my first LD, which was good because I did all the engine code from scratch on that one. This time I used an existing codebase, but I ended up losing most of the time gained due to a lazier pace and procrastination.  On the other hand rushing the whole time sucks, so maybe it’s better to be prepared and avoid the need to work frantically.

Tedious Code Writing:

Even drawing from an existing codebase, I still ended up needing to write collision handlers and resources management scripts, etc. I need to put this stuff together into a complete, flexible engine.

Too Much Unfinished Stuff:

I didn’t prioritize well enough, so a lot of things were missed — no sound for one, but I also left a lot of signs and npc’s around that don’t do anything when clicked on and that bugs the crap out of me.

THINGS THAT IM NOT SURE ABOUT

Tiled:

Tiled is a pretty fantastic editor in a lot of ways, and lets you build maps fast, but it also has some annoying aspects. I had kind of a weird workflow and ended up writing a bunch of ruby scripts to process Tiled’s output.

Javascript:

Javascript is really awesome despite it’s quirks, and I love that the programs I write can run anywhere. But I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with dynamic typing. Every time I spend 20 minutes debugging some stupid typo that would have been caught at compile time in a static language I die a little inside.

POST JAM EDITION?

I’m planning on making a post jam edition when I get time.

Some things I’m planning (besides fixing stuff): music (I got some from open game art picked out), sound effects, new areas, bigger dungeons, enemy variations, a better final boss, more signs and monsters to talk to, and maybe even shops of some kind. I’ll make a post when I finish it.

In the meantime, Click here to Play ‘Artifacts Of Monstrosity’.  It runs in the browser!

When the theme was announced for this Ludum Dare, Britt and I were less than impressed.  It seemed generic and not to really allow for interesting theme-based gameplay, only narrative and setting.

A lot of people have been commenting that they didn’t get how our game, Wayward, fit into the theme–either because they didn’t complete the game, or that it was intentionally pretty subtle.  Our sighs of despair at the announcement of the theme were that of understanding what would come of it: a list for which I took the time to write on a whiteboard with a caption “DON’T DO THESE, THEY’RE TOO OBVIOUS.”

The list of obvious choices and what not to do (for us!) for this jam:

1. Pull the rug out from under the player at the end and shout in their faces “YOU WERE THE MONSTER ALL ALONG!!!”
2. “Goomba Simulator”, or, adopting the opposite role of the typical protagonist.
3. Kaiju

What this meant for us was that we had to come up with an interesting and virtually impossible narrative and setting for a hard as nails theme.  We didn’t want to be obvious, we wanted to be clever.  The first idea, in this regard, was a monster truck arena game called You are the Monster(truck).  More and more ideas that seemed more punny than anything (including, I fuck you not, playing as Monster Energy drink pouring into somebodies body), but we couldn’t resolve on anything.

We landed on the idea that we would make the player, not the main character, the monster.

Ethics and moral questioning aside, Wayward is a game about finding and killing the monster that stole the babies from your village.  A trail of what we can assume are said babies’ blood leads the way, and you explore the Wintery wonderland we set up, fighting other monsters along the way.

One thing I did to push the theme along the course of the adventure (before the climax) was to make fighting the monsters completely optional if you were to study your surroundings.  The minor monsters in the game are territorial and only spawn if you get very close to a checkpoint-campfire.  Some players have realized this, but naturally, in a game where you have a bow, you feel inclined to aggro the enemy anyway and take them out.

After a few encounters, skipped or not, you finally reach the end of the blood trail.  Here is where I wanted to avoid the “HAHA GOTCHA, YOU WERE THE MONSTER!”  Instead of killing the mother and having a bunch of babies pop out from the brush and wimper and make you feel bad about what you just unknowingly did, I have the mother and the cubs shown in plain site around a pool of blood.  No more baby.  The aggro range is very small for this, and you cannot aggro simply by shooting the mother.  At this point, a player wary of the theme will or will not come to understand.

A moral side note on monsters:

The entire story and question of “Who is the Monster?” can be realized at this point.  The Beast is the monster in the main character’s eyes for eating the babies.  From the beast’s perspective, there are no other animals in the game, so it was killing out of the necessity to feed its young.  The main character is the Monster from the perspective of the Beast, and depending on her moral standing, also the Player.

Which leads to the actualization of the theme.  Objectively, if the Player of the game finishes the deed, she is the Monster.  My favorite comment on the game yet was “It was very beautiful, but I’m sad you made me kill the mother at the end.”

I didn’t make you do anything.  The only way to not be the Monster is to not finish the game and just turn it off.

-C

In the midst of the jam, our fearless artist Harris Nakajima composed 8 incredible tracks. Using Musescore, Harris put together some sound that our graphics can only hope to compare to.

Bright Darkness

Aside from providing a rough sketch of the last level, Harris wrote music for the entire jam.

Sky without Stars

Resulting from the staggering 273 MB of .wav files was an addition to Tenebrous Expanse that helped solidify our mood, and thus overall feel. There is no doubt that Harris’s efforts will sway the final scores of our entry.

Droplet of Light

After some “polishing” (although personally I found very few flaws in the original music), the updated tracks were uploaded in our post-jam version as well as soundcloud.

If you have time, go check out Tenebrous Expanse (ten·e·brous ex·panse) and let us know what you think of the audio. We hope the visual effects mesh nicely with the tone, and ultimately result in a more coherent mood. You can also read more about the development of TE here.

Our group is going to make a final push towards 100% coolness this weekend, if you leave a comment we might just have to return the favor!

– WubAlliance

Greetings! I hope by now you have all had the pleasure (or misfortune) to play my LD33 entry: “Trump 3016“. The game stars Donald David Trump as he strives to reach Saturn in time after losing the Pluto debate to the cyborg-enhanced Hillary…. you know what, let’s try this again:

It’s a Trump-themed RPG Roguelike! (Dare I say… the only Trump-themed RPG Roguelike!)

The Good

• I started with a simple Ruby script I had written to generate random dungeons. This was a helpful jump-start (which relegated me to the Jam, but that’s fine).
• I really love the feel of exploring the random floors. This is what I’m most proud of.
• Comments from my last 2 entries indicated people liked my humor and storytelling best (graphics and audio least). So I focused on that.
• There is an absolute abundance of Trump out there. The story basically wrote itself.

The Bad

• The battle system is woefully unbalanced. The game is unplayable past level 10.
• I didn’t count on having pacing issues; 72 hours is a lot harder than 48! Props to all you Jammers.
• RPG Maker has its own host of problems. I totally understand if you are allergic to RTP (but at least watch the intro!)

The Ugly

• I lost a lot of time tracking down assets. It’s easier when I can just draw something (terrible) and be done with it.
• This game might become a whole lot less funny in 2016. Sorry in advance!

Some other cool things about the game:

• If you talk to the suited NPC near the doors, you can get a “Fabric of Reality” early  —this lets you enter the random seed for the next level, which will consistently generate the same level each time. Try entering your name, or any random information. Maybe you’ll spawn a cool layout.
• It is cross-platform, which is no small feat for RPG Maker games.
• It exists! We now live in a world where a Trump-themed RPG Roguelike exists! Huzzah, and you’re welcome!

If I were to do this again, I’d enlist someone else to do the battle balancing, or I’d streamline combat to focus on HP, Attack, and Defense (and Ikari).

I had a lot of fun making this game, although my next LD probably won’t use RPG Maker.

The game I worked is called Corruption and was submitted under a group account we made called MapleQuest (an inside joke). I’m a bit late in writing this but did want to get it out before the LD came to a close. The delay away has given me some time to reflect on it as well. We met on Reddit just a few days before the jam with the intention of entering something into LD33. It was everyone’s first jam and we were all pretty motivated to make something.

It started well, but in my opinion quickly fell apart.

We had some ideas which looking back on now may have been a bit overly ambitious. Our original intention was to take the theme of “You are the Monster” and make a game based on the concept of “Are you the Monster?”, a platformer where you would go through the game and be given the moral choice of destroying stuff around you to gain power, or ‘doing the right thing’ by leaving it be. The idea didn’t turn out to work as expected and we started re-iterating on the idea… and re-iterating… and re-iterating… throughout the whole jam. As a group we had a hard time coming to any sort of agreement on what mechanics worked, what didn’t, and what it takes to make a fun game.

The end result is something that uses the art and sound assets from our previous ideas and tries to put some new game around them. The conclusion to go with the mechanics in the final game were chosen within the last 6 hours before the deadline and the end result is an idea that isn’t really fleshed out as well as it could be. If this game has one fatal flaw, it’s that the mechanics aren’t clearly demonstrated to the player early on. There’s also a lot of new stuff happening you don’t really see happening in a platformer which means it’s not as instantly intuitive and can cause confusion:

• the aggro range of the shadow expands over time
• the shadow corrupts creatures into enemies
• killing enemies ups your corruption meter in the top right and lowers the shadow’s aggression
• if your corruption meter fills completely you get hurt

The end result is something that technically works but doesn’t really add any additional fun or strategy to the game. The systems feel more like an arbitrary constraint than something new you can use to your advantage.

I’m still quite new to game development and it’s the first platformer I made that wasn’t a quick (made in less than an hour) prototype. Something I didn’t realize before being in the designer seat (as opposed to the player seat) is how hard it is add the subtleties to a platformer that make it “feel good”. As a few of the comments mentioned, having the player move whenever they attack can be very frustrating and adds a lot of difficulty (as opposed to challenge). Having a stationary attack in addition to the dashing attack could have helped a lot. Making the attack feel a bit weightier, like slowing down the player when they collide with an enemy, and not having the enemy instantly vanish and instead recoil from the attack, would have helped a lot to make the dash not feel as wild.

The Good:

• The quantity of art assets and animations our single artist was able to put out in the small time frame was impressive.
• The sound is great. The way the sound can add so much life to a world is something I always seem to underestimate until I hear it.
• I’m happy with the particle and WebGL effects on the shadow creature and checkpoints. They’re not something I’d really implemented much before and worked out better than expected.
• The incredibly amount of work the three of us did in the last 6 hours before the deadline. Once the mechanics were set in stone and we had all committed to them, it seemed like everyone got into this hyper-productive zen like state and just started pumping out work fast.
• The level’s flow. There wasn’t a lot of time to get others to playtest the level. For a first go at things I think it flows well and does a good job of making the direction you need to go clear without too many markers. I think the checkpoints are spaced out well between the action (for the most part) to make a decent rhythm, with high and low points.

The Bad:

• Too complicated an idea to start, and too much wasted time on new ideas that didn’t work.
• Inability to come to an agreement on what would be “good” (a bit of analysis paralysis).
• Failure to demonstrate or show the player the new mechanics in a clear, intuitive way.
• The level’s design (tying in to the last point, where it doesn’t utilize the mechanics well).
• The lack of a good “platformer feel” for the game.
• Having art assets that were really specific made adding new things to correct the game’s flaws near the end more difficult (this isn’t in any way a fault of the artist, so much as the overall planning for the game).

A lot of the bad comes down to just not having a fun idea and having too much conflict on what would work. When I look at the body of work for the three of us have done individually I’m confident we could have made something better than this in a different situation. Everyone in our group was really critical of their own pieces near the end; Larissa was making comments about how the perspective of certain assets were off (I didn’t notice, but I don’t have an eye for that stuff); Mat was sending updated and improved sounds even a bit into the submission hour (while the new ones were better, the old ones were certainly adequate); I was pretty pessimistic about most of the design choices by the end, and trying my best to fix what I could into something playable.

I suppose it’s natural for everyone to be hyper-critical of their own work. On the one hand it feels like a failure; the game isn’t very fun and doesn’t come close to meeting the potential the group had to make a good game. On the other hand, with all the issues we faced in it’s creation we did still did come out with a finished game which does feel at least a little satisfying. If nothing else I learned a lot more about game design and have a few new tricks in my game-making toolbelt.

The high score board is filling up for MiniGolf Endless MMO so I thought I’d share 3 tips to help you come in under par!

1. Understand the power meter
When you swipe your finger back (angry-birds style) the line extending from your ball indicates how hard the ball will be hit. The maximum power available depends on where your ball is laying on the ground. At the top end you have the first tee-shot, here the power bar is red-coloured to indicate maximum power – let it fly! On the other hand, if your ball is in the rough or worse, a bunker, you’ll only be able to hit a short shot. Keep on the fairway to keep your score down!

2. Read the greens
First things first, the ball will only drop in the hole once it has landed and is rolling! The second thing to realise is that it must be going below a certain speed to drop in the hole (just like real golf – I speak from bitter experience!). So you can’t just blast your ball across the green at full power and hope for the best, you have to observe the gradients indicated by the long arrows (steep slope) and short arrows (shallow slope) to judge where your ball will come to rest. Then give it a little “tap-tap-eroo” as Chubbs would say 😉

3. Keep an eye on the wind
The wind is shown by the rotating arrow upper left on screen and the mph display. A speed above 5 will really affect all shots, though the longer the shot the bigger the deviation. Balls are only affected while in the air so after the bounce it’ll run on in a straight line from there. Something else to bear in mind is the wind changes randomly between shots, but it’s the same for all players so it’s “fair” in that sense.

I hope you found these tips useful and fun! I’d love to hear your thoughts on the game! Cheers 😀

PLAY AND RATE HERE

Howdy Gamers!
This may not be the best time whilst LD #33 is finishing up but I would like to announce an early release of my game. This is my first popular title Mine Upgrade! Spend cash on equipment and upgrades to build up your mine as you power through precious minerals. Stack up cash and head up to the highscores!

You may also like to try out the first release of Beta here. Thankyou and enjoy
Edit: Many updates later..

Infinity dash was a project from a couple of years ago for a mini LD, which I never got round to posting due to the excessive amount of glitches, however now I have finally decided to remake the game for a mobile platform.

The aim is to run for as long as possible and pick up bonuses along the way. Unfortunately at the moment it is only available on the Google play store, but with more support I could release to windows and possibly IOS (it is already available on the Amazon app store as well).

Here is the link to the app and some screenshots(ratings and reviews would be greatly appreciated):https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.JosephGilesCooper.InfinityDash

http://joseaper.itch.io/infinity-dash

if(worst comes to worst just search for it on the store and look for this image)

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Also check out my LD33 Game “You are a Zombie?”

Hey, we just finished the post-Jam version of our LD33 entry.

Link to the Post-Jam :

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5143153/LD33PostCompo1-0/index.html

We added a proper menu and a in-game tutorial. Polished some arts and added sound effects. There is just three levels, but we are happy with the results.

Link to our entry:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=15108

The future

We hope to make something of this game, more levels, story, and other stuff. For now we will just wait to see what to do next. See you until the next Ludum Dare!

Heroes better know what’s coming when they get you down to low HP – complete annihilation!

Click Here to play Player Rush!

Oh, and don’t forget to tweet us your game if you’re still looking for people to play + rate!

Just remember. If you fire the entire United States, be sure you have a sure fire escape plan. -> [Escape from Twump Tower] by 01010111

Tags: by 01010111, Donald Trump Parody, Escape from Twump Tower, Larry Chupacabra, Larry Does Ludum, LD33

Hi!

As an wannabe artist/animator :s i think games can be a very powerfull form of art and i am really interested in creating strong moods and graphics  for those universes .
I think graphics a long with the sound can create a really powerfull environment for a story to evolve and  create a strong and visually appealing gameplay experience for the player. Despite all that, i only focused on visual graphics to do my Top 5  not on the congregating of the graphics,  sound and strotytelling.

Hope you like them and fell free to play them and see this awesome games 

5- Mobs, Inc.

   4- Nimble

3- The Mammoth: A Cave Painting

2- Adula

1- The Old One

We are the creators of the game called Me . Feel free to check it out

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

Here is our selection of the best entries we could try during theses last weeks.
So, have fun !

Great gameplays

Gh4st
A great puzzle-game with excellent mechanics ! Unfortunately a little to short.

Mobs, inc.
Almost everything is perfect in this game !

Orange
Really nice mechanics but where is the theme ?

Who cares the M%rtgage
Simple but with a really addictive gameplay !

Delicious Cortex
Very impressive new kind of gameplay !

Takodemon
100% Innovation !

RGBlob
Great puzzle game with blobs and colors.

Funniest games

Monstre de Coiffure
Non-stop funny ambiance. A great LOL game !

Internship adventure
Ok, it’s our game, but, yes, it’s really funny ^^.

Monster Academy
Do you like Warioware ? So be a good monster !

Goomba Simulator 2015
Great story around a goomba. What will happed to him?

Artistic games

DAMNED
Great ambiance and artistic direction

Melody Muncher
Tis is a rythme game, so, of course, the music is great !

Hop’s Hope
Really nice ambiance with a day/night cycle.

The Bear Hunter
Do you like Zelda 3 ? You’ll love graphics of this game !

Meet the Monsta
Graphics design is so great !

Me
Great ambiance with interesting graphics.

Anxiety : Last Night
Maybe the most scary game of this LD33 !

Tags: best games, favorite games, selection