My second ever, entry into Ludum Dare is done!

I present to you: Defuse Run!

It was made with Unreal Engine 4.10.

I had 8 hours of practice with the engine before the LD 34. I had the most issues with packaging the game for release. HTML5 version may still come up if I manage to fix it.

Link to entry: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=37112

I actually managed to finish and submit my game Birds of Borg 2 minutes BEFORE the deadline!

I think I went a bit over the top by creating a networked multiplayer game, even with (simple) match making. Game mechanics could have been more sophisticated, and originally I wanted to support the growing theme as well (growing a flock of birds), but that would have needed quite a few more hours. I hope you like the StarTrek related theme 😉

There will be a timelapse video, but first I have to clean it up a little – my Xserver crashed 3 times during development.

I’m really happy with the result nevertheless, given that it has been my first Ludum Dare, and that I personally never did anything with phaser before.

And NOW I’m exited to play all those games YOU guys have created =-D

And a little sleep would be reasonable as well…

Tags: action, html5, multiplayer online, nodejs, phaser, Singleplayer, web

My first compo, second dare. This was crazy fun. Unfortunately it is right before finals week for me, so I wasn’t able to exert myself fully. I really liked the relaxed approach I took to it though. I focused a lot more on the design than what I’m used to in jams, it was a nice change of pace!

Also my first 2-Player game

Push Your Buttons is a simple little platformer-racer you can play with you friend! It’s all about using physics to go through levels as fast as possible! You’ll use different button combinations, similar in practice to Mortal Kombat combos.

I put a lot of effort into each level, so unfortunately there are only four levels. But this means you’ll be able to speedrun the game super fast! Also there are a few paths to go in most levels, for the speedrunners out there to find and perfect.

Screenshot of an alley-oop!

EDIT:
Play here

I am so happy I had time this weekend to participate! In previous LDs other thing have always gotten int the way.

So now I proudly present Cavern Climber!

This was so much fun! I can’t wait for the next one.

I hope you enjoy my first Ludum Dare game!

Plant Simulator: Chemical Warfare

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=64815

I am happy to have finished my first Ludum Dare. I submitted my compo entry one minute after the deadline (just into the submission hour).

I struggled with Dropbox. I struggled with animated GIFs. I struggled with Unity. Oh how I struggled. But I also learned.

I managed to make a four-player Rocket League like game inspired by Asteroids. You control each ship with two buttons (that’s the theme) to push around an asteroid to score goals for your team.

I give you: Asteroid League

Play it in Unity: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/41693465/Games/asteroid-league/index.html

Vote and give me feedback: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?uid=61867

Enjoy the source code: https://github.com/mlepage/asteroid-league

Another Ludum Dare has come and gone and I have to say that my experience this time around was much different from that of previous compos. Miraculously, nothing seemed to break and I was able to get art and gameplay completely finished by the beginning of the second day. This was pretty amazing to me. Before I was coding right up to Submission Hour and the whole thing was very stressful for me. This time around, I found myself not only wasting time by browsing reddit but actually venturing out and trying to do music – something I have never tried before. Now, I’m not trying to say that I am better than anyone else here because of all my free time – looking at the submissions already I can see that you guys are way more talented than I could ever be. However, I’d like to take this opportunity to say that keeping your game simple can be one of the best things you can do in this compo. It gives you much more time to experiment with game development and saves you a few sleepless nights. I found it very helpful (in my case) to map out exactly what the game was, which was four main things. Winning, losing, combat, and puzzle solving. Once you have a set of base rules the coding goes a lot easier than making it up as you go along. Setting up an easy way to create levels can also be very helpful. The first thing I did was basic color recognition, so I could feed my game simple drawings and have it spit back fully rendered levels with sprite sheets and etc.

TL;DR: Have a plan, keep it simple, and automate what you can.

My submission is “Burgeon”, if anyone is curious. Good luck to everyone going for the Jam!

Not proud, but I managed to half-way finish something.

It’s done and it’s here : click here, yeah here.

And now :

Time to sleep. Bisous

WHEW! That was… intense. I’ve completed 2 separate Ludum Dare entries before this, but they were in the jam format working with someone else. This was my first real attempt at the solo compo, and my first time FINISHING solo. I’m so ecstatic right now, and I hope you all are just as excited for your own accomplishments! FREE TICKETS ON THE HYPE TRAIN BOYS LET’S GO!

That being said I’m not terribly happy with the music. I did what I could in beepbox, but I’m very meh about that part of the whole thing. Something is better than nothing, at least. So I believe.

Anyway, you can check out my entry, Roto, right here! I hope you like it.

That is what I ended up making for my second Ludum Dare. My first one was LD24 so that was a while back, it definitely went smoother time time. And oddly the game controls I made feel pretty good. With some balancing this could become a real nice control scheme. My theme was ‘Two buttons only’, the second theme is only used in the title.

The only thing really missing is sound. I would liked some more levels however. I will be making some more levels and release them later. I’ve put my personal records for the levels in my entry.

You can find the mouse-platformer that is my game here

And a action screenshot to end with it all!

I had a great time with the theme this round! I’m going to spend another day on DOUBLE PUNCH MAN and get it submitted to the Jam as well. This was my second Ludum Dare, and I hope you guys have fun with my entry.

First time i finish in time and submit my game.

Themes were very inspiring.

Hope people will enjoy.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=44990

I really enjoyed in this Ludum Dare ;), i hope you enjoyed it too! ;D

So… this is my game ! Feed The Hole!

You can play my game here, i hope you enjoy!

Thanks everyone!

I had a lot of pepsi… (more than this)

Unfortunately, school gets in the way of a lot of Ludum Dares for me, but I’m really glad I managed to do this one! I went with the 2-button theme and made a game where you tilt the floor to help your stunt dog do tricks. The goal of the game is to stay in the spotlight for as long as possible. I also wrote a short little ragtime piece for the game, which is a first for me.

You can play Acrodog here!

Didn’t have it in me this time. May as well stop now.
Good luck to all the participants!!

Phew, that was my first Ludum Dare in a while. Tried to do both themes, but settled for just 2-button-controls. Did a lot more than I expected, though obviously still lots I’d have liked to have done. Going to work on this post-competition I think. I reckon it’ll work nice on Mobile.

Chucked up a link to a Windows Build & Source for now, will get Mac, Linux and Web sorted tomorrow – 2:40 am here in London so my bed is calling! Then I’m looking forward to playing all the games!

Tags: screenshot

My first game made with Unity is finally (sort of) completed.

This is definitely not my best submission, but now I’m more familiar with a new tool, and I did make a cool tree model for it. (I was told it looks like broccoli though)

Good job everybody! Play my game here.

It came very close to not reaching a playable state, but ScrapFighter is DONE!

Battle five enemies to the death in a abandoned sector of space filled with floating scrap metal. Harness your starfighter’s gravity fields to surround yourself in a growing halo of protective junk. Fire your beam weapon to shoot metal and explosive chemicals at your enemies.

Here is the entry page. I recommend playing in a large browser tab.

Hi Guys, I did it… =)

I’m so happy, so excited…
This is my first finished game ever.
And better, for LD and Compo.
Holy Shit… I’m almost crying here.

Anyway… if you guys, wants to take a look, this is the link…
Thank you all

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=57799

I believe this is the BEST LD that I’ve done to date. I had a really great time over this weekend and look forward to playing some of the other games submitted for this LD.

Now submitted, you can go check it out at this place..

I’m going to try and play everyone’s game who leaves a comment. 😉

So coalesce is done. I’m pretty pleased with the result this time.

Grab some friends, and get online. I might try and organise a schedule later so that we can get enough people playing.

I’ve finally finished my game! Deceit! You can play is here…

Deceit is the story of a where a madman loses his memory, and the voices in his head take him over. The voices tell him to do stuff he doesn’t agree with, but he complies out of fear. You play as the madman, where you must follow the voices is this horror shooter game.

I put a lot more effort than I ever have into this Ludum Dare game! This is defiantly my most advanced and complete game I have ever submitted during a Ludum Dare.

MY NAME IS TANNER DANIELS, AND I AM A 16 YEAR OLD DUBSTEP PRODUCER, AND THE AUDIO IS VERY IMPORTANT TO ME! PLEASE VOTE KINDLEY IN AUDIO. This game features advanced vo-coding and vocal time and pitch manipulation. Creating all the vocals and such were incredibly hard, and you won’t find this form of vocal-editing in ANY OTHER LD GAME!I spent a lot of time on audio.
I am not a artist, and I am amazed I was able to accomplish what I did, the lighting is once of the biggest things that brings my game together.
I had a lot of fun working on the gun mechanics (even though they were a pain). I am super proud that I accomplished creating a automatic gun!!!

I am super excited about this game and I really hope you enjoy the game!

Lets get top 25 in audio this LD! (I reached #26 last LD…)

My soundcloud page

Wow …

I never though dit will be this entertaining and fun … I should more compos x)

So here is my entry to the Ludum Dare 34 : Core Guardian

Give it a try and I hope you’ll like it :3

Page : http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=60651

Finally. I did compo. Let’s play those games!

Here’s  mine:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=55697

Tags: 2D, compo, ld34, screenshot

I’ve submitted my ludumdare game for the topic of “Growing”

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=60736

Another case of my first idea being too complicated – I got lots of great work done on my engine, but by the halfway point I’d found myself with lots of technical work done and very little actual game. Stepped away for a while, and came back with six hours to spare to do the simplest game I could think of (that fit both themes).

And so I present my remake of – Snake!

You only get two controls – turn left, or right – and every pellet you eat scores points but makes you grow longer and faster. This is probably the most basic game I’ve ever submitted, but I’m glad I came back and finished this after running adrift on Saturday. You can try the game here (Windows only, sorry folks)

Best of luck to everyone else, and I hope you had fun taking part!

I came up with a weird idea about growing your magical influence by traversing ley lines around a map.  You control a fanatic Cthulhu cult who wishes to bring the elder gods into the world.  A classic set of “adventurers” are set against you.

It was created in Unity 5.3.

Vote and play here!

A minor related web post here.

A bit more than 23 hours ’till the jam ends, and lots of things still left to do. Time to sleep tho. Here’s some gameplay.

I don’t normally do these, but I can’t seem to get into the IRC channel so…

I made a silly party game about mathematically stacking dice, that you can play in Tabletop Simulator or print (or 3D print!) out at home. :V

It’s called The Dice Tower of Babylon, and you can check it out it here:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=34144

I guess I can say “I did it”. I’ve made a complete game, albeit without sound or music (and a bit of a rushed ending).

This is a pretty original take on shooters, as far as I know. Please feel free to try it here (web game): http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=3945

Just submitted my entry!! Wow, that was a really intense LD! Congratulations for everyone that participated somehow!

Now, a shower, some tea, and maybe play some games~

Feel free to have a look at my game! http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=49665

I finished!  Please check out Snow n’ Grow and please rate it!  Thank you!

It’s done. Well, done-ish. There where things that I never got around too. Like:

• Title Screen
• In Game Help
• Better Squirrel Graphics
• Animation Improvements
• Smaller Bounding Boxes
• Squirrel on Squirrel Collisions
• Pines
• Proper Z Indexing
• And More

But it’s still functionally complete. I had the choice to spend my last hour on better squirrel graphics or other stuff. After doing some research and discovering that a decent looking squirrel walk cycle’d require a least four frames (the game was hard coded for two) and that neither of my exiting frames would work, I gave up on that. It’s a good thing too, as while implementing high scores and a few other things, I discovered and fixed some bugs.

I really wish I’d have gotten my release cycle setup before the compo. It took me almost the entire submission hour to get the binary and source uploaded. My README is pretty rough, but I realized while I was writing it, that I was running out of time. Whew. Kinda glad this is over.

What a wild ride. This is my first full-fat LD, and definitely the busiest weekend game jam I’ve ever taken part in.

But I’m pretty happy with the result! And I definitely want to do this again. Looking forward to judging some cool games tomorrow.

With just 5 minutes to spare as I’m typing this from a final review session…I DID IT! This is probably my most content-packed LD, so I’m certainly improving over the years with time-management. Or maybe this was just the first LD in awhile that I didn’t have to spend an hour or two brain storming! Good luck to everyone…I’m gonna go take a shower…

Try out my alpha build here!

Didn’t make it in time for the compo, but I decided to post the alpha here and maybe add/fix some stuff for the Jam!

http://gamejolt.com/games/run-gun/113663

EDIT: Currently having problems uploading to the website. It’ll be a moment 😛

EDIT: The build is up! It seems someone (the person right above me) has named his game the exact same thing… thats funny.

I think that’s the first time I’ve finished the Ludum Dare and been relatively happy that I’ve accomplished the game I set out to do.

Granted, it could use some work still… but I “finished” it.

I’ve played some other peoples’ games, and they’re pretty cool. I don’t think mine really compares, but it is good to actually finish one of these.

It’s been fun guys. Until next time!

Submitted the final bugfix 2 minutes before the submission hour ended.
For my first Ludum Dare, I think it’s ok. The gameplay is complete and the game is pretty fun (and hard), but I couldn’t get all the graphics and sounds I wanted into the game.
I’ll release a post-compo version soon.
Good night, and good luck to everyone still working on the jam.

*****************

OLD POST:

While there were 15 seconds left on the Compo-clock, the Compo-radiobutton was greyed out, so I couldn’t submit my game for the compo.

So I submitted it for the jam, even while I sufficed for the Compo rules.

EDIT

I sent Mike a tweet, and within 5 minutes he responded that I forgot to click all the buttons. Let’s just say I’m really tired 😉

*******************

But after all, here is my game: Man Simulator.

You’ll have to do 2 manly tasks to become a man again, after you’ve lost your beard!

You can play it HERE

I’m pleasantly surprised how this came out.  I’ve dabbled in Unity, but I’ve never devoted a full weekend to making a single game.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=60660

Wow, it took me over an hour to complete all builds, upload them, make screenshots, etc… Thought it will take 10 minutes at most. And of course the WebGL build doesn’t work properly…

Yes, I made a snake as well

It had been too long since my last Ludum Dare attempt. So I decided to go all in on my re-entry into 48 hour game development.

And then I created this monstrosity.

Play HERE

You guys are insane. This is madness! How do you manage to do these crazy materials by yourselves in so little time?
It has been a nice time, nonetheless.

My submission is up and I’d LOVE any feedback.
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=60154

If you wish to have your game reviewed, feel free to ask. I’ll play a lot of games from here.

Cheers and best of luck to you.

Tags: ld34

I was able to finish something to the compo. The linux build should work (well, worked on my system)! =D

However, the Windows version didn’t work out of the box… As usual. XD

It’s probably something quite simple, but I’ll look into it tomorrow, after work.

For now, I’d rather rest.

See ya. o/

Well, I “Finished” My game. I submitted it for compo at http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=55143

I could’ve definitely finished in the jam but I’m tired right now and I need a break, so yeah, you can check it out if you want.

It’s an autorunner. It uses two buttons to make some pretty hard puzzles. You can play it in your browser (although last ludum dare the engine didn’t cooperate with me for not-Chrome).

I’d appreciate it if you checked it out!

Here!

This was a productive weekend, even if there are still lots of things that I would tweak or add. I’ll leave the details for the post-mortem, but I’m quite happy with the result, I can actually play the web version on my phone! I know this sounds really stupid, but I was surprised at how well it worked considering that I wasn’t thinking of mobile platforms at all

Behold “Fun with magnets!”

Tags: haXe, HaXeFlixel, ld34, magnets

I can not believe I made it.  I was right down to the wire.  Check it out http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=60667

Click to play!

Collect black dots and avoid white dots! And be wary of those grey diamonds!

Click here to play!

Super 2 Button Growdown is a 4-player game where each player must use two buttons to jump on the heads of their opponents to be the last one standing. However, as players lose health, they’ll also grow in size, making them able to jump higher and more easily hit opponents.

Resonance by Starspell

I’m fairly happy with what I achieved this weekend. I am however disappointed that I didn’t manage to get any audio in. I was looking forward to doing it and in some ways it was the audio that I wanted to spend the most time with to give the game a degree of polish.

Ah well! That’s LD for ya!

Now time to rest before I try to play 100+ games tomorrow.

Very happy with how this turned out. I decided to play to my strengths, which I knew would be art and writing, so I went with something simple to take advantage of the themes. There’s a couple of spelling errors, and I’d probably play with some of the writing a bit more if I had the time, but I hope you enjoy the short narrative experience that is Tamám Shud.

Ok, time for bed. It’s 5 a.m. here in Finland and work awaits me in a few hours. If Jammers can stay awake tomorrow, so can I.

Here’s what I got. It’s my first Unity game and so I’m very glad I could get it out on time. As you can see, it’s a two player boxing game. Tap on either side of the screen or use the left/right arrow key to make a player lean forward. This gets the hands swinging. So timing is everything in this game. The only thing growing, though, is your ego

If you got interested please check out the entry and try playing the WebGL version.

Tags: 2d unity, boxing, rumble, Two buttons Controls

The story of my game is pretty crazy, straight from the description:

Ancient romans have found a time machine and have travelled to the future, where a crazy nature warrior controls the ancient art of beanstalks, drives cars into people, plants mushrooms that slow soldiers, and puts thorns in the middle of their path. Ancient romans have archers though! And, and soldiers! Surely they will win!

My game was made with the awesome Haxeflixel library, and I had a lot of fun.

You can play my game here

I’ve made a timelapse of this weekend, and will do a post mortem after I have played some of your games! Have fun!

Play the game here

Antibounce is a Jam game where you control an infinitely bouncing ball to collect coins. During the middle of Saturday I was going crazy with the first idea I had, but it didn’t work out so well. Mid-day today I figured out exactly what I wanted to do. So, I present this! I’m glad how this turned out. I still have almost a day left in the Jam, but whatever. I hope those who play it enjoy it thoroughly!

My Growing Bug, controlled with a left and a right button was submitted for the compo.

For the first time I’ve finished a game with sounds (a few) and even a menu!

Just started, I’m a little bit late.

Not sure where I’m going with this but I’ve managed to implement some yummy clicking action.

Unlike the last time where I was far too late to submit a decent entry and had to compete in the Jam, my entry for the 48-hour compo is more or less complete.

The themes were pretty inspiring and I managed to follow both! The game, Wesh Grow, uses Thrust / Gravity Force like mechanics, with only two control buttons, one for each thruster. And the goal of the game is to make your spaceship grow by collecting parts. The parts collected affect the ship’s size, mass and thrust power, making it more and more challenging to manoeuvre. The downside to all this is that, as usual, the level design is a bit poor, but also the artwork suffered a bit. I deliberately chose a simple palette and a small resolution so that I would not spend hours doing my sprites.

The game is probably hard to control at first. You get used to it after a short while, but I decided to make the spaceship indestructible so as not to frustrate the player. Here is a video of the first levels for those who don’t feel like downloading and playing it:

The seven false lords of Spirit Serenade. Can you defeat them all?

Remember to check us out on Twitter @exceedgame for constant live updates

on all of our projects!

Re:sizer (VR) is a lot of firsts for us. We’ve never made a 3D game, made anything with VR support, or participated in a Ludum Dare (or any game jam for that matter).  I learned more in a weekend than I could have ever dreamed I would learn.

I know it’s not much (and definitely doesn’t look like much) but I have to say I’m rather proud of this little game/prototype!

This makes it hard for us Linux peoples…

Play it!

Seems like I love extremes. This is my third Ludum Dare. Both past times I did my games according to Compo rules – however, 48 hours was turning out to be too little and consequently they ended up as Jam submissions.

This time I slacked off for the entire weekend and started working 6 hours before Compo ended – and guess what? I did it!

My first Ludum Dare Compo entry – AvsL!

A game for two players, where all’s fair!

Groundmole Antonio wants to grow so high that he can take over the world!
Gardener Louis notices the danger and tries to thwart the evil groundmole plans!

In order to win, it is recommended to do whatever it takes to keep the second player away from the keyboard – just keep it legal, please! 😀

Save the world!

Play AvsL with someone!

PS. Instead of my usual C with Allegro 5, this game uses JavaScript with fun and fresh library by Sos Sosowski – allegro.js 😀

When I tried out the game on my mac today I realised that the system had some gamebreaking bugs. The game did not load levels correctly and you couldn’t press the two controlling buttons at the same time (That’s a nice bug on a two-button game). The bugs are now fixed and the game should run correctly on Chrome / Firefox / Safari. If you have tried the game before, you might want to clear your browser-cache to get the updated code.

Wow, that was SO MUCH FUN! \o/

You control the 2 white DNA Polymerase enzymes on screen. Your job is to complete the DNA sequence shown in the bottom of the screen. A goes with T, C goes with G.

Press the left button (A, CTRL, Fire1) to pluck the nucleobase picked by the enzyme on the left, or the right button (D, ALT, Fire2) to pluck the nucleobase picked by the enzyme on the right.

Known bugs:

• Half the Nucleobase letters have their rotation wrong
• Score is kinda meaningless, it should punish you more when you make mutations
• Score is missing sounds for good and bad move. The code is there and ready for it though.
• I am clueless about aspect ratio and resolution so the Windows version is pretty messed up if you don’t use 1980×1024.
• There’s no way to get out of the GameOver screen (You’ll have to ALT-F4 in Windows or refresh the page in your browser)
• Probably many more

Try it and leave a comment

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=31782

My game is all done and ready to play!

Excited to play everyone else’s games as well!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=49147

My first ever game jam is over.

A lot of fun, and not a lot of sleep, but well worth it. I wrote small to-do lists throughout the jam and I’m now left with a mini-diary of what I did. Really cool to see how the idea evolved a developed as it went on.

Note to self for next time: Don’t start with the art and sound first, then build a game around that!

Screenshot of the “final” -ish product:

Looking forward to seeing what everyone else has come up with. Looking at the twitter and have already seen some amazing stuff. Night!

Tags: DevSocYork

Alright so i didn’t have enough time this weekend to submit to the compo, but that’s okay.

At least i will be able to complete it in time for the Jam deadline.

The gameplay is done, i need to add some menus (intro/score), sound and music and maybe a small intro if time allows it.

Couple of othe refinements as well, such as screenshake when getting hit.

Here is a new update of the gameplay:

I think my Trello says it all.

I should have done the warmup. :p

One Day left, looking good. Some sounds are missing and pacing is a bit unbalanced. Maybe add some music but I think it is mostly ready for submission!

…so  many things can seem to all go wrong at once.
I think I made it in time, working on getting html5 working so hopefully that becomes a thing soon.

So far so good! But there is still much work to be done!

Bonsai Growth Simulator

is a relaxing peaceful game about growing Bonsais. Give it a try!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=21238

Had a smooth time this LD, mostly because I picked a simple idea. Had the core procedural tree mesh generation working after like 3 hours and the rest was struggling to make it look nice and not feel terrible to control. Hope you enjoy

Ok, I can’t say if I will complete it and submit since it seems time is missing…

Anyway, here’s my third prototype, with sprites imported (from Spriter, working great with Construct2, it even can smoth transition between animations !).

Third Prototype

Voilà !

I finished my game and posted it around 6:15, but had to hurry away before I could write a proper finishing post.  Anyway, this was my first Ludum Dare and I think it went pretty well.  I was not able to work on it as much as I wanted but still ended up with a finished playable game so I am happy.

My game is Vine.  It attempts to show what it is like to live the life of a Vine.  Finding water, getting sunlight, and avoiding other animals, using only two buttons to move your vine.

Link to my game.

I would love feedback on my game, especially as this is my first time.  I look forward to playing everyone else’s game as well, and good luck to those still doing the Jam.

It was only last month that I decided I would enter Ludum Dare for the first time. Since, I had completely forgotten about it until 12/10/15, one day before Ludum Dare 34. I quickly typed in all caps in my Skype chat between the members of my dev team, “GUYS,” “DROP EVERYTHING,” “LUDUM DARE 34 IS TOMORROW.” I was determined to make my first entry for the Ludum Dare game jam. When time came to come up with an idea, I wanted to use both themes that tied, the one idea stood out in my head, Balloon Roulette. A game where, if you press the right button, your balloon inflates, and if you press the wrong one, *POP* goes your balloon. The idea, though simple would take me until Sunday at 22:00 to finish. By the time I was finished, I was quite satisfied with my simplistic, mobile-oriented game of chance, I pushed to my repo, built with Unity Cloud Build and submitted. The game has a fairly satisfying main menu, if I do say so myself, and a few simple mechanics that could easily make a popular game on the mobile market. As of now, I want to eventually release this game on Android and iOS, as I feel as if most mobile games are moving to a more simplistic style. Moreover, regardless what happens later on to the weird game that I submitted, no matter what ratings I get, I will definitely be doing this again. This was both a learning experience and a challenge, a very fun one. You will definitely be seeing something from me in April, for Ludum Dare 35.

As for my first submission, you can see it, play it and rate it at http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=63909.

Bugs are normal, right???

Game done and uploaded. Only worked on it during some of the second day after scrapping the initial idea.

You can play it here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=5432

And I’ve added a youtube video of basic gameplay as well (sadly the audio doesn’t seem to want to get recorded). Screenshots/comments of any highscores you reach are much appreciated.

I forgot to post right after I was done like I’d planned, but here is my entry:

Give and Take

I hope you all enjoy it. This is the first LD game I’ve made that I am actually proud of and enjoy playing.

My game “Torque” is now available to play on all platforms and from the Ludum Dare website.

Whiplash
by Tziomara Ximenez

I I I I
breathe in
the noxious national anthem,

the scent of Zoloft stars and
whip
lash
stripes;

I I I I
damn in dream the zombie master Cristobal Colon,

whose toxic flamebreath slayed
the ebon queens
whose code runs through
our every crazed cry.

Yaaasss, girl.

Like animals entranced, my mestiza sisters shriek into heaven.

You can check out my game here!

This is my second LD and I think I did pretty good with it. But, that’s for you to decide.

Some screenies:

Star Eater is complete and submitted as a Jam entry.

Submission Link

In my first post I lamented my progress After that I switched gears to focus on pixel-art and got re-inspired.

Exhibit A versus Exhibit B

Please leave your honest feedback, and I will do the same

Ludum Dare 34 Game Jam Malaysia

Our Game “Fragile”
Stay tuned for tonight release at Ludum Dare Website.

“The Art of Fragile”
Feel free to have a look.
http://jstanconceptart.blogspot.my/…/…/fragile-game-art.html

Hey everyone! I tested out my game under Linux with WINE and it runs perfectly! If you have WINE you can still run the Windows version of my game with no problems!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=62665

Hello fellow Ludumers and Darers!

I’m excited to have completed my first ever LD, and first ever game. It’s not very complex, but I was trying to keep it very simple since my experience is limited.

Please have a look at my game and leave some feedback

Can’t wait to see what great things everyone else has made, but for now…sleep.

zzz

I didn’t have very much time this weekend so I decided to keep it simple. I wanted to create something where the gameplay itself would be pretty straightforward to implement, allowing me more time to focus on other aspects.

All you have to do is match your entity’s energy to that of the beam of energy flowing towards you. LMB switches to Light, RMB switches to dark. That’s two buttons, but I also implemented a difficulty modifier that “grows” as the game goes on. So I guess I’m going for both themes with that one. Hitting dark as light, or light as dark, kills your entity. Upon dying, you’ll get a stats screen detailing your run. How good can you do?

The game starts off pretty easy, but I added a difficulty setting to the Options menu so you can ramp it up if you’re after a challenge. I’m pretty happy I managed to create what I created in the 12 hours that I had.

Why not give it a shot and see what your highest score is? How far can you make it on the toughest difficulty setting?

There’s a WebGL version so you can give it a quick play:
Compo Entry

Check out my game Not Enough Space

Window, Linux, and maybe Mac!

Well crap, I wasn’t able to make it for the compo, since it’s a bit hard to not be distracted by the internets, but I’m not quitting here, I’ll just do the Jam instead. Luckily enough though, I have a pretty good idea involving a turret shooting against random meteors falling into buildings, and alien ships bombarding the buildings as well. The turret would be defending the buildings, by shooting constantly while the player would control the turret by driving it left and right. Hopefully it’ll be done by monday or tuesday. Hopefully.

BTW, I suck at focusing…  

Hey everyone!

I just submitted my game to the compo, and I thought I could share a bit of my postmortem with you all.

Glyph

If there’s one thing that the compo taught me was to spend A LOT of time planning. I spent about 30 minutes planning and it was waay too short. I think maybe an extra 45 to maybe even 2 whole hours could have been beneficial toward my goal. This is because although two days might seem like ample time for your idea, it most likely ISN’T. So, that brings me to my first lesson;

#1) Strip down your biggest most awesome-est idea, down to its very CORE. What is it that makes your game fun ON ITS OWN. Meaning, if you were to take out all the fancy graphics and cool stuff, would this mechanic make your game fun? Then once you have that; STRIP IT DOWN MOAR.

This also taught me that you need to focus on ONE aspect of the compo is you want to achieve a certain position on the board. If you want to be high in the graphics section, focus MOST of your time on graphics and make simple mechanics. If you want a coolness or theme section, you need to spend more time on planning than anything to come up with something original. So, here we go to…

#2) If you’re not going to spend a ridiculous chunk of your time composing the soundtrack or the artwork, focus on the MECHANIC. Super Mario Bros, literally has one action; jumping. That’s it. You move to the right, and jump. That’s literally the entire game of Super Mario. Then, you build off of it, adding obstacles (Pitfalls, Enemies,etc), and that’s how we make a game.

and lastly, and probably most importantly;

3) Have FUN, and make the game YOU want to make. Sure, there’s the theme, but don’t take it so literal. I’ve see a lot of people give up on this game solely due to not being able to come up with a good enough idea for the theme. If you got nothing, use Google. Google the theme and see what comes up, or even punch it into a Thesaurus and see what similar words or synonyms come up that can give you a creative loop-hole. The best part of the compo is you get to learn new skills by actually DOING, not by reading or studying. You find where your strengths and weaknesses are and it helps you improve as a game dev.

I hope this helped someone reading this, and good luck to all you guys doing the Jam!

Tools used;

Programming/IDE: GM:Studio

Art: In-engine editor, Cosmigo Pro Motion, Aseprite.

SFX: Bfxr

Tags: 2D, compo, Game Dev, ld #34, Ludum Dare, motivation, post-mortem, update

(CLICK FOR ANIMATION)

Any comments are welcome 😀

Note: if anyone knows how to post gifs animated without you having to clock on them that would be great

Tags: 2D, gif, jam, Main Menu, MUNCH, progress, unity, unity3d

THis is my jam submission. Ty it.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=65795

BUTTON PUSHER Version 1.0a

RULES:

Sit down with a friend

Choose two buttons

Push them

Talk about it

Take turns

You will grow as friends. Or not.

Suggested buttons:

How is your relationship with your father?

Could you be a little less of a racist dick?

Do you have feelings for me?

Have you ever……??

I made a 2 button infinite runner, press both at the same time to jump. This is my first time using Unreal for a game jam, actually my first 3d game jam. What’s funny about Unreal is that some stuff is super easy but other stuff takes way longer you’d expect I also made it fully in blueprint. Most of my time was spent getting the track generating well and player movement. Also I had to learn a lot along the way. I will write up a full postmortem soon.

Berry Thorny – Official Entry Page

Tags: unreal

I forgot to make a post earlier on in development, but better late than never! I was worried early on about not being able to finish anything substantial in time, with this begin my first Ludum Dare, but I ended up completing my game entirely, which was a nice surprise. Keeping it simple really does work!

There was even time to create an online global leaderboard (albeit an unstable and hacked together one), which was worth the hours spent grappling with SQL and the inevitable nightmare it will cause when I finally get to sleep.

I made a Twitter game for the compo, but I didn’t have time to finish it. 5 hours to build to vision.

Check it out at @bartergame. Full rules at http://crhallberg.com/barter.

Happy sales.

Good news everyone!

My compo entry Asteroid League is now available for:

• Web (both WebGL and Unity Web Plugin)
• Windows
• OS X

Comment on this post if you need Linux.

You can play and rate here.

I just submitted Synergy Shakedown to the compo a few hours ago. I’m not good at writing postmortems, but I thought I’d share some little things that seemed relevant before I forget them.

Colours

As a self-imposed restriction, I used the NES palette for the game’s art. I was able to load it into GIMP for easy colour picking.

This turned out to be a lot harder than I expected. A lot of the oranges were pretty similar, and the only yellow is really pale.

One thing that frustrated me was how it’s hard to to distinguish the player’s hair from the blue background. If I had time to go back and change the colours of all the sprites, I’d probably theme it to be more distinguishable.

JavaScript Quirks

I wanted the game to have the game’s pixels sharp like an old NES game. This can be hard to do with modern graphics frameworks like Unity or Phaser. To get around this, I made the player character have no sprite, and put a “model” sprite on top of him. Every frame, the model’s position matched the player’s, but with the decimals truncated. One time the Nintendo Web Framework documentation warned me to never use Math.floor(), and instead use the double tildy instead.

var floatingX = 3.2;
var hardX = ~~(floatingX); // hardX should be an integer of 3

It’s kind of become a magical floor operator in my head now.

Tuning for Gameplay

I think one of my flaws is balancing my games. A lot of the games I’ve made in the past are too easy or too frustratingly hard. Sometimes I’ve neglected this!

By keeping the scope small, I was forced to make sure the game was a little more balanced. Not by much, but it’ll help me form better habits in the future. That’s part of why Ludum Dare’s endearing for me.

Cutscene Polish

The cutscenes were a bit of a last-minute addition, but they added a lot of character to the game.

An hour before the deadline, I changed the dialogue and made the last dialogue scene flicker with an earlier one. It made it better, but it made me feel like George Lucas, updating his movies after he made them to make them “better” haha.

Getting a Child to Playtest

I’m travelling Japan right now, and I did the game jam with a few other developers at an old weaver’s workshop in Kyoto. At one point, one of the developer’s friends came in and brought their six-year old. I plugged in a SNES gamepad and got him to play it, and he got enamoured with it. It helped me find some pressure points in the design, as well as get a morale boost knowing a child enjoyed it.

He didn’t speak any English, and I didn’t speak much Japanese, but the moment was really special to me.

Overall, I had a lot of fun doing the compo. Hopefully I can do it again soon! Best of luck to those finishing up on the jam!

Tags: ld34, postmortem, synergy shakedown

Phew, managed to finish a very basic game. Play it.