I loved way more than three games. Out of the ~30 I played, I think I absolutely adore closer to 10 of them. So I’ve decided to share them in clumps around a theme. First I’d like to draw attention to entries by developers who I’ve followed for a while: people who’ve made amazing games in the past and who are just really consistent.

Tangram Games (Simon Larsen and Lukas Erritsø), the team that brought us the absolutely fabulous Dream Witch Erika, is back again me with a ton of laughs and fun challenges this time around in Trick Parade! They are joined by collaborator Hernan Zhou, who also worked with them on the excellent N.O.D.E. for LD32. Trick Parade feels like a mash-up of WarioWare and Earth Bound, in the sense that it provides a bunch of weird mini-games in a light-hearted (but scary) contemporary JRPG setting. Definitely check it out!

Alvivar (Andrés Villalobos) has a captivating and consistent minimalist style that runs through their work. I was really impressed by Drybreed, their entry in the 32nd LD. While their LD33 entry, Primer, doesn’t have the same degree of depth, it does not lack polish. The mood and game feel are interesting and compelling, and I can’t wait to see what comes out of it. Play it if you haven’t!

Deepnight (Sébastien Bénard) has been made a game every LD since LD19. The games follow a tight visual thread, though the themes and gameplay style vary greatly. I was particularly impressed by Chipset-0, which came out of LD30 and just really blew my mind. Deepnight’s current offering is Delicious Cortex, a hilarious ironic and simple yet absorbing mix of RTS and puzzle. The levels remind me a little of the early levels in Starcraft’s story-mode, in which a smaller force must carefully eat away at ( in this case literally) a more powerful foe. Play this game, OK!?

There it is, my Ludum Darlings. Lots of love and keep making amazing things!

Expect part 2 sometime tomorrow!

— Ziggy (the Z in ZNCatLaw)

(check out part 2)

Hey everyone! If you could take a look at my entry, Hymn of the Sages, I’d truly appreciate it. With the judging period ending soon, I thought it’d be a good time to see if anyone was interested in giving feedback for my game. Also, when the judging period ends I will try to publish my post jam version.

Thanks!

Hi there!  DDRKirby(ISQ) here with my =10th= LD entry (wow!), Melody Muncher!

Link to play and rate: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=7285

This one was a blast to make, and I ended up working for 2 weeks to make the Post Compo version (out now!), adding a new mechanic, animated backgrounds for each level, more songs, 3 separate difficulties, and more!

When the theme was announced this time as “You Are the Monster” I was actually quite disappointed, just due to the fact that it was so similar to “You Are the Villain”!  I mean come on guys, really?  But now that I think of it, You Are the Villain was EIGHT LDs ago, so I guess I can’t fault people too much for it.  I wonder if anyone decided to redo the same game concept that they did for LD25?  It would be an interesting challenge, just to see how far your game jam skills have come over the past years…

Anyways, despite my initial dislike for the theme, my idea and game came together really smoothly this time; I can’t even remember running into any hiccups at all!  As always, let’s go over what went well and what didn’t go well.

What went well:

Avoiding other commitments during LD weekend
Almost every other LD I’ve done, I’ve had =something= else to attend to over the course of the jam, usually on Friday night.  Usually I tell myself that it’s fine and that I can just try to brainstorm in my head while that happens, but to be honest, that never quite works out and it’s basically like I start off behind by 4 hours already.  This time I decided that I really was just going to dedicate the whole weekend to LD and besides some driving here and there and dealing with meals (gotta eat!), I was just heads down working the whole time, which was GREAT!  An exhausting weekend, for sure, but I don’t think there’s any way around that.  For Sunday, after breakfast and running a quick errand in the morning, I pretty much worked straight through the entire day until the deadline…I stopped twice for the bathroom, once for refilling water, and once for a massive yawn/stretch…that’s it.  Hahaha, you other LDers will know what I’m talking about…Sunday is usually that day when it’s like “omg I have 5 hours left and I still have to add in 2 more enemy types, also my game has no menu, title, or tutorial and I haven’t tested the difficulty at all AHHHHHH”.

Game concept and execution
As mentioned earlier, everything came together really smoothly for Melody Muncher, without a hitch, really!  I spent Friday night doing my usual brainstorming routine, and considered plenty of other possibilities, but the idea of having the piranha plant munching guys as a rhythm game occurred to me pretty early on, and it clearly had the most potential while also playing to my strengths, so I went for it.  Huge success!

Level data layout
One of the reasons I was able to cram in six (!) full songs to the 48hr version of Melody Muncher was because I made sure the levels were really easy to program in.  Unfortunately this was NOT the case for my previous game of this genre, Ripple Runner.

Here’s what a level definition looks like in Ripple Runner:

// Section 1
 addPlatform(startTime + -10.0 / bps, startTime + 36.0 / bps, -40, timingWindow, level);
 addPlatform(startTime + -10.0 / bps, startTime + 36.0 / bps, 40, timingWindow, level);
 addPlatform(startTime + 37.0 / bps, startTime + 44.0 / bps, -40, timingWindow, level);
 addPlatform(startTime + 37.0 / bps, startTime + 44.0 / bps, 40, timingWindow, level);
 addPlatform(startTime + 45.0 / bps, startTime + 52.0 / bps, -40, timingWindow, level);
 addPlatform(startTime + 45.0 / bps, startTime + 52.0 / bps, 40, timingWindow, level);
 addPlatform(startTime + 53.0 / bps, startTime + 60.0 / bps, -40, timingWindow, level);
 addPlatform(startTime + 53.0 / bps, startTime + 60.0 / bps, 40, timingWindow, level);
 addPlatform(startTime + 61.0 / bps, startTime + 62.0 / bps, -45, timingWindow, level);
 addPlatform(startTime + 61.0 / bps, startTime + 62.0 / bps, 45, timingWindow, level);
 addPlatform(startTime + 63.0 / bps, startTime + 80.0 / bps, -40, timingWindow, level, true);
 addPlatform(startTime + 63.0 / bps, startTime + 80.0 / bps, 40, timingWindow, level, true);
 GameWorld.world().add(new Checkpoint(startTime + 64.0 / bps, -40));
 ...
 // Section 2
 addPlatform(startTime + 80.0 / bps, startTime + 100.0 / bps, -40, timingWindow, level);
 addPlatform(startTime + 80.0 / bps, startTime + 108.0 / bps, 40, timingWindow, level);
 addPlatform(startTime + 108.0 / bps, startTime + 116.0 / bps, -40, timingWindow, level);
 addPlatform(startTime + 116.0 / bps, startTime + 120.0 / bps, 40, timingWindow, level);
 addPlatform(startTime + 120.0 / bps, startTime + 124.0 / bps, -40, timingWindow, level);
 addPlatform(startTime + 124.0 / bps, startTime + 126.0 / bps, 40, timingWindow, level);
 addPlatform(startTime + 126.0 / bps, startTime + 128.0 / bps, -40, timingWindow, level, true);
 ...
 ...
 ...

And so on and so forth.  And that’s only the =first half= of the EASIEST level.  Yuck!  Unfortunately I was super duper hacky while coding up Ripple Runner so the way that I constructed the levels was actually just by placing each platform individually.  This involved tons of hacks, especially trying to deal with assymmetrical timing windows which varied according to which kind of obstacle you were using (spikes, rippling, jumping), and a bug that prevented me from creating single platforms that were too long….etc etc.

Thankfully I didn’t repeat the same mistake this time.  Here’s what a level looks like in Melody Muncher:

result.SfxName = "sfx/level3";
 result.BeatDivision = 2;
 result.BeatPixelLength = 80;
 result.Left =
 "........ ........ ........ ........" +

"1.....1. 1....... 1....... 1...1..." + "1....... 1....... 1.....2. 1...1..." +
 "1.1..... 1...1.1. 1....... ........" + "1...1.1. 1.1..... 1....... ........" +
 "1.1..... 1...1.1. 1.1.2.1. ........" + "1...1.1. 1.1..... ........ 1.1.2.1." +
 "1....... 1....... 1.....1. 1...1..." + "1.....2. 1....... 1....... 1...1..." +

"........";
 result.Right =
 "........ ........ ........ ........" +

"1....... 1....... 1.....1. 1...1..." + "1.....2. 1....... 1....... 1...1..." +
 "1...1.1. 1.1..... 1....... ........" + "1.1..... 1...1.1. 1....... ........" +
 "1...1.1. 1.1..... ........ 1.1.2.1." + "1.1..... 1...1.1. 1.1.2.1. ........" +
 "1.....1. 1....... 1....... 1...1..." + "1....... 1....... 1.....2. 1...1..." +

"........";

Much better!  Here I’m using “1” to indicate a green enemy, “2” for a red enemy, and “3” for blue enemies (which don’t appear in this particular level).  I ended up using “[” and “]” to denote the yellow centipede enemies in the post-compo version.  The periods just indicate points where there are no enemies, and spaces get automatically ignored.  It’s still perhaps not 100% ideal as I still had to build up separate strings for the left and right sides of the screen, but overall inputting notes for songs went pretty quickly.

Coding it the Right Way
So, again, for Ripple Runner I used a bunch of stupid hacky coding, and as a result, even though your X position in Ripple Runner is locked to the position of the song (good!), your jump height and y position is not (bad!)–it’s actually just normal platformer gravity.  This led to some pretty clumsy manual hacking about to get the gravity to be correct for each level (it needs to be adjusted for each BPM setting!), and in general just led to sad times within the code.  The end result still ended up just fine, but…

When it came to program Melody Muncher, I had learned my lesson, so I made sure to do everything right.  The position of all of the enemies is dictated solely by the position of the music, and there are NO collision boxes or movement physics or anything!  Each enemy knows what beat it should be hit on, and the enemies on either side are kept in an Array, sorted by order of arrival.  When you press left or right, we run through the first part of the Array looking for enemies whose beat is within the defined timing window–no collisions or any other nonsense needed!  Very clean, very sensible, and the code was much better and simpler as a result.

Post-Compo Version
This might not technically count as something that “went well for LD”, but this was the most fun I’ve ever had working on a Post-Compo version of a game I’ve made.  Probably because of the above two factors, and also because I knew I had something with a lot of potential.  Making new songs and mechanics was a blast, and even though it took a lot of work to add all of the new features in the Post-Compo version, I’m super happy with how it turned out, and I believe this is my most polished game ever as a result.

What didn’t go so well:

Input Delay and Lag Calibration
Okay…so this was mostly a stupid mistake.  So one of the mechanics in the game is that after a few levels, enemies can come at you simultaneously from both sides, so you have to press Left and Right at the same time to do a split munch.  Simple enough, right?

Well, on the coding side, I implemented this by having a separate animation — one where Ms. Melody has two heads that are each attacking.  (As it turns out, while working on the Post-Compo version I had to redo this and just implement each head separately to allow for the yellow long centipede enemies to work)  I then also decided that because people probably weren’t always going to hit left and right at exactly the same time, what I would do is this:

When you first hit left or right, the plant transitions into a “getting ready to attack” state (with a different animation frame) and waits for a frame or two, during which you have the opportunity to input the other direction.  Once the frame or two is up, the attack actually happens.  So this was good because even if you hit left on frame #1 and right on frame #2, you still get the split munch on both sides.

The problem is that by doing this, I essentially delayed every input (as well as the resulting “munch” sound) by something like 17 or 33ms.  Now, that may not seem like much, but in a rhythm game where your actions need to be really tightly synced, you can really notice, and people did.  Add that to the fact that my default lag calibration for Flash builds was slightly off (I had to shift it by maybe ~50ms compared to native builds) and people definitely felt that their inputs were delayed.  Now, part of this was that I simply didn’t have enough time to program in a robust and user-friendly lag calibration setting (it’s much better in the post-compo version!), but most of this was just my own fault for adding additional input delay unnecessarily.

The good news is that the post-compo version fixes this entirely, and if you compare the two the post-compo version should feel MUCH better.

Missing was too punishing
In the original 48hr version of the game, if you try to attack when no enemy is on the corresponding side, Ms. Melody does this ugly faceplant animation which leaves you stunned for a half beat or so.  This was designed intentionally as a means of punishing you for trying to attack when there was no enemy, as well as to eliminate the cheesy strategy of just trying to munch on both sides on every single eighth-note beat.  If you didn’t have the recovery animation, you’d just be able to do that and get a perfect score, which was obviously no good.  I had been trying to think of various ways to solve that issue, and after trying it, this seemed like a clean solution, as well as making it very unrewarding to miss notes, which is what I wanted — it should feel good when you hit enemies, and bad when you miss enemies.

Well, the problem is that players don’t like feeling bad.  One of the complaints that I got was that the recovery time for missing was too long and it led to people feeling like the game was “unfair” (ugh, loaded term).  Now, if you’re used to rhythm games, you probably didn’t mind this as much, but if you’re not a rhythm gamer, what happens is that you miss one enemy, then because of that your input for the second enemy doesn’t register (since you’re still in recovery), which throws you off and then you end up missing again ……, in the end that’s a situation that just doesn’t really feel good.  So lesson learned — reward your players for succeeding, but don’t punish them for failing.

The solution in the post-compo version was to eliminate the recovery delay and just add in a proper scoring system that adds points to your score based on your current chain, a la Guitar Hero.  Now I no longer need the recovery delay because if you try to use the strategy where you attack both sides on every eighth note, you’ll keep on breaking your chain over and over again, leading to a poor score.  Problem solved!  But unfortunately, I just didn’t have time to get the more fancy scoring system and everything done in the 48hr version.

No Shovel Knight
Okay, so this wasn’t really that big of a deal, but when I was drawing up the graphic for the red enemies I knew I wanted it to be something big, beefy, and blocky, so I went with an armored knight.  Since it was a knight, I decided to give it a sword.  I even referenced some Shovel Knight images as I was drawing it up….but for SOME reason I missed the golden opportunity to just have my Red Knights carry shovels and be “shovel knights”.  Which would have made perfect sense (they’re trying to dig up Ms. Melody), AND would have been a great callout to a great game.  Biggest missed opportunity everrrrrr =(

48 Hours!!!!
Alright, I guess this isn’t really something that “went wrong”, but it still amazes me every time how quickly the 48 hours goes by, despite you wanting to cram in more and more features.  “If only I had 1 extra hour!!!”  This was apparent this time around as well; the submitted version of my 48hr entry was missing some key components that I really really wanted to get in, but I just. did. not. have. enough. time.

Specifically, better lag calibration was one item high-up on the wishlist that I didn’t end up getting to squeeze in until later.  It wouldn’t have taken long, either!

And, changing backgrounds was another real big item.  I had a hue shifting effect that I used in Ripple Runner which worked fabulously, and I really wanted to do the same thing in Melody Muncher, because without it the backgrounds feel very static, especially when the music is very energetic and has these big builds and climaxes.  Of course, it turns out that because I’m now working in Haxe and Haxepunk, I can’t just use punk.fx (flashpunk) to do an easy hue shift; in fact I still don’t know of any good way to do hue shifting in Haxe/Haxepunk without digging into low-level RGB code yourself. =(  The silver lining on that cloud is that because I wasn’t able to do easy hue shifting, I ended up making much more intricate and involved animated background effects for the post-compo version, so it all works out.

And that wraps up another post-mortem!  Results will be in very soon–good luck to everybody and remember, the real prizes are your games, not your ratings!  Be sure to take your scores with some salt; sometimes you get scores that don’t quite make that much sense.

Thanks for taking the time to read about Melody Muncher!  Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!

Tags: haXe, LD33, postmortem

Here’s a very short behind the scenes of my game.

Roughly, I spent Saturday morning brainstorming, Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning coding, and Sunday afternoon working on graphics.

Code-wise, I finally forced myself to use a framework, instead of writing a mess of jquery + lots of <div>s. I used Phaser, which was great when it did when I wanted, and frustrating when it didn’t (mostly because I learned the framework as I went, not such a great idea). I’ll try and take the time to learn more about it before next LD! (but that’s what I tell myself every time, and know I won’t).

For the graphics, I decided not to do pixel art for the first time. So I started with a pen and paper, and drew the main character of my game: Godzilla. I wanted it to be cute, to add a tiny bit of depth to the game (you’re Godzilla, you’re the monster… but are you really? maybe the humans are?)

Here’s what came out.

I then used photoshop and an old tablet to draw over my sketch.

I needed to make a walking animation, and it was my first time making any animation, so I wasn’t sure I would be able to do this. But I’m really proud of the result!

Overall, I’m very happy with my Godzilla, the rest of the graphics are a bit messy and the gameplay is so-so, but at least I finished another game and it’s always a great feeling!

Final tidbit, the title of the game comes from the song of the first stage of Sonic Adventure Time 2.

I have no witty sayings, no animated GIFs, no clever jokes, no fancy pictures, no detailed postmortem, no top 10 lists, no videos or streams, no “almost to 100”, no description, no screenshots, no memes, no “I’m already in”, no infographics, no tweets, no development screenshots, and no timelapses.

But I have one thing.

A link.

Click it.

aparently i must talk to exist in the site,well HELLO , I EXIST, and im not a bot XD, i never tried to make a game in two 2 days before i knew ludum dare, now i know thay i can work faster than i used too,tank you

Now I have the exact equality between votes received and given!

My game Something Deep received 50 votes, and I rated 50 games. It might seem to be not a high number, but together with a vote I always make a video review, like this:

So, all those who commented on my game received a video review. Also (as some of the votes were without any comments), I reviewed games which I found in my Twitter feed.

If I receive more comments within the following 31 hours I’ll do my best to screencast more videos.

For me as a developer participating in LD was a great experience, proving, how much I can do within a limited amount of time.

Also, as I’m a game reviewer at FGL, I want to say that all LD participants are welcome to use free FGL services, like Enhance, which will help you integrate ads into the mobile game without any coding, or Marketplace where you’ll be able to find a publisher for your web or mobile game.

Tags: review, video

Today is the 256th day of the year and it is celebrated as the Programmers’ day! Congratulations and best wishes to you, colleagues and friends! Let there be more great ideas and less bugs! More interesting and less routine tasks!

I continue making video reviews to LD entries:

Going to make 10 more reviews today.

We at FGL.com welcome all indie game developers – we’ll be able to find a sponsor/publisher for your web or mobile game. Also we have a great service called Enhance – you can use it to integrate ads into your mobile game without any coding.

Tags: holiday, review, video

Hello everyone!

This was our first ludum dare and we had a blast both making and playing games. I was really impressed by the diversity of the different entries and it was hard to choose which ones to feature in this post.

So here comes my 3 favorite games in no particular order :

The Monster Files

In this game you play as the detective and try to find the culprit in various investigations. As a Ace Attorney fan I immediatly loved the game. The graphics are neat and the humour in this game was very nice. The game also has unexpected twist when you discover the culprit but I won’t spoil the suprise : play it!

Werewolf Quest

A 2d platformer where you play as a Werewolf. While it seemed quite simple at first, it introduced interesting mechanics such as using the power of the moon through windows to charge power.

Mobs, Inc

Fun and polished game all round where you play as a monster who as to kill adventurers to get a promotion in its company. Everytime you get promoted you also unlock new abilities to defeat the adventurers.

(Putting the promotion gif because it’s so awesome)

I hope you will enjoy those games as much as I did!

As I mentioned before we also made a game :

Get out of my house!

In this game, you are the monster and everything could be fine until some adventurers invaded your home in order to kill you. Quick! Throw everything you can at them to kick them out! (ducks included)

—

As our first Ludum Dare entry, we were very satisfied with the end result but we will try to be a bit more ambitious for our next entries :p

Thanks for reading this post and don’t forget to play games 😀

Hi everyone! I didn’t have the time to rate as many game as I wanted, but I wanted to make a little list of the 5 games I enjoyed the most!

Here we go:

The Monster Files

An AMAZING narrative game, with a really cool story. That’s in my opinion, the best thing you can do in the P&C genre in 72h.
The puzzles are simple but quite interesting, the dialogues are cool, and the game is pretty long, with a nice twist in the gameplay!

Really, that’s a crazy work!

Melody Muncher

A rythm game. A Wonderful rythm game. Everything is perfect, gameplay, visuals, mood, soundtrack (<3) and fits perfectly well.
It has so many great design ideas,  and it has a real (but fair) challenge!

Internship Adventure

A brillant and really cool game!
Everything fits well, and I especially loved the humor and the mood the game manage to install!

DRUMSTER

Another rythm game, a bit more “classic” in the gameplay, but it has something different that makes me relaunch the game from time to time, just to beat my highscore!

Earth Was A Bad Choice

A simple concept executed amazingly well, with a good story, simple narrative, and a solid gameplay!

I have one more day to vote for more games, I hope I’ll find other gems!

Don’t forget to try our little narrative game, The Loved Ones!
And don’t hesitate to leave a comment, we really need it!

Thanks for all!

Hello guys,

hope you are having a nice Sunday. Since we are going towards of the ending I would like to publicize my game one last time hoping to get some more votes.

So if you want to have some fun and at the same time challenge yourself here is You are the star !

Hope you will have some time to play and especially comment since I am planning to expand the game!

Tags: LD #33

I’ve finally released an update for my entry for LD#33.

Looking at the feedback, most people stated that my

game was too hard! So, I’ve done some balancing, added

some music and audio and game more feedback to the
player about what’s going on.

I wish I had more time for updates, but I plan on still

tinkering with this as I have time!

Here is the Update: itch.io link

And if you haven’t played the entry version: LD#33 You are the Monster

Thanks for taking the time to play my game!

Please vote or give feedback!

Well this was our first Ludum Dare entry and first game that we have ever finished as a team, so we would really appreciate some constructive feedback as we hope to continue working on Buddies for Baldwin and port it to android. We also can’t wait take part in more Ludum Dares in the future!

Well I’ve just done a little update to my jam entry Monster Production. After reading some feedback I got some ideas to add some more elements to the game to make it a little more interesting.

It is pretty hard to play the game for the full 10 day time period in order to collect your paycheque before some tedium sets in. I also realized my apartment building was so big that some of the apartments were too far to reach at your current rate of speed.

So I added random coffee stations that reset after each day. If you find a coffee station you can have a drink of java and your speed increases for the rest of the day.

The other feature I added was your efficiency the more time you spend standing around it will drop quickly. If you allow it to drop to zero you are terminated from employment.

I also added some more interactions to give you a better sense of what is going on. When your coffee breaks occur the message coffee time appears when your monster is reset to the start point. I also added some minor little silly things just to spruce things up.

The new version is 1.0.0.3 and is available here .

I’m just gonna leave a link here http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=49267

It’s almost a day until the end and I’ve rated 100 games. I can’t do any more and it won’t get my default down anyway. so if anyone would like, play and rate my game. I appreciate constructive criticism

Tags: LD33

Phew~

It was a big time. I participated in Compo, so I have two days of video of making the game. Here’s the day 1:

Have fun!

Play the game here: Room Chaos Monster

itch.io page

Ludum Dare page

What?

Accursed Stare was my entry to the LD33 Compo. It’s a top-down 2D game where you use gravity to move stars into our very own sun.

How did it go?

But why feed stars to the sun? 

Hey everyone! As of writing there is one day left to vote on entries for LD33. I’ve had a load of fun developing my own entry, which I’ve gone into detail in a post mortem, and afterwards I’ve gone and tried out and voted on as many games as I can, which isn’t easy since I started a new job last month. So here are my five favourites so far:

Escape from Twump Tower

Honorary award for catchiest music track in a LD game, this is a very colourful game for such a topical storyline. Music is really catchy and I love the Megaman approach.

Intergalactic Love Machine

I love the dialogue and the text options, this is a really neat idea to base the theme on and the design of the monsters are really well made, fitting with the individual characters.

R-ADIUS

Very well made, I like the strategy involved in planning how to overwhelm the player ship to make it lose all its lives. I hope MrTwister expands this to give some more level and boss varieties, since I managed to beat the player after three rounds and the game just looped around.

Unsolicited

Brilliantly simple and novel concept, definitely liked the level of micromanagement you have to pull off in the later levels.

A Shadow In The Night

A very well polished puzzle platformer, with a unique jumping mechanic. Really good take on classic movie vampires with a great art style!

I’m really looking forward to the results, and see which games I’ve completely missed or had surprised me by somehow reaching the top rankings. I’m also hoping to see how well my game did, which if you are curious and wish to vote on, play it here!

Tags: compo, favorites, favourites, jam, LD33

“Rated 10/10 combovers” – The Donald’s Combover.

At last, the post-#LD33 version of Combover Monster Campaign Manager is out! This is a political-parody game about The Donald, his monster combover, and the media circus surrounding the US Presidential Elections 2016.

Play post-jam version | Play original compo version

Help The Donald with his campaign:

Don’t let these clowns win:

Look at them run after the SuperPAC money!

Turn into a giant combover monster and daze voters into becoming Undecided voters.

Play post-jam version | Play original compo version

Hello everybody!
So the day of the final vote is coming and we wanted to share our top 10 from all the game we  have tried the last two weeks. On a more personal note, it was our first Ludum Dare and we had quite a lot of fun making Free Hugs Kraken.
Of course there are many many cool games out there and well it was hard to make up our mind but we finally got our list to put up on the wall! There is definitely some gold nuggets in this ludum dare edition, good luck to you all for the votes!

Here is the list!

Youkai

Simple. Fun. Addictive. Smooth. Try this, it rocks!

Jörmungandr

You take snake on Nokia3310, add in 3D. Then put in it innovation and fun. There you go, a sympathic jam entry!

Dude, Stop

A really cool and original entry, you will go several times doing the game to feel just….MONSTRUOUS!

A Shadow In The Night

The concept is really fun, attractive and lots of fun to play. The ambiance (graphics, sound) as well is really cool!

Siren’s Serenade

Who never wanted to incarnate Ulysse’s greatest nightmare? well this game just put the history right in place!

underworld siege

A reall cool turn by turn/dungeon style game. Having your Lord to protect, you need to gather gold and create traps, doors, and minions that you can control to defend and gather resources. A cool entry!

Monster Academy

He is actually not related to cookie monster, don’t make that mistake but he is even more cruel than him. This game is refreshing and funny as hell to see your monster giggling all around. Do not try this at home!

Delicious Cortex

Who never dreamed of being the Zombie Lord? reviving an army of zombies and lead them to their destiny, which is eating brains, brains and brains again. The pixel Art is just gorgeous and the game is a pleasure to play.

Mobs, Inc.

Great graphics and a top notch animation for this entry. It wouldn’t mind if we had 100+ more level backgrounds!

Troopers’ Starship

Strong gameplay mechanics, with a charming 2D/3D style in it. It would nearly gave me the feeling of walking on the walls, just to say how much the ambiance was great!

Have fun!

Tags: LD33, screenshot

I thank all the comments, you can follow us on twitter and facebook to keep updated on the game dev log.

Entry

facebook page

Tags: 2d platform, Construct2, pixel art

Hey, folks. Looking forward to the voting results soon, but I need a few more votes to hit the mark, and I’m doing some last minute voting of my own. I wanted to do more, but I’ve been super sick the past couple weeks sadly. I’m on the mend, though so that’s a plus!

This time around I made Lairkeeper, a sort of dungeon builder / tower defense mix. Overall I think the game’s pretty decent, though I didn’t have time to implement as many spells / enemy types as I wanted. You may want to check out this short tutorial video I made as well since it’ll tell you everything you need to know to play. Hope you enjoy!

Play Here!

One day until judging ends! We just want to share the awesome music our composer made for “It’s Sunday” 

We were looking for a song that could remind us to Street Fighter, something that could encourage the players to spam the hell out of their mouse. He worked hard and finally showed up with what would be the fist version of this song… it fits like a glove :3

Have you tried our game ‘It’s Sunday’?

Pretty cool. First lets play of one of our games.

Jam Entry Link

I played around 30 games during this judging period: a modest number. It should have been easy to choose just 3 to “take the cake”, but I couldn’t do it! In light of this I’ve decided to post three top-three round-ups, grouped into rough themes. Today’s theme is “Deep Feels”, the games that best punched my heart-guts.

Separated, by rxi, established its lonely mood from every angle. The monster’s slow pace and sad eyes, its inability to speak, the lighting, drifting fireflies, and sound design all contribute to a very touching setting. The author draws special attention to the monster’s isolation by giving us an action button that is clearly the pitiful creature’s best attempt at communication… alas to everyone else it is terrifying nonsense.

Alice & August, by nic, is something like Dear Esther in its design. We are given a series of rooms to wander between, with each one bringing us a little closer to understanding our relationship to the absent other. Another very interesting choice is the lack of animation: the avatar is a still sprite, sliding through a maze. At times, however, we have to cross a long, featureless hallway and without animation to give us a sense of the passage of time we become anxious. Our anxiety — as to whether time is passing in a meaningful way at all, or whether the game has crashed — mirrors the protagonist’s anxiety after their own life spiraled out of control.

The Fifth Apartment, by Bruno Poli, Klos Cunha, and Ricardo Bess, is a strange thing indeed. If I had to give it a genre I might say point-and-click, but honestly I think that would be a mistake. It is a psychological horror that explores themes of loss, mental illness, and age. In the game we occupy the body of an old woman alone in an apartment, surrounded by her regrets (by, as the team puts it, her monsters). We are forced to wander back and forth in the apartment, day after day, watching strange alienating television to pass the time or just standing on the balcony. The game is littered with occasional flashes of something darker, eyes watching from beneath the bed, or the conspiratorial whispers heard through the pipes. The game certainly takes a page from Polanski’s The Tenant (Roman, not Lana).

These three games each impressed me, but I honestly can’t say enough about The Fifth Apartment: this is a candidate for my game of the year. It is certainly my most highly rated game of LD33, but it also goes above and beyond in terms of presentation, subject matter, lack of clear genre, and just being sophisticated. This is the kind of game.

— Ziggy (the Z in ZNCatLaw)

(check out part 1)

In Hugs you play a kind but slightly retarded monster. You really want to hug everone you see. The problem is that you are a monster and people tend to run away from you. You need to sneak up on them to be able to hug them. Unfortunately you always hug too hard and crush them. You get really sad for a moment, until you spot another human!

How to beat the game: Hug all humans… to death!

We are pleased with our result but at the same time it’s really annoying that we did not have the time to implement policemen that were supposed to try to locate and shoot the monster (you). That would have spiced up the game a lot. Another thing we wanted was some strategic sneaking and setting traps by moving furniture and such to block pathways, to be able to hug especially tricky and speedy humans.
We had a great time making Hugs and it will be very interesting to hear what you guys think of it.

GO PLAY HUGS RIGHT HERE!

Hugs & kisses

V.M.M

Well, I had one last go at this game before needing to focus on packing up to move to my new house.  I fixed a few issues and tried a few things.  The goal of the game is to claim your part of the human population for consumption.  In the case of this world in Eat Humans, the population is 7 billion.  You have to prepare the humans before consumption by hitting them with either a freezeball, fireball or sawblade.  Consuming the humans in a “Full Course” provides a score bonus.  Eating an extra human of the same type will reset the “Full Course” bonus.  I wish I had time to put a proper tutorial to play and do some other things.  Please give the POST version a try!  Please comment and rate if you have time!  Thanks! 

EAT HUMANS

In a last-ditch effort to snag some votes before time’s up, I just finished up CRUNCH!!! 1.1, which fixes some performance issues and makes gamepad controls a bit easier to work with.

Check it out here. Enjoy!

Here is the complete final list with all Twines and other hypertext games that I have found in LD33, for your playing pleasure.

Compo games

Truth be untold by Pseudavid (yours truly): http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=57036

Loch Ness by filiph: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=42061

I hunger by David Yates: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=51459

A series of totally legit events by Slashee the Cow: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=29123

On the Growth of Ludum Dare and the Selection of Themes by Crowbeak: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=16689

Mega-Normous-All-Devouring-Beast-o-Saurus-Super-Evil-Angry-Hairy-Scary-Thing (Rampage Lord of the Darketty Dark) by garygreen: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=13914

Soul ownership by lowercaserho: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=54907

You are awake by frokes: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=44142

Campaign trail OF BODIES by inurashii: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=57795

Jam games

Intelligent solutions – Helpdesk by asentientpuddle: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=57223

Don’t eat the kid by pancakecity: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=28537

A house story by Kate Kligman: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=27059

There are no monsters outside by Riadelva: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=58019

Dark entries by MechaTofuPirate: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=55204

Revolution by dacharya64: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=57413

Teratogenesis by MiloSomething: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=57439

The chocolate effect by BitwiseStudios: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=50551

You, little monster by elefantopia: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=37031

Am I a monster? by Antokolos: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=57023

Profession: Chair de poule by dunin: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=32902

Monster by Lou Byrd: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=58001

Tags: Twine

Hi!

It is now 16 hours left of the Ludum dare!

I was hoping you could swing by and take a look at our game! that would really mean the world to us, as this is our first game!

the game is about killing npc’s and avoid the cops in a maze! you move with WASD, and fire with the mouse button!

Death Maze

Thanks!

~Pag

Played The Mammoth and wished you could’ve had a happier ending? Well it is possible! TechValleyGameSpace managed to get to the end with a baby still around; watch the video at twitch:

Let’s Play The Mammoth by TechValleyGameSpace

SPOILERS! If you haven’t played yet, make sure you play it now: the game is a pretty intense story and you need to experience it for yourself.

Coming soon (after rating ends): a more polished version, including such gems as COOLDOWN ICONS!

HiVE interactive, sharing Aliensche! Bovine Metagenomics Expedition

So voting is drawing to a close, and I would like to take this chance to shamelessly invite you to play and rate my entry for LD33.

I have been hard at work on a new post-jam version of the game.
This past weekend I took Aliensche to a local playtesting event to get feedback and document reactions:

People seemed to have a lot of fun catching cows:

I am currently putting together a post mortem, and will be putting that up along with the new version of the game.

This new version will feature many improvements and fixes based on the comments I have already received, so I am looking for more feedback!

So please, if you haven’t already – Play / Rate Aliensche!

Don’t forget to leave a comment so I can work from feedback for my new version!

Thankyou! <3 from HiVE

It’s final hours counting, so I just want to say thank you for everyone. For those who played my entry game and for those who didn’t just because you all guys are the greatest community.

It was my first Ludum Dare and the first gamejam at all. I don’t have a lot of experiece in gamedev (but I freakin’ love games and really passionate about making them), but I recieved very positive feedback and it’s the great inspiration for me to move on.

I don’t think I will get somwhere near the tops here, but it wasn’t the point. The point was to make a game that would be playable and somewhat enjoyable. You know how it’s hard to make something complete and LD gave me enough motivation to make something really cool.

I wasn’t sure if I’m able to make a game from scratch in just 48 hours. Now I know for sure – I can do it.

So thank you all game lovers for making this LD.

Thank you all who rated and commented my game – you gave me a lot of inspiration to move on.

Thank you youtube (and twitch) guys who made a reviews:

Fire Gaming

Jupiter Hadley

Game Jam Weekly

LukeZaz

It’s really exciting to watch other people playing your game. Never got experience like that before!

You all guys gave me enough self confidence so I posted my game at Newgrounds and it got pretty good feedback as well. So I think I’ll make bigger game from this LD entry! =) And of course I will participate at future LDs!

And if you feel like playing my game, here is the link

With judging ending today, I’ll be able to see the results of my game, Hymn of the Sages. Shortly after judging ends, I will release my post-jam version (which is coming along well) on Game Jolt! If you haven’t rated my entry, please take time to do so here!

Here’s a preview of a post-jam cut scene:

Thanks for reading, I wish you all the best results!

Tags: post-jam

With voting drawing to a close, I finally got around to making the timelapse of my half of the development of The Monster Files. Watch in full screen for the best experience!

We’re playing as many games as possible in this last day! We’ve had some pretty great reviews on our game, so if you haven’t played it already, give it a shot!

Hello dear Ludum Darers?!

I didn’t have the time to participate in the latest Ludum Dares, but I somehow submitted an entry  to the Indie Game Maker Contest 2015.

It’s called Fantastic Flower and is a game about growing a plant as high as possible.

It features Music by Humble Exclusive Preview Resource Pack [Copyright](C) JStewart and an online highscore board.

Now I also want to release it on Android so check out my Kickstarter project here .

You can also vote for the windows version of my game here .

Thank you

Hi everyone!

Thanks for all your comments, but if you haven’t already played Sunset Monster, you can play it now.

Play Sunset Monster

Many thanks to everyone who played my entry

–

Here are my favourite games that I played this LD:

–

Some Knights Left

–

Adula

–

Micromancer

–

Dude, Stop

–

Lil’ Drake

–

Jenkaiu

–

And here is my entry: Soup

–

Well done to everyone who took part

With just over 9 hours to go, I doubt I can rate any more entries. So, I present unto y’all my list of the BEST LD entries playable on the web. Will’t please you sit and look at them?

Some Knights Left (Fun)

Combover Monster (Humour)

Electro Magnetic Purge (Overall)

The Monster Inside (Narrative)

Corruption-5 (Graphics)

Am I? (Audio)

The Walls Have Ears (Innovation)

And of course, the obligatory link to my own game – Lovers on a Park Bench

Happy playing, and may the rating system be ever in your favour.

Here’s a timelapse of my fifth Ludum Dare game named Heavy Hunt.

Entry page

If this embedded video doesn’t work here’s a link

Tags: timelapse

As Ludum Dare is coming to a close in a few short hours I feel the need to thank you for everything. Thank you to the holders of the jam for giving me this spectacular opportunity. Thank you to everyone who participated and created wonderful games for me to play. Thank you to all the streamers, YouTubers and the like for promoting the Jam and the awesome entries in it. And most of all thank you to everyone who rated/commented on my game: Drack’s Mansion!

Tags: #ludumdare33 #ld33 #thankyou #nowstopreadingthetagsandgorateandplaystuff

I’m just curious. How many votes do most people get on their Ludum Dare games? My first game (LD32) got around 40 votes but this time my game seems to be doing much better and has 350+.

I’d like to thank everyone who played and rated my entry, Out West! With Ludum Dare almost over, I’m amazed and overwhelmed by the positive, supportive comments and vibe of this community. I was a little hesitant to engage, as there has been much lately to deter someone from engaging anything that moves online. But blasting my reservations to pieces, I have yet to find a more focused community that also finds something good in everything. Thank you so much, and good job to everyone that I’ve seen and rated! I’m definitely coming back for more: Consider me converted!

All Im saying is if you clone a murderous insect in a science lab… you prolly shouldn’t forget to give them dessert at night. They tend to get a little cranky -> [LADY BUG] by King Penguin.

Tags: King Penguin, Lady Bug, Larry Chupacabra, Larry Does Ludum, LD33, Youtube Showcase

Thank you…

• for the wonderful games
• for the gained experience
• for the constructive comments
• to the let’s players
• community
• ludum dare

Tags: playthrough, thank you

This is my last attempt to make people play my game as the competition is nearly over. 😛

It is very close to 50 votes and I would like to see that happen.

Please, play it here!

Based on http://ludumdare.itch.io/:

93093 votes

Now if we split entries in 10 groups (sorted by votes):

29,16 %
14,86 %
12,01 %
10,32 %
8,917 %
7,875 %
6,805 %
5,349 %
3,153 %
1,445 %
0,088 %

Check that the top 5 block got 75% of all ld votes

In The adventures of the Squire and the Liar, you’re always travelling somewhere new. This is because wherever you go, you fool the villagers into giving you their money (you monster), so you are never welcome in the same Shire twice! It’s also a good showcase of random generation used as an easy way to add detail and richness to a world, given how short the Ludum Dare deadline is!

Wouldn’t you just love to visit the famous ‘Amusing Bridge’ in Trumpcote?

The code to do this is really simple!

private readonly string[] villagePre = {
     "North",
     "South",
     "New",
     "Old"
 };
 
 private readonly string[] villageNames = {
     "Axe",
     "Raven",
     "Trump",
     "Beer",
     "Cringe"
 };
 
 private readonly string[] villageCompound = {
     "ton",
     "bridge",
     "hall",
     "ham",
 "cote"
 };
 
 private readonly string[] villageDesc = {
     "Village",
     "Hollow",
     "Motte",
     "Crossing"
 };
 
 private const int PreVillageChance = 3;
 private const int VillageCompoundChance = 2;
 private const int VillageDescChance = 4;
 
 public string GenerateVillageName ()
 {
     string vName = "";
     
     if (Random.Range (0, PreVillageChance) == 0) {
         vName += villagePre [Random.Range (0, villagePre.Length)] + " ";
     }
     
     vName += villageNames [Random.Range (0, villageNames.Length)];
     
     if (Random.Range (0, VillageCompoundChance) == 0) {
         vName += villageCompound [Random.Range (0, villageCompound.Length)];
     }
     
     if (Random.Range (0, VillageDescChance) == 0) {
         vName += " " + villageDesc [Random.Range (0, villageDesc.Length)];
     }
     
     return vName;
 }

The arrays of name segments are inspired both by fantasy worlds, and by good-old English town names. There are plenty more in our game (and we had fun thinking them up), but this is just an example.

Whenever a world is generated, the villages on the map are given random names, to add some variety on multiple playthroughs.  It also helps with the Mood and Humour judging categories, because it gives the feel of a richer world, and sometimes the generated names can be really funny 😀

There is a lot more random detail generation in our game, see if you can spot all the places we used it!

Play our game, The adventures of the Squire and the Liar!

Hey, all. As promised, we’ve exported the videos we’ve recorded in our Twitch.tv livestreams to Youtube. Here’s the always-up-to-date playlist below.

The new games are:

1. The Lair
2. Youkai
3. First Person Giant Monster Game
4. St. George’s Academy for Monster-Slaying Lasses
5. MONSTREEUM
6. Are You A Monster?
7. Mobs, Inc.
8. PokEscape: Magicrap’s Stealthy Journey for Survival & Gyrodeuce
9. Dissident
10. Drunkula
11. Protect the Egg
12. A-maze-ing Monster!
13. Bite In Tandem: Euphoria
14. The Mammoth: A Cave Painting
15. Monster Chomper

And hey! Since there’s only a few hours left to vote, why not check out our games, too:

• Moon Witch
• Fly On The Wall
• Huntingman Championship
• Lardum
• Can I Haz Monsters?

Here is an overview of the 30 most rated entries (thanks to itch.io):

P.S: don’t forget to test Lil’ Drake if not done yet 😉

“I find that most games do not have NEARLY enough bloody sheep carcasses, but this game did not disappoint!” — Chadivision

Hello everyone! This is my first-ever ludum dare entry. I’d really like to get some more ratings and feedback before it’s all over!

My game is No Country for Troll Men. Play a troll surviving as long as you can while a nearby human settlement expands into your territory! I wanted to explore that contact zone between humans and the big wild animals, and this seemed like a fun way to do it.

Two things:

1. Humans will not fill your troll’s tummy.
2. Cross the rivers at the darker areas.

Please play and enjoy!

Thanks a ton to everyone who played and reviewed our entry this Ludum Dare. It was a fun experiment, a joy to put together, and I’m really happy that so many people enjoyed it! That’s what makes the hectic LD weekend so worthwhile.

If you haven’t played our entry yet but want to, check it out:

There are Tourists in my Castle

Here’s a list of some of my favorites from this Ludum Dare:

Death of a Lich was probably my overall favorite of this LD; the sort of game I would have paid to play. It’s got brilliant strategy gameplay, looks and sounds fantastic, and really makes you feel like an immortal lich biding your time, gathering strength, and trying to escape confinement. I can’t praise it enough, so just go play it!

Death of a Lich, by Managore

Hero Mate is a puzzle game where you help an incompetent AI hero get to the end of the level by positioning and sacrificing monsters to keep him alive. Solid puzzle design, a really cute presentation, and the sort of saccharine and heartwarming narrative that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Hero Mate, by Lancelot Gao

Monster Pizza was adorable too. I loved the feel of carefully navigating the city as a giant dinosaur, trying to get pizzas to houses. I loved how cars would stop when you blocked the intersection, and sometimes force you to choose between trampling them or nearby buildings. I loved how, when angry customers nearly cost me my job, I was able to knock their houses to the ground, despite not being something the game taught. Great entry, with a surprising amount of emergent complexity!

Monster Pizza, by DalbinBlue

R-adius was a really clever take on the sidescrolling space shooter. You take on the role of the level itself, summoning different enemies using a pool of points, and try to find challenging enemy combinations that can defeat an AI ship pilot. Pretty clever, fun, and nostalgic, while still presenting something very original.

R-ADIUS, by MrTwister

Sweet Dreams was interesting and unexpected. Framed as a Bogeyman sim, the game is essentially an interactive shadow puppetry gallery. I usually don’t dig Unity games, but this one made really good use of the engine. All in all, a really original Creativity Toy that I had a lot of fun with. Totally worth checking out, and seeing what people have made with it!

Sweet Dreams, by Hitchh1k3r

Yeti Scent made for a strange, wonderful experience. Billed as a yeti stealth action/survival/dating sim, it used drifting, fading colorful particles to emulate being a monster with scent-based tracking, which helped when hunting down rabbits and humans to eat to stay alive. The scent depiction was a clever mechanic that I appreciated a lot, and made for a pretty neat experience! I was mildly disappointed that I was unable to romance the lumberjacks, but the experience of finally tracking down the Skeleton King was totally worth it.

Yeti Scent, by Nanolotl

In which I quote mysterious comments that you can only understand by playing the game!
That, or by reading the description But that’s way less fun.

(And don’t forget to press Q once you’re in the game! We hide that surprise every time!)

“Ah, the monstrosity of politics. Excellent game :)”
-Patomkin

“Nice entry! Really makes you wonder how some people manage to do this in real-life to real people.”
-derr

“This is one of my favorite entries so far!
I didn’t have enough clues to figure out most of the choices, but that did not interfere with the well crafted story.
Well done guys!”
-theholychicken

Play the game here!

Or here!

Or here too!

They all lead to the same place either way.

Click the link of your preference!

Okay, I’ll stop.

Right here.

A cutscene from the game

One way or another I ended up here alone this time. So I decided to convert it into my first Compo – personal mini challenge.

In short, it was like this:

(By the word “collisions” I mean the mechanics of the object’s borders detection and the collisions between objects)

– Woo-hoo! Ludum Dare tomorrow. I totally need to sleep well.

Day 1:

– Are you kidding me?! 3 hours of sleep because of sudden insomnia strike?

– Hello, stream, I’m your sleepy friendly ghost.

– What do you mean “no internet connection”?! OK, no panic, start it offline.

– Hi, welcome back, luckily I have only the game idea, let’s draw it!

– Lunch time!

– I nearly made these collisions.

– I nearly made these collisions.

– Lunch time? No? OK.

– Let’s just call these good collisions and keep going.

– Yay, my own sprites. Me is drawing! I don’t even want to burn these down.

– I nearly made these colli… Anyway it looks better with the sprites.

– Cut scenes! I’ll just ignore the fact that I don’t have the finished game, play it cool.

– Looks nice, next task: don’t fall asleep on the keyboard.

Day 2:

– Morning, guys! Let’s finish it!

– Yay, it’s actually very simple.

– Damn, it’s actually very simple. I need to make the bigger game.

– Lunch time!

– Or… Maybe I’ll finish the game and make a bonus? Something in-between?

– Main part is done. Looks like it even works.

– Bonus level!

– Bonus level that works and actually gives the fun!

– I made these collisions! I made the z-sorting! I’m unstoppable! Let’s finish it gloriously.

– OK, let’s post this. The easiest part – write down the description. Right? Oh…

– Posted!

– Hr-r-r-r… Zzz…

Day 3, bug fixing:

– I nearly made these collisions…

P.S.: you can play the game here

Time lapse of the 1st day of the work process here

Hi there,

I reached 80 plays, and would’ve went for 100 had I not had college start.

You guys have made some awesome games! Totally crazy that some of them have been made in 48/72 hours.

But yes, I have 49 ratings, and since have 47 and 40 plays, I’ve somehow not achieved default, which is unfortunate, because now I have to seem like a jerk and beg for plays, but I do it shamelessly.
So yes, if you could check out Vindictae, a game about fighting an army belonging to your murderer by possessing them, that’d be super duper awesome.

Thanks a lot, and hopefully see you in LD35, if not LD34 (college work permitting   )

Taha

As Ludum Dare is coming to a close in a few hours, respectfully I want to thank you for everything. Again this session was great. I think sincerely that I did something interesting even if I didn’t appreciated immediately the main theme – you are the monster. I planned on another theme – something else, but the game is the game. However I have 66 votes – it’s good enough. There have been some really great games in this Ludum Dare session and you will agree with me that it’s been pleasant, playing and rating them during the last few weeks. Now it’s time to evaluate a few projects before the end, waiting final results. I wish you the best for the future. Bye my friends ++

My entry – forest monster

The One and Mighty Tickle Monster has spoken – if you don’t rate Tickle Monster vs Suits until the deadline, you will be elligible for mandatory tickling provided to you by His Excellence The Tickle Monster himself*.

Experts agree that rating Tickle Monster vs Suits before the deadline is the best way to avoid being tickled.

It’s been proven that rating Tickle Monster vs Suits is the best thing since sliced bread.

Ensure the proper amount of fun in your life. Vote Tickle Monster 2015!

* If you rated and want to be tickled anyway, don’t worry – Tickle Monster eagerly awaits you too.

With less than 2.5 hours of voting to go and under the motto of “better late, than never”, I present you with my shortlist of best LD33 games, in no particular order.
Be sure to check them out, and if the voting hasn’t ended by the time you read this: cast your votes!

— Super Snack Time
A neat art style and a funny view on the lives of the well know Piranha plant.

— Play
Nice graphics and a unique and cute concept.

— V8000 AD
An excellent example of Mad-Maxian mayhem.

— Mobs, Inc
A neatly executed concept with very nice art and animations.

— Gojira-Chan no Densetsu
Very cute art and fluid animations, combined with satisfying city-stomping gameplay.

— Intergalactic Love Machine
Seriously one of the funniest, unique and polished entries.

And, of course, I end this list with the obligatory shameless promotion of our own entry:

Don’t touch the shredder, Jim.
A short, dark-humoured point-and-click game in a neat hand-drawn art style.

I hope you guys had at least as much fun competing and playing other people’s games as I did.
See you guys next jam!

Hey there! Here’s my try-to-be-metroidvania mini story platformer. As always there was a lot more planned for the entry, but I’m fairly happy with the end result considering how I was doing half way. Would really appreciate some comments on it! Needs to be played to the end to really experience the theme integration. /end of shameless self promotion.

Link to game page

And here is my list of pointers for future jams! (And myself more than anything)

• It’s great to focus on learning something new, but that focus can be learning to polish and complete, probably something a lot of us need, and then it’s good to use tools you know and not set to high goals!
• Keep the scope small and focus on polish!
• Try to be feature complete day 1 of the competition, so day 2 is about polishing and improving.
• Plan as much as possible from the start and make a full todo list from start to finish – be self critical and aware of your time consumption miscalculations and keep it small.
• Remember it’s about fun, not packing as much as you can into 48h. Make something small and you won’t have to torture yourself the last 10 hours and can afford some breaks.

If you’ve read this far without TL;DR’ing and realized like me that voting ends soon and therefore are sacrificing your sleep even tho work starts in 6 hours after a 18h work day, post your game as a comment and I’ll be sure to give you some votes too!

Anyway, everyone who submitted anything is awesome, and those who tried but failed are too! Let’s look forward to LD34! 😀

Hey there! Judging is ending soon(!!!), so I finally rendered the timelapse and uploaded it to youtube. I only recorded half of the jam, since I had some issues with timelapsing, this time…

Thanks for all who played my entry! This LD was great and I had an awesome time both making my game as well as playing entries! There were a lot of amazing games. Congrats to all participants! 😀

OMG GUYS!! 2 HOURS!!

I’m so excited I want to see the result!

AND REMEMBER!

The future of B(L)OB is in your hands!!!

PLAY HERE!!!

For those of you who played Barrel Roll (Ultra!), thanks for your kind words and reviews. This game started of as a reverse DK, and I wanted to keep the vibe going as much as I could. I maintained the game in a way that players can get where the inspirations is coming from, and still be entertained. The game kind of becomes a Mario zombie carnival later and its great fun!

Some of you asked who the green head monkey thing is. Well he is an ape who leads of the Great Kong’s followers. The leader uses a Green mask, the pipe guy is Mr.Pink, Mr.Blue does the cleaning afterwards.

The initial plan was to have a progression based action game. You start alone. Then you get more monkeys to join the squad. They are supposed to add threat as the rolling barrels can harm you too, but can also be helpful because if you escape, they will most likely explode on a plumber. Then there was introduction to different barrel types, enemy types etc etc.

I spent two hours on this frame on Day 2 before abandoning it..

I am looking forward to seeing the ratings for this game. For the future, this game has given me some ideas for another game I always wanted to do. It is going to be a strategy game with some similarities to this one. Here is a sneak peek on how it is coming along. I will try to keep updating the game’s progress through Twitter.

The pigs cometh! Soon.

Thanks for reading, and keep Jamming! You can play the game here: Barrel Roll Ultra!

-Saf (viking.potato@gmail.com)

Clayfruit.com

Help us get to 55 and break our record!

Monsters vs. Aliens

Thanks!

<3 Tweedle

This was the first Ludum Dare that I programmed in event tracking.  It wasn’t anything fancy, mostly just info about the device playing the game.  I also tracked whenever someone beat the game, and recorded the players highest combo and airtime.   I was hoping to add a high score system, but ran out of time.  Now that we’re near the end of LD33, I thought I’d post the high score here:

Highest Combo* – 32

Most Airtime* – 22.8s

Can you beat these scores?  Click Here to play Earth Was a Bad Choice.

I hadn’t posted the timelapse of me creating the game. Check it out:

Last day of voting, so I’ll be going through as many game in this last hour; voting and leaving comments.

If you are doing the same, give my game a go and if you leave a comment on my entry page, I’ll visit your entry and rate/comment.

Please try the post version!

Eat Humans

We’re Cosmic Adventure Squad, and we made Super Sea Serpent Simulator during LD 33!

Click above to play and rate (preferably before the rating period ends!)

This part 1 of the post-mortem will be from the point of view of two of the experienced LD-ers on our team: Rosypenguin and Stregawolf.

—————————————————————————-

Hey, I’m Rosypenguin. Incredibly enough, this is the 9th LD I’ve participated in, though this was the first time I’ve worked with Unity for a game jam so everything felt fresh and new.

Role: Most of my experience with past LD’s has been in 2D art, animation, and technical art. This time around I also had the opportunity to work with an experienced Creative Director in the industry, and hoped some of his awesomeness would rub off on me! I did some simple low-poly modelling in Maya, 2D background assets in Photoshop, and UI art in Illustrator.

Concept art and inspirations for the sea serpent.

What went well: I think the overall game came together really well. We have a finished LD game, with a solid game mechanic and a unified art style. Really, I was just excited to be back to doing LD; the last time I was seriously involved was LD28, with Rations,Please!.

This our first LD involving more than our usual team of Strega, Tenlki, and myself. We brought on some of Strega’s talented coworkers, and with them we were able to scope outside of our usual 2D Flixel game tradition. We also knew we’d lose the whole 3rd day because we’re working people now. Boo.

With two artists on the team, we were able to do more. Ocean and I spent some time the first day putting together a mood board to make sure we were consistent with the aesthetic we wanted for the game. I made a few concept mockups and Ocean went on to create the fantastic cut-paper-aesthetic shader for each of the 3D elements.

Photoshop mockup for final aesthetic.

What could be improved: Since so many of the team members were working professionally in the game industry, I felt intimidated and did the stupid thing where I held back my creativity for fear of judgment. The stakes felt higher than when it was just us three long-time college friends making games for a fun weekend and not caring if we succeeded or not.

But I still had an amazing learning experience; I was able to pick up from where I left off in Maya over three years ago, and guidance from Ocean helped boost my confidence bit by bit.

What you will do different next time: Definitely looking forward to working with Unity again. In the meantime I want to practice with modeling/rigging/animation in 3D to build more confidence and skill. I need to work on a self-esteem boost as well; I’ve done so many LD’s and GGJ’s that I need to remember that my opinions count too, even though I don’t work in the game industry.

—————————————————————————-

Hi, I’m Stregawolf! I’ve been doing LD since LD 21 and GGJ since 2009. As always jamming is a blast.

Role: My role during this LD was gameplay programmer. I put together most of the systems in the game such as how the sea serpent is controlled, the circular world coordinate system and gravity, enemy behavior, enemy attacks/weapons, enemy spawning, difficulty scaling, and integrating finished art into the game.

What went well: Deciding on a game design and title name quickly really made it easy to move forward right away. Friday night of the jam we all meet up at a restaurant and hashed out ideas while eating. We had a basic idea and sketch of what the game would look and feel like by the end of the meal. We didn’t actually start coding or making much art until saturday after getting a good night’s rest.

Knowing the tools before hand really made things go a lot faster. I’ve been using Unity for a long time, I think since Unity 2.5 so it was pretty easy to get things setup and start coding.

Github worked surprisingly well. Everyone was able to quickly sync up, make changes, and collaborate with little problem.

Working with coworkers from work made it easy for me to communicate with them and we all already knew the general workflow for Unity.

Getting a minimum viable product done by saturday night really gave us a lot of time to polish the feel of the game and make the motions and controls feel good. I used Unity primitives to get gameplay system in without having to wait for models and assets. When the final assets were ready, I had already set up everything so that it would be easy to replace the primitives.

What could be improved: Having a clear task board and prioritizing early on. In previous LDs we would spend a lot of time on friday sorting out todo lists, needed assets, needed game systems etc. This time we spent a little time, but mainly for art assets. I probably should have spent some time writing things out first. Instead I jumped right in on the saturday and didn’t prioritize tasks until Sunday night. Oh well, it still came out pretty well 😀

We really wanted to get some kind of high score tracker into the game, but didn’t have enough time to do so. We definitely didn’t stay up as late as we usually do and didn’t start again in the morning as early either.

What you will do different next time: Be better organized about what needs to be done. List things out, prioritizing them, and clearly assign who is doing what. I feel like there were moment when we failed to communicate who would be taking on what tasks and it was because we never clearly listed out the tasks.

Have a clear leader. I didn’t realize that I was suppose to be the leader for the jam. Next time, I’ll make sure that whoever is expecting to lead clearly knows their role, to reduce moments of confusion and indecision.

All but one of our member was working in the same location for the jam. I feel bad for not keeping an open group chat for everyone during the jam. Next time I’ll make sure that we have everything we need to communicate better.

—————————————————————————-

We’ll post part 2 with the other team members soon! Thanks for reading, and if you haven’t checked out the game yet: Super Sea Serpent Simulator

Hey! So many great games.
Just a friendly reminder! I it’s last chance to play and rate our game.
Thanks

You can found it here

No frogs were hurt during making of this game.

Not sure what was going on, but during the last 14 minutes I was locked out.  Tried for the past 10 minutes to get back in to rate/comment on the games I had on my list and played, but can’t get back in.  Sorry to anyone who voted/commented my way and didn’t get the favor returned.  I really wish I could have returned the favor.  GAHH!

As said up there, here we are. Another great Ludum Dare, has come and now past completely. Fun is on of the only words to describe this. Onto ratings: my points when down drastically. Were talking down by like 300 places! Maybe I was lucky last time 😀 I don’t care what I got really. All that matters was that I made a game. Not a great one. But a game. If you did, thanks for playing!

Ratings This Ludum Dare

Ratings

Ludum Dare 32

My goal for this Ludum Dare was to make a better game than last time. Going by the ratings, I think I succeeded.

If you want, you can play my game

Here

These are my results for this Ludum Dare:

#359	Fun(Jam)	3.28
 #466	Overall(Jam)	3.28
 #569	Mood(Jam)	3.05
 #640	Graphics(Jam)	3.13
 #841	Humor(Jam)	2.15
 #875	Innovation(Jam)	2.52
 #888	Theme(Jam)	2.89
 

Last time, I got these results:

#710	Innovation(Jam)	2.76
 #801	Fun(Jam)	2.63
 #828	Theme(Jam)	2.86
 #832	Humor(Jam)	2.18
 #841	Mood(Jam)	2.56
 #910	Overall(Jam)	2.71
 #919	Graphics(Jam)	2.18
 

I’m pretty happy with this. I’ve increased in almost every category.

If you want, you can play my game

Here

So I’m happy. Not incredible but definitely better than what I wanted.

So I think I did a lot better than last Ludum Dare. I avoided some of the mistakes I made last time, and made a better game.

I made a arcadey shooting game in space. I wrote in in Python and Pygame and entered into the jam. I named it the first random and dramatic thing that popped into my head: “The Stars are Watching.” Ooh mysterious, huh? Sort of. I’d like to apologize to anyone who expected a sophisticated story-driven game and was given a mindless shooter with a brainless plot. If anyone wants to play said mindless shooter, they can go: Here

Anyway, here’s what

Went right:

• The gameplay – This Ludum Dare, I think I made a genuinely fun game. Its mechanics are simple, and that’s why I think it’s much better than my last entry. Complex gameplay is hard to implement well in 72 hours.
• The graphics – Just like last time, I used Blender to make the graphics for my game. I modeled in 3D and then rendered top-down. This time however, I think I did a much better job of it. The player looks a little odd though…
• The explosions – They’re a small thing, but in a shooting game, explosions are very important. I made an explosion animation in Blender, and then rendered it. The reason I think the explosions look better than the explosions in some of my other games is that I used additive blending. I think they look a lot better.
• The boss – What arcade game would be complete with a big nasty boss? I think the boss for this game turned out nicely.
• The story – A lot of people complained that the twist at the end was painfully obvious. I don’t care. I am proud that I got any story at all in my game. It’s a first for me.
• The “tutorial” – Last Ludum Dare, my game had an obtuse, obnoxious and obfuscated instructions menu. (There might have been a few more ‘o’ words. I’m not sure.”) This time there is no instructions menu and there are a few short instructions at the start of the game. Of course, it helps that the mechanics for this game are a lot simpler than my last one.
• Being a “mindless shooter” – Last time I tried something I’d never done before–a tower defence. That really cost me. This time I made a shooter, a genre I am very familiar with.

And now,

What went WRONG:

• The lack of friction – You would think, in a space game you wouldn’t want any friction. However, there where a huge number of complaints about the lack of friction. Oh well, live and learn, I guess?
• Not knowing what to do after I finished the base game – I finished the base game in about 48 hours. However, then I goofed around trying to add achievements (That’s going to be another thing that went wrong) and tweaking mechanics. I should have spent the last 24 hours adding new enemies, and polishing.
• Achievements – At about 48 hours in to Ludum Dare, I had finished the base game. It was at that point I thought “Hey, who doesn’t love achievements? Nobody, right? I’m going to add achievements to my game.” It was a great idea–in theory. In practice, I wasted about 8 hours. The way I added achievements was stupid. There was no way to tell what achievements you had unlocked unless you consulted a text file. Not exactly a stellar amount of polish, is it?
• Being a “mindless shooter” – Yeah, I know I put this in the “Went right” category. However, it also goes in the “Went wrong” category because of how dull it is. Sure, it might have been easy to make, but it really cost me in my Innovation scores. That’s one of the few places I did worse than last time.

To sum this up: I am quite happy with my results. I did better than last time. I had a great time making a game. Thank you to everyone who rated my game, and I can’t wait for next Ludum Dare!

For our first game ever, I could not be more pleased with the ratings for Sales of a Deathman. We went into this not knowing if we would even end up with something that ran. Our main goal was to make people laugh, so it’s good to see our humor score so high:

Thanks everyone for making this such a fun experience and for playing/voting for our game. We’re looking forward to December!

I thought I would be better scored in some categories, but, anyways, great results.

I just wanted to thank everyone who helped me rank 24% on the coolness factor! I wasn’t expecting to rank in anything, actually.

Future: Now that I have a webcam and can record music, perhaps I can add original music for next years event.  I’m too much a noob on the guitar and drums for this year.

My games will always have puzzlers, but I’m seriously considering keeping the Sudoku variations out of my game, and sticking to either traditional Sudoku or one with an X rule in it, or taking Sudoku out altogether.  Every idea I tried, failed in testing, so there is no way I can do a unique Sudoku variation in Ace.

My challenge will be to fit my puzzlers to the “theme”, and come up with better puzzlers. The latest theme, “a Final Boss” will be easy. I’ve already figured that one out. If I could do “war” in Ace and have it not be like Game Boy Advance games, I would, but I can’t yet.  I’ll have less animation too. I just am a wee bit addicted to waterfalls. lol

Well. Once again happy with how that went! #5 in Theme and #6 in Mood! Thanks guys!

Here is a couple of graphs with my progress from the last Ludum Dare.

I’ll try and work on my coolness next time.

Here is a handy link if you wanted to have a look some time

Until next time!

Tags: LD #33, TheCure

My first entry in LD31, ranked #63 for Innovation.

My second entry in LD33, ranked #63 for Humor.

In both cases, I hadnt exactly planned to target either category but half way through development I knew what each game’s strongest point was, and the ratings reflected it. Ah the fun of the jam. I wonder how the next one will go…

I ranked 14th equal overall in the compo when I wasn’t expecting to make it anywhere near a high rank.

I was already quite proud of what feedback I had received and the game came out better than expected.

My internet went down for 6 hours just before the results were announced and I didn’t believe my friend when he told me I came 14th.

I hope everyone else also found success this year in the ludum dare. I enjoyed playing many of the games submitted and will definatly try to participate in the future.

Thanks again to everyone who played and rated my game

here are my other ratings for those who are interested:

The Reckoning

Hmmm… yup not charming at all.. I had much better times before

It’s my 3d LD, my first time making a 3D game for Ludum Dare and my first time using Blender Game Engine. I know I AM pleased with the result – I achieved more mechanics than I imagined in 48 hours. I didn’t polish the game on the other hand, and.. IDK I thought it’s not much of a factor in LD judging so I left it as the last task and since I had no time left – I didn’t.

Through the bugs crashes and the impossible use of BGE, I feel like I succeeded moving foreward, still it seems like I still need to work on my sh*t XD

Minimal 3D graphics seems like didn’t impress much, so I must conclude that my minimalism falls short. Honestly, this is bad.. that’s the worst thing a minimalistic design can have.

Or maybe my problem is not being user friendly. I mean, I made a mini game that barely explains itself, because I thought color-mechanics correlation is something one can discover itself and would be much more fun this way. Well, this fell short once again. My guess is that only one folk got to the last level.

My last guess isn’t very mature but WTH I’ll just leave it for you guys to discuss – do you think being “harsh” with your judging would result in deducting points? Do you think people who write nicer and less honest comments would get better results?

Well, either way, I think even if my game is sh*tty, I learned a lot and made a crazy ride just as I planned – making something with a tool I never tried, made some cool mechanics I’m honestly proud of considering the time frame given and the theme.

My entry was “Being a Video Game Monster“, and I want to thank everyone who played it.

70% coolness is the most I had ever before, so in that regard – I’m reasonably happy to finally figure how to behave in this coolness system.

I hope I can participate next year as well, though chances are I’m gonna be really bussy; this honestly has nothing to do with the scoring, I knew this even before entering. I don’t really care about the score as much as I care that this might have been my last LD. Hopefully, this isn’t the last one. Gonna try hard to find time to making an entry once again, it’ll probably suck since I’ll have even less time to prepare than THIS time, but even with sh*tty score I would be able to enjoy a break from everything and living the dream of making video games while asking NO ONE’s permission!

That’s what’s LD for me.

And, as always – Have a Happy Ludum Dare (bitter smile). =]

Tags: LD33, Reckoning

Well thank you everyone who played and rated Corruption 5, which you’ve generously decided was pretty good. As I expected I have done worse in graphics, audio, fun, humour and innovation and yet somehow done better overall.

Doing worse at graphics now

For me this Ludum Dare was all about testing out a way of telling a story in a platform game — using Point and Click adventure style speech bubbles and lots of special events — and, I think, this is what saved it. There’s no ‘story’ category but I think the points for that were all put into Mood, Theme and Overall.

Corruption-5 featured nearly 200 individual sprite animation frames. It featured 11 entity types with a total of 91 different inputs and outputs (basically the behaviours and interactions with the entities) all of which needed coding. To do all this in 48 hours meant sacrifices.. and what was sacrificed was sleep, music quality, background art (only a small handful of functional tiles, nothing decorative like in Mass-X) and level design. I couldn’t use all those entities and mechanics more than once or twice because I just didn’t have time. I had to just implement the specific story beats for each level and leave it at that.

It was a victim of being way too ambitious. It’s pretty obvious how to improve next time: FASTER LIFTS.

Now it’s back to work on the full commercial game I’m making called “Aye, Robot.” It’s a hybrid of my last Ludum Dare game “Mass-X” and this “Corruption 5” and is all about robots in the strange English county of Yorkshire. Follow me on twitter to keep up to date on that!

Thanks again and see you all next time!

Tags: ld33 results

So here’s how CRUNCH!!! An Intergalactic Meal Trip did:

A bit disappointed I didn’t manage to break into the top 100 overall, but check it out – #39 for Fun, with nearly a four-out-of-five average! (Woulda thought I’d have ranked higher for Humor, though – had a lot of positive feedback about my Space Police. They do get a bit annoying when there’s too many of them in play, though…)

In fact, I just checked, and this is the single highest average I’ve had for any category in any Ludum Dare so far (and again, this makes my seventh!) Thanks for the ratings, all! Hopefully this isn’t the last we’ll see of the Big Crunch and his planet-eating antics. Or the Space Police.

HiVE interactive, sharing Post-Jam Aliensche!

So voting is over! I’d like to thank everyone who voted and took time to play my entry into LD#33.

Here is how I went for my first ever Ludum Dare – I was very happy to place in the top 100 for ‘Fun’ and in the top 200 for ‘Overall’!

I have been hard at work on a new post-jam version of the game – it’s done!
Check it out here.

I could not have made all the improvements without the constructive criticism I received from you guys, so thank you very much!

Here is a short list of things I did for this new version…

ALIENSCHE v0.1.1 CHANGELOG:

       – GAMEJOLT API LOGIN WITH ONLINE HIGH SCORE LEADERBOARD
        – CONTROLLER SUPPORT WITH FORCE FEEDBACK
        – NEW DIFFICULTY CURVE
        – NEW THROWN MISSILE ATTACK
        – NEW MISSILE SHIELDING TECHNIQUES
        – PROJECTILE CHANGES
        – HEALTH AND SHIELD PICKUPS ADDED
        – IMPROVED SCORING SYSTEM WITH COWMBO METER
        – OPTIONS MENU
        – ENVIRONMENT AND LAYOUT CHANGES
        – NEW SOUND EFFECTS
        – VARIOUS BUG FIXES

This past weekend I took Aliensche! to a local playtesting event to get feedback and document reactions, people seemed to have a lot of fun catching cows:

Thanks to the LD community for this amazing experience!

I plan on taking part next time and using what I have learned to improve upon what I can achieve!

Please, if you haven’t already – Play Aliensche!

Thank you! Love from HiVE

So, it’s first time I’m participating in Ludum Dare. And I want to say thank you everyone, my scores are way higher than I expect.

Yeah, I know, nothing too special, but I wasn’t even sure if I can do something in 48 hours. But I made it and people found it’s pretty fun! I really proud of taking #45 at Fun category.

See ya in the next LD!

Trying to see if I will be the lowest ranked game to post results ☺

Happy to finish the marathon though!

Still looking for more feedback

Ratings

Coolness 53% #483 Audio 2.67 #817 Graphics 2.32 #868 Mood 1.74 #886 Theme 2.35 #910 Innovation 1.85 #936 Fun 1.73 #954 Overall 2.00

My game had the (IMO!) awesomely executed possession system, but not much in the way of an actual system to play in, and so it lost the simplistic value the mechanic had.

Also, I figured I was going to be disappointed with anything, considering my first LD, LD27, I scored #40th most fun game, which was awesome. No top 100s for individual categories that year, though

But yep, I’m not disheartened, not at all. If I rework the graphics into something a bit more minimalist, then maybe add more enemies, I can easily turn it into an arcade-y single screen murder-them-up, with even a set of stealth based levels down the line. Going to need to rework everything though, this is just a proof of concept.

Thanks for the awesome time, hopefully see you in December, if I’m not drowned in work.

Taha

I ranked 13th Overall, 5th in “Fun” and 11th in “Humor” categories! that’s nicee

Overall in all my Ludum Dares I had the luck of being in the top 11 in all categories, apart from Innovation. That’s gonna be my goal in the next LD!

I ranked 13th Overall, 5th in “Fun” and 11th in “Humor” categories! that’s nicee

Overall in all my Ludum Dares I had the luck of being in the top 11 in all categories, apart from Innovation. That’s gonna be my goal in the next LD!

Thanks for the awesome jam good LD friends! 😀 Thanks for voting and the cool chats and feedback and votes!

Had a wonderful #LDJAM this time around, I felt much better about this one than my previous one, both during and after the jam. And that definitely showed in the score

So now that I’ve done four LDs (sorry #30, I couldn’t get to you), I can put some kind of data together and see if I can make sense of my performance. And to be honest, it’s baffling.

LD32 vs LD33

First, comparing this one to the previous shows a definite improvement, and that I’m really happy about. The previous one was really quite uninspired and rushed, and I’m glad that my approach to this one (not pre-determining what to make before the jam) has yielded far more creative and interesting results.

LD 31 vs LD33

In comparison to my best LD so far, I couldn’t beat it. But hey, that’s really not a major issue. But that feels like an anomaly to me… my LD31 was a purely multiplayer game which meant it was impossible to test, with no Audio to speak of so it scored 0 there, and it was a platformer which was like 80% of other games. Why did it do so well?? Was it genuinely a great game, and I really should work on that one further, or was it an anomaly? WHICH IS IT?? D:

Theme?

PokEscape placing 437th on theme makes me feel kinda sad, because the very first line of the description said “You are the (Poke)Monster!”, which I thought was a great fit for the theme. Which meant that 90% of people who rated the game either missed that line or never read it, or didn’t agree with it. Sigh.

Comment count

I went through my games and roughly counted up how many comments I had on each game, and this last one was a lot higher than the rest by about 50%, which is possibly significant. Was it because this game referenced Pokemon? Or was it due to other factors? I really would like to know how many ratings my past games has. Don’t know where to find that. Sigh.

Adios LD!

It’s been a rad Ludum Dare as usual 😀 After this analysis I think I’ve decided that data analysis is not useful without a sample size of a billion So just keep jamming and having fun, making cool shit is the best you can do! Until next time amigos!

Tags: analysis, data, pokemon, PokEscape, stealth, tuism

We’re Cosmic Adventure Squad, and we made Super Sea Serpent Simulator during LD 33!

Click above to play!

This part 2 of the post-mortem will be from the point of view of one of the regulars on the team: Tenlki! If you want to hear from Rosypenguin and Stregawolf, part 1 is here.

—————————————————————————-

Hi, I’m Tenlki (or as some will know me from elsewhere – just Tenki). I’ve been casually helping out with Ludum Dare and Global Game Jam for a while, not really keeping count anymore, haha. This was pretty much my first full Unity project.

Role(s): 

This time around, pretty much everything audio-related went to me – I was originally tasked with making the music (and implied, the SFX), but as time went on, I had to pick up and code the audio system.

What went well:

I’m actually pretty happy with how everything turned out!

I spent Friday night/Saturday morning listening to different sea shanties from games and other sources, to get a better feel of what kind of instruments and well, how to write a song with the feel we want. Threw in a first draft on Saturday night, got feedback (“it sounds piratey- can we make it sound more ‘monster’?”) and added parts in to make it fit. Sunday night, came up with the idea to split the title motif and create the peace theme and a layered battle theme (my personal favorite ‘variation’ of the soundtrack).

I got (or had) to do a lot of things for the first time: I…

– Updated FL Studio the first night in – the interface is kind of different!
– Recorded a lot more “live-played” music with keyboard instead of clicking in notes the whole time as I’d previously done. That’s me actually playing piano! (..and kind of the other instruments, just reskinned the sounds lol)
– Accidentally upgraded to Windows 10 a few days before
– Never wrote music quite in the style/genre that we ended with
– Didn’t have significant experience with Unity and Github

…but all things considered (…and more on the “all things considered” later), I think it all came together really well!

What could be improved:

Well, I think everyone else was actually around the same area and meeting up locally, but I live across the country, so everything together, I was kind of kept out of the loop most of the time. Up until around Sunday evening when we submitted, all I had to work with were some screenshots, some minor descriptions of the game and what mood or assets we needed, so I was kind of shooting in the dark as far as how the game itself was looking and feeling.

On Sunday night, I found out we didn’t actually have an audio system and I was needed to code it in and hook in all the sounds. I hadn’t really gotten my hands too dirty in Unity before so I kinda drove straight into it with the time limit coming up (after forcing myself through an ugh video tutorial). I did a bunch of improvisation in that last bit and came up with having an audio mixer, battle/peace theme, figured out some nice places to trigger sounds (and improvised the sounds themselves) and got everything in. If anything, I kinda wanted a different theme in-game than the title screen (though, title “screen” was more of a misunderstanding on my part), but ended up running variations instead. I think it worked out ok.

I did actually write a game over theme but I think silence did the job better.

What you will do different next time:

Really, I kinda liked having that bit of pressure forcing me to learn. I actually ended up having to do some emergency fixes and builds the day after on request while everyone else in PDT was still at work (aw yeah, unsupervised builds!)

If anything, I’d like to be more familiar with Unity (or whatever tool we’ll end up using) before it starts. In previous Ludum Dare jams where I’d done coding, I had treated them as learning experiences, but I at least had some decent familiarity with the platforms (flash/flixel). This time, I went into it completely cold and kind of not expecting to really do more than create assets. I had left working in the game industry a while ago but sometimes the pang of wanting to code a game hits me again. Unity was still kind of weird (coming from someone who’s more used to coding everything from scratch), but maybe because of new insight from working with other things, the whole components thing doesn’t feel as foreign and unwelcoming as it used to. Maybe I’ll get to do some more coding next time.

I’m not complaining about how it turned out though – I’m the kind to enjoy the chaos of unplanned moments, and hey, the learning experience was awesome >:)

edit:

woo, 64th out of > 1.5k jam entries in Audio and 50th overall!

The first thing I’ve checked today morning were LD ratings. I’m so glad to see that my game got into the Top-100 Innovation rating (as #100)!

I’ll definitely follow valuable feedback I’ve got from other LD participants and continue my work.

I hope my video reviews were useful for the game developers too.

And now I’d like to use the occasion and invite you to the FGL game Jam, which will take place 25th-28th Sep. You’ll have 72 hours to make a mobile game (.apk or .ipa).

FGL Game Jam 32 thread – you are welcome!

Tags: contest, review

Hi all, I’ve posted the postmortem for my game, Patient Zer0.

Click to read!

Hey guys. Seeing that this is my (Taro’s) fourth Ludum Dare (and first for John), I figured it might be a good idea to look into how I’ve been doing for the past few entries. First with the latest: how did Can I Haz Monsters? do?

Not bad at all! Certainly got my innovation groove back, which I’m really proud of. As mentioned to some Let’s Players, John Ceceri III was the one who pitched the game idea about adopting in an alien world, so kudos to him. I simply helped out simplifying that idea to something that can be implemented into the game.

In comparison, this is how I did in the previous Compos & Jams:

The Sentient Cube (Ludum Dare 26)

Tragically, the first Ludum Dare I participated in was the first game I had to put down due to legal reasons. So no ratings, here. Even then, I was well-practiced with Unity and game jams in general, so it was pretty clear from the comments I was doing pretty well for a first-timer.

Laundry Day (Ludum Dare 31)

Laundry Day was our first attempt at organizing a real-world meeting at Tech Valley Game Space. As a consequence, nearly the entire group participated in this jam, including dreamlogician and Brightstar. It was also our first time learning Construct 2! Ultimately, a lot of raters figured out our game was making fun of the free-to-play style games with pointlessly addictive gameplay, leading to high marks on humor.

Star Driller Ultra (Ludum Dare 32)

Star Driller Ultra was well-praised for its graphics and overall presentation. It didn’t do nearly as well on fun, which I extensively wrote a post-mortem about. Either way, it definitely was an improvement from the last two projects I’ve worked on. It certainly showed my talent on creating well-polished games.

Unconventional Stick Swinging Simulator (Ludum Dare 32)

And of course, the curveball: the joke entry, Unconventional Stick Swinging Simulator! This was just a fun exercise of getting a game done in 12 hours, so I figured I’d get low rankings here. And I was not disappointed!

Plotting everything together, here’s how I did (Audio and Graphics are assumed to be 0s if opted out):

Overall and Innovation categories looks like a slow but progressive improvements, and I couldn’t be happier with that. Fun and Mood, on the other hand, are rocky. It looks like I might need to focus on these two categories a little more. Other than that, looks like things are improving smoothly!

I did better than last year on every category ! Still not on any top 100, but I’m close to it Surprisingly, I got a rather good grade on “Humor”, I am not sure what was so funny in my game but thank you ^^

Thanks to everyone who played my game (No Pictures Please) and for all the comments, I’m glad you enjoyed it.

Good things

• I was really not sure that my idea would work in practice and I spent all the weekend worrying about it until I finally got some levels. After all the votes, it seems that it was actually a good idea and I might develop it further, I already have some ideas of improvements.
• Innovation was my main weakness last year I think, I’m happy that this time I found something more original.
• I had never really done animations like this for my games (with drawings), it was a good experience.
• I received much more comments this year than last year, that was really enjoyable.

Bad things

• Despite all my efforts the graphics are not as good as I wanted, I should probably try to improve that for next year.
• As many people told me, the game is too difficult. I think it would not have been that hard to improve that during the weekend. I should probably let people test it before I release in order to adjust that kind of things before I release the game.
• Even though it took enough time to find a more original idea than last year, I feel like I should still spend more time in the beginning to find more ideas instead of keeping the first good idea I find, but it’s really hard to control myself.

See you next year !

When I uploaded my entry I knew that the game has a poor graphics, but I was really exited because I could make the game working in the time for compo and the game includes all what I wanted to. This made me a winner in my own eyes. While I was working on the game, I have realized of how much I have learnt and how much I will have to learn. Here you can look at my rating.

My game

AUDIO
It is actually really funny/sad that my entry has the best rating in audio class. This was the first time I was making audio for a game so I had to look for a right software to help me with it. Because audio class is closely connected to mood class, I now my audio is not good for being good but for being funny.

HUMOR
I didn not add any texts or something what should increase humor aspect and I dont even know why I obtained so much points in this class. Maybe the right timing of sounds and backround music made it possible.

THEME
What is more “being a monster” than eating people? Here I think I lost points because the graphics design of the under-bridge monster.

INNOVATION
When I was working on the game, I did not know anything about about categories which I will be rated in, so I dont have in my sights. I must admit, my game is no innovative.

FUN
My game should have more points in FUN than in the HUMOR category. It is fun to eat people, dodge the bad thoughts and dont die by starving.

MOOD
Here I lost again because of my graphics. Time to learn pixel art style.

GRAPHICS
This is the main problem of my game. I did not even want to be good in graphics, I was so glad to have a working game. In my opinion, graphics is the key in LD and here i have so much to get better.(Maybe chose a lower resolution will help next time)

I m so happy for being a part of Ludum Dare 33 and I promise this isnt my last try. I want to thank you for playing my game and writing comments. Next time I will get better. It also took some time to build Rome.

Hey guys,this was my first LD entry and my second game in general,it had a lot of problems and wasnt the most fun to play but i hope you enjoyed it,thank you very much,cheers!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=54789

As I said, this year was the first time that I decided to participate in the compo. 48 hours: a game, with all the code, art and music by myself and donated to the public. Yesterday, the voting period ended, and I admit that I was expecting a much lower score on the criteria that interested me.

Scale: 1 to 5

Despite bugs and problems in the early days of the compo, the worst days for that to happen, the game had a relatively good reception.

Mood / Theme:

I learned that gritty atmosphere can even be attained with a naïve aesthetic seen in voxels without generating a negative reaction; nonlinear writing however confused several users, but many got by far uncomfortable sensations, which it was my goal; The proof of concept where the player is a psychopath, but without clarifying who is truly the monster or victim, was extremely well received and many believe that I should expand the concept to a full game; something that interests me the most.

The main reason to the average score is mainly the story was lost; which I owe to the lack of more time to be polish it, it just wasn’t well delivered. My mistake was to deepen the unessential story.

Graphics:

Many pondered the visual style and the work of shaders. Especially the technical work; as in the case, I used a single texture that was a RGB palette rendered into tiny PNG. The shader used to divide the screen into a pixelated grid; was also highly welcomed. As well the use of chromatic aberration and noise, to emulate a feeling of loss of sense of reality was highly appreciated.

Several mentioned that the artistic aspect was lost mostly to the shader pixelating the game world. An error on my part was too not adding more variety in vegetation for the courtyard.

 Audio:

I’m a terrible musician, but I have less musical talent than a fish. I admit it’s not my forte, and I expected that low score. However, most criticism was the lack of variety in the music, which I will consider for the next competition. My mistake was also unable to provide sound effects, but I did not have time to create sounds like crying or injuries of the victim.

Innovation:

The main reason for the low score is the same as I expected, given the clone of the game of cat and mouse that I implemented. Although I wanted to do a much more complex game of stealth, with executions and elements alike, creating the AI ​​for the game, consumed me a good couple of hours I could not use for anything else.

However, many admitted that expanding the concept to more elements of gameplay would be welcoming, something that attracts me to do if I expand this concept to a big game.

Overall:

With all the aforementioned elements, the graphics and gameplay limited factor, affecting a higher score. Things to keep in mind the next time. The good thing is that this AI can be used in any other project, which will give me another occasion greater creative freedom and attention to the gameplay.

Humor / Fun:

The game at no time sought to be hilarious and fun. On the contrary, looking for something to bother and generate similar experiences. You’re a murderer at the end of the day, without precisely defined emotions, the mood was reached, and my objective accomplished. The fun score, shows me clearly that the elements of cat and mouse, are already very common for this kind of games, and that the opportunity for the victim to defend itself undoubtedly was tempting and would have scored me several more points, but time was lacking.

Conclusion:

In TL;DR. I learned a lot, I did an AI using Environment Query Systems, a system damage and a lot of feedback to the idea of a game like I aforementioned before: it is indeed good, and maybe if things improve: I’ll expand the AI, improve the art, make a new aesthetic and above all things, not limit it to one house and do it as a full game

Tags: final post mortem, the empty

I won’t deny that I’m quite disappointed with my results, this time. I usually try not to care all that much about the ratings, I simply check how my game did and that’s it. But this time I aimed at getting a good score in graphics, putting pretty much everything else aside (well, except audio… somewhat). I focused more on polishing the graphics than on making a playable/balanced game… When the compo was ending, I simply designed a simple level, added some screens for the menu, the intro, the win/lose “scenes” and called it done.

Well, let’s take a look at my score before moving on:

Only taking into consideration that I focused a lot on graphics and that there were 1199 compo entries, I didn’t do all that bad. I score above ~88% of entries in graphics and ~83% in audio.

But if I were to compare my latest entry with my previous ones…

Scores per entry (per category)

Percentage of how close I’ve got to first in any category

Yeah… still not all that bad. It’s in fourth place, when sorting by graphics. So, why am I so butthurt annoyed that I’m even ignoring conclusive (and absolute) data?

I thought it deserved a better score. During the voting, I really thought that a game with graphics as good as mine deserved at least a 4.0. C’mon, look at that parallax, those leafs on the background, the smooth animations… How could all those, even considering the lame gameplay, score less than a 4.0?

So, I replayed my LD#31 entry Cold Remembrance. It got 20th place in graphics, even without any gameplay; you simply hold left! I wanted to compare both and try to understand what that “game” had that this game didn’t.

Well, that “game” felt complete, and there was nothing unnecessary. But the experience looks and feels great. The audio merges with the graphics and the story; each aspect of the game make the other better.

On this entry, on the other hand, there’s an element that really takes it charm away. Although the graphics and the audio do merge well, the first impression the players has is with that ugly title screen. It’s not even functional, as the text goes through really fast and fills all of the screen…

I could probably had gotten away with telling the story on the entry page and removing the title screen. I didn’t even need a win/lose screen… I could had simply displayed a message (in front of the “playstate”) after you got to the end/died and then I could had restarted the game…

Yeah… it was probably just that… =/

Well, lesson learned!

I’ll still probably work on a post-compo version, but I want to first work on a post-compo for my LD#32 entry… XD

Thanks for reading! Until next time! o/

were my scores for Audio and Graphics, my highest placings. I will admin, I’m suprised. A lot of people said that its great, showing maybe a 4 star. However, the there was a 3 star average. Suprising. Also, Graphics seemed to be better than Audio, but it wasn’t. Audio got almost 200 places higher than graphics. Whew.

Now to Ludum Dare 32.

#579 Graphics 3.00

#463 Audio 2.86

Here, these are pretty bad results. I guess i did improve.

I got lucky that LD. Here are the top 2 results.

Whew. What a long post. Well, thats that. I’m not pissed or disappointed or anything. Just, a little lost. Still proud to compete in Ludum Dare. Would rather do Ludum dare and get 1200th place than miss it.

So, my game Within suffered a lot due to real life experiences I had to deal with during this event. I almost opted out of the event completely, but thanks to a few good friends and, what I’m guessing to be, luck, I actually made my first game and I was able to submit it to Ludum Dare 33. Pretty surreal!

My ratings weren’t too bad:

My highest score was Mood (which is cool, because I was definitely going for that with my take on the theme) but out of all the other ratings, Audio is technically the highest as I placed pretty well. What’s interesting, too, is that I only spent an hour on my music (including writing and editing it). What’s even more interesting is how this reflects who I am as a person; I studied music and music composition in college. It’s very uplifting to see that education playing a vital role in my game’s success.

Unfortunately, I was going through a big move during this event. I was actually couch surfing during the creation of the game, and after I moved in and judging was commencing I was unable to rate and play as effectively as I wanted due to lack of internet. I was able to get a couple of games in here and there with my terrible laptop and a connection provided by a coffee shop, but these were mostly restricted to web games.

Things I realized that need significant more focus in my coming games:

1. Level design

My game has very simple controls, so the level design is simple as well. However, if you have played it, you realize that the switches or buttons in each level can be cryptic and their effect can be lost on the player because of poor implementation. I’m sure if I had more time, I would have been able to make a better system.

2. Coding

I used Game Maker to make this game, and thanks to Shaun Spalding’s tutorials on YouTube I was able to have a quickly working platformer engine for my game that I was also able to tweak. Still, in the future I would like to have more experience writing code from scratch for an event like this.

3. Graphics

Several commenters pointed out that my game looks and even feels a bit like “Thomas Was Alone” by Mike Bithell. The square based sprites was really all I had time for and, naturally, I see the resemblance, but rest assured that I didn’t even have that beautiful game in mind when I was crafting my own. This area is probably my weakest point with game creation. If I pursue games, this will be the area I will need to work the most on. That, or work with a team.

All in all, though, I had a blast participating in this event. I learned a lot, gained a ton of experience, and enjoyed all the games I played (while I was able to). I’m looking forward to participating in Ludum Dare 34 in December. Hope to see you all there! 😀

Ludum Dare 33 was a little rough for me, as I had to stop my game early for illness. However, I did a fair amount of streaming and played some great games! Here were my favorites, followed by a postmortem for my own entry at the end.

Cruelty Free

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=38961

My favorite thing about this game is how the team focused the polish on all the bits that totally sold the fantasy of running around as a rat. The camera angle made me feel anxious about what was above. The animations on the rat were adorable and believable. The animations on the scientists were elegantly done – the same animation over a counter looked like “working” while out in the open looked like “searching for rat.” All the details that they pushed compelled me to hide in nooks and scurry around corners and believe that I was a rat. The payoff at the end was also nicely done – a simple solution with big impact.

Tenebrous Expanse

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=54258

This was a game built on mechanics (essentially a cross between minigolf and billiards with a rubber band attached) but did an excellent job of layering compelling mood and atmosphere on top of that. It very simply made the game feel like a complete whole while sticking with minimalist visuals and effects. The ramp-up in levels and how they slowly constrained elements until it became about making perfect shots was nicely done (and the spiraling level select menu was certainly something I’d never seen before!)

Beast of the Woods

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=12468

It looks like a common theme with my favorites this Ludum Dare is “elegance” and completeness of the package, and here’s another one that does a great job of that. There are so many wonderful touches that totally make me buy into this world – how the music intensifies with proximity to your prey, how your monster hands creep onto screen when you get within lunging range, how your victim whips around to see you just before you strike. Every effort spent in this entry works together towards a common experience, and that is no easy feat in the compo!

Sick Sick Solitaire Postmortem

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=22452

Now for my sickly little entry. I had never made a digital card game before, so that’s the idea I decided to tackle. In the game, the black cards are “bad” but you are forced to use them to advance play, so the result is a tricky, brain-stretchy sort of solitaire.

It was inspired by a few things:

1. Four Seasons Solitaire, which was always my favorite type growing up
2. Cooperative games where you have to play for “the game’s” turn, like Eldritch Horror (which I have been playing a ton of lately). I wanted to see if there was a way of getting that feel of you having to play “for” the bad deck in a simple card game.
3. Once Upon A Time, my favorite card game, specifically for its elements of being cooperative and competitive at the same time. I liked that tension of having to use the “bad” cards to advance play. I also had plans to incorporate this more into the theme, but was unable to finish.

For the curious, my plan to theme this game was to make it about two monsters that had made a mess of the knight’s prized plate collection, and were trying to clean it up before he showed up. You played little sister monster and big brother monster was trying to pin the blame on you. You were trying to finish cleaning up your stack before him, so you could accuse HIM of being the monster who made the mess when the night showed up. I had some pretty cute monster sketches all planned out, but alas, it was not meant to be.

When I woke up on Sunday and realized I was too ill to finish, I was pretty disappointed.  I mulled about scoping down and pushing through it, but health woes have been stacking up on me and I knew I had to choose to take it easy. I’m glad I at least had something playable to put up, but it was hard to have my first Ludum Dare where I wasn’t able to properly finish.

However, the ability to choose not to finish something is a life skill all the same! There is always next Ludum Dare

Tags: ld33 postmortem