Hey all!

Just wanted to say that I’ve had a blast doing Ludum Dare this year. I made my first game using Construct 2, Ableton Live 8, and Paint.Net.

Since I’m not a programmer and this is my first delving into game making, I decided to do something a little heavier on art and less heavy on gameplay (something to focus on learning for the next one!). With that in mind, I created what I called “art exploration.” The theme, growing and two-button controls I approached by deciding to design long canvases that were thin and then grew to a larger side. After I designed several, I picked a handful.

So the player, whom I decided to name Derek, drifts along with a simple Asteroids-esque control system where you’re not quite in control through several scenes. These scenes grow and then contract, so as the player goes along he or she is able to see more and less art, giving breath and taking it away from the game. Choosing to only spend about 6 or 7 hours on it (getting married soon; knew I wouldn’t have much time), I added a couple of other effects and related it to a short quote I had seen before (in an effort to unify the piece).

Anyway, I’ve had a great time, and I’ve been surprised at the reactions which have been supportive and constructive. Thanks guys!

If you think you’d enjoy my low-gameplay art game, give it a play at: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=63970

I will write a making of entry later on, but for now I want to recapitulate how this Ludum Dare went for me.

Overall I’m content with the process and result, but there’s still room for improvement.

I believe that my initial idea and the base mechanic of Litterlings (creating and destroying terrain in a point gravity setup, with creatures living on that terrain) has great potential for interesting games. And even though I like the way the game turned out, I don’t feel that it really exploits the possibilities I created with this basic setup.

What went well:
+ I didn’t take on too much with my goals, therefore I got to do sound, particle effects and polishing, which adds a lot to the experience.
+ Probably my best entry so far regarding fun and completeness.
+ A lot of fun in the development process and also a great learning experience (especially the pixel based terrain and collision).
+ I created a nice base system to further experiment on in the future.

Where I see room for improvement:
– I don’t feel like Litterlings makes the most out of the promising start concept.
– I got too little sleep (~6 hours) and completely wrecked my sleep schedule. Also I ate as unhealthy as possible. Felt kind of sick afterwards.
– I didn’t flesh out my concept, resulting in a second brainstorming and ideation phase halfway through the development.

What I plan for the future of Litterlings:
– add a lose condition (dropping your Litterling count to < 20% of the highest score)
– create an android version with start menu, highscore table and optimized layout
– add the possibility to zoom in to and follow your spaceship with the camera, important especially in the later stages of the game
– more polishing, balancing and tweaking
– experiment with the base setups and different objectives, like an approach of combat and destruction or a strategy game

Check out Litterlings here!

So the initial idea of my game was completely different to 3d snake but well…that’s how most creative stuff works out. I’m pretty satisfied with how this ended up, would have liked some ambient music but couldn’t end up finding any that fit. Anyway check it out below!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=63883

I published a post jam version, with some bugs fixed!

Enjoy!

This was my first LD. I heard about it before and played some games created for it without even knowing they were created in 48 hours.

I have to say it has been an awesome experience really. I wish I could thank you all individually for creating so great atmosphere here. Also, the voting system is genial.

Ok, enough praising. Let’s talk about my game.

What went good:
– I came up with the concept quite fast and sticked to it until the end
– I read some quides and stories by other LDers in advance, that’s probably why the dialogue is there
– I finally used git for my project
– I got enough sleep, so my productivity didn’t drop
– The music. It was actually my first attempt at music making
– I didn’t visit facebook or similar throughout the weekend
– I wasn’t disturbed by anyone

What went bad:
– My eating schedule was messed up. I had one HUGE meal throughout the whole weekend and nothing else
– I wrote some terrible collision code at the start thinking I will have not to return to it ever again, but turned out I had to adjust it a lot of times. This actually caused some bugs with collisions
– The difficulty. Let me talk a bit about this. So, I really like this kind of “skill” games, one example for all is Super Meat Boy (all bandages). Of course I want to make it fun for me, and I want the levels to be challenging. I create levels that are hard and nicely challenging for me, but combine some skill in the genre with designing levels which I know how to win, and you get impossible levels for other people. Which really sucks. You know, you spend most of the time on mechanics and features, and then you lose it all on level design. This exact thing happened with my earlier project, but I didn’t learn for some reason. The worst part is that most of the interesting features are in the levels 90% of the players will never get to. It has a grow mechanic, but I think nobody reached that yet. I really hope I will finally learn and start making proper difficulty curve.
– Too long levels perhaps? It is probably frustrating to have to go through the whole level if you die at the end

Anyway, here is a chronological log which I wrote up during the weekend.

5 hours till start
So, in preparation, I set up my repository, learned to work with Bosca Ceoil and sfxr for music and sounds, and I think I am ready. I can’t wait for this to finally start.

I had several ideas written up. I think I had an idea for about 10 themes. I lost them all because I forgot to save. Whatever.

Anyway, I have a little neat concept that could – with some tweaks – fit most of the themes. Well, not most, but some.

I really hope the theme will not end up being Growing. Like… what… would I do…

Control the environment… same…

I guess I will complain about theme anyway. I like isolation, stick together and strength in numbers the most.

I think I have everything set up, including food and beverage for the weekend. The best part is my parents are leaving the house for the weekend, so I will not have my workflow disrupted at all.

I think I better get to bed so I can get up and dev all day and all night and all day and half the night. This… is gonna be awesome. I really hope I will keep this blog running and updated.

Ok, I lied about the “go sleep” part. I set up the page, set up the canvas, made resize function and basic hello world. That is not considered making the game yet right?

Man I am so excited.

Ok, 4 hours remain. I will get hopefully 8 hours of sleep. See you, for real now.

Almost 8 am now, 5 hours in. The themes are the two worst ones. Two button controls and growing. Darn.

I at least have an idea about Two button controls. Acceleration game where you can accelerate into two directions and have to bounce off walls and shit.

Time means hours and minutes since start. Add 3 hours to get local time.

5:16 I got it going. I imported some input handlind from earlier projects and got menu up.

5:39 Level displays properly, let’s get into player physics.

5:44 Player displays and can be moved like I wanted him to. Next step – wall collisions.

6:28 Bouncing off wall finally works properly.

6:45 Ok, bouncing works. I should probably make a spreadsheed with todo and ideas.

7:18 Ok, now it works. For real now.

8:48 I got working on some dialogues and story. I will have to think of something funny. I am in the phase, where the core is working and I don’t know whether to add some features or leave them be.

10:25 My workflow is starting to slow down. I have no idea what to do next.

11:06 I just made music and generated some sound effects. Will implement them shortly.

12:19 Third level, yay. Music is not as terrible as I was worrying. The loop sounds a bit odd.

13:19 Ok, here comes the level designing. I have 2 tutorial levels and 1 real level. I think 2 tutorial is quite enough. I was thinking… maybe about 20 levels is just about right.

15:37 I took a little break. I don’t know what to do next once again. I even got the sounds done this time. Also, I said “screw menu”.

17:11 It works. I created quite a lot of dialogues to keep the players playing. Becuase the power of this game is in its later levels, and to get somewhere, I need something to hook people on. Getting close to half-time, and I am out of inspiration already. I added ice, which was probably a good idea. I need something else. Active powerups like for example instant stop is not an option with only 2 control keys. I was thinking maybe some speed upgrade, but that sounds a bit stupid.

18:03 Gravity changers. They turned out to be pretty good actually. Made one level with them, and it is awesome.

18:40 level 7 complete. I have a long night ahead of me if I really want 20 levels.

19:08 I will add some grow mechanics. While you are on a grow tile, you get bigger, making it all harder. Once you get too big (48px), you just explode.

20:39 I got the grow mechanic working. Now I need ideas for levels.

24:11 Half time, here we go. I was expanding my music, then accidentally hit Esc and lost like 1 hour of work. Darn. The music sounds like shit, but I will keep it in anyway. I tried to make the “graphics” look less like 5-year-old-made by making the colors cooler, but it seems it started lagging. Darn. The levels keep going, but I need ideas.

28:12 Night wasn’t as productive as I hoped. I have 10 levels now, and made new music. I just am out of ideas for levels dammit. I have enough game elements for various combos, but I just don’t know where things are stuck. I guess I will go get some sleep after 24 hours. I have like 10 hours of work available now, should be enough to finish this thing off.

36:30 I have 13 levels, and I think that’s enough. My play-through is about 30 minutes, so I suppose other people will have completion time somewhere around 1 hour. That’s fine I guess.

39:00 It is complete, but it NEEDS more levels. Some of the features are only merely introduced. I have 9 hours, I should be fine. But the rest is complete. And also feels complete. I haven’t even met that rare bug in two runs, it is not even worth to be bothered by. Also, my second run with adjusted levels was 15 minutes.

39:09 FUCK! It lags like hell in Firefox. Goddamn Firefox, I hate it even more that IE.

39:56 Phew. Fixed it. Note: Firefox takes for EVER to change ctx.font. Several adjustments to this fixed it, as I was changing it like n times every frame. I can’t even upvote the random guy who saved me on stackexchange.

40:08 I just realized I haven’t eaten in 24 hours. Weird I didn’t even notice it. Well, I ate had a shitload of lentils the other day, so I guess that’s why.

41:33 I made 2 more levels. But I need AT LEAST one more to make it 15.

44:17 I managed to hopefully fix one really bad bug with collisions. The size change fucked up everything. I added last very hard final level. It is done. DONE! The very last step is submission. Nothing goes wrong with that right? RIGHT?

47:57 I browsed around Ludum Dare a bit. I added several little things, but my ftp is fucked up. Hope it works.

I just remembered I didn’t make a post with my game here yet. This is the fifth time I entered a Ludum Dare, and the result is certainly my most complex game so far, there’s a lot of different mechanics! The game in itself is really hard to describe… It’s basically a combination of a puzzle and an idle/progression game (though the idle elements are only really used at the end). You’re a lawnmower that can shoot seed balls to grow plants or destroy enemies, and new plants can be created to maneuver the level or to farm more seeds.

Give it a try here: Lawnmower Puzzle

Hey all if you haven’t had a chance, you should check out our project Organ-izer!

Use two buttons to control a bridge in this unique physics-driven puzzle game! Sort the nutrients entering your body to live a long, fruitful life! How long will you live? This is a first for our team, and we had a blast making this game! We hope you enjoy it!

I added a walkthrough video for my game, so if you don’t have the patience to beat it at least you can see all the waves and the ending!

If you didn’t checkout my game yet, but got interested you can just click here to have a look! I’d be glad if you did~ ^^

Play mine, I’ll play yours.  I can do web or mac, thanks!

Hello!

I talked about Bellows already but never with a gif.  So we’re tryin it again!

Bellows is the Jam game Grahm Nesbitt and I made.  It’s about a man trying to make his…unconventional escape from the city using his trusty bellows to propel himself.  But in the sky there lives all manner of creatures, any of which could bring his journey crashing down.

We worked hard on this game, me on coding and graphics and Grahm on music and sound.  We’re really proud of it and think it turned out quite well.  We hope you like it too!

I have started to continue work on my entry, bridge balance. Don’t worry though, the original is still available for judging.

So far I have added in a highly requested feature, a Next Log Timer!

Play the Ludum dare version and the updated version here.

Woohoo!!!!

This LD is the first time I have gotten to 100 reviews. When this LD rolled around I decided I was going to go all out reviewing other people’s games, and so this time has been the most fun LD I’ve participated in.

If you haven’t already checked out my game, you definitely should.

Give and Take

I’m planning on building on it while I’m on break. I will post back here with my progress in the future.

this jam was a lot of fun! I’ve got to take it slow reviewing games. I try to give some constructive feedback on all of them.

Here are some GIFs, they don’t seem to auto-play

I made a timelapse too!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=27074

So, this was my first ever game jam of any kind, and only the second video game I’ve ever worked on. I have a much larger and ambitious project that I’ve been working on as I learn gamedev, but I wanted something to help get me excited again. And this jam was it. I had an absolute blast, and despite my trepidation coming in, I was able to complete my plans for my game much faster than expected, and deliver basically what I planned to. I even had time to polish up the graphics and give it a really cool retro feel.

And then there’s the comments my game has received since rating started. Which have humbled and flattered me no end. I came into this hoping I didn’t make a pile of garbage. It sounds like people honestly enjoy what I created, and that makes it all worth it, ten times over.

I’ll be taking all the feedback I get, and some plans I have for improving what I built, and polishing the game up over the Christmas holidays, as a present to myself. My first completed and, apparently, GOOD game. Thank you, everyone who has provided feedback, and to all the volunteers who help run this challenge! I’ll definitely be back for another jam in the future, schedule permitting.

My game is Centi-Snake, and if you haven’t tried it yet, please do!

http://www.atticus.codes/projects/ludumdare2015/index.html

Tanya Titor and the Time Twister – Play Now

So we “finished” our game in time. What does that mean? Well, we’re proud of the game we released. We feel it was a very good entry for Ludum Dare. And we hope you are enjoying it! But we still have many additions and modifications we would like to make before it is “complete” in our eyes. Which I suppose is the point of Ludum Dare: make a game that can is a starting point that can be iterated on to make something even better and really worthwhile. And we hope to make a game that will be truly worthwhile.

We learned a lot from our last Ludum Dare. This time we kept our goals within reach, and aimed for a game that was both fun to play and also exhibited our personality. We like to make games that are big on personality, and also fun to play, and with Tanya Titor, we think we reached a good balance between the two. But there are still a few sticking points for us. For instance, we would like to make more enemy types, and more weapons. And we would like the game to have an ending. And all these things are in the cards for future versions of Tanya Titor and the Time Twister.

But we are very proud of what we have achieved, and hope you agree it is fun as well!

first LD, quite intense, would do again. after some well deserve rest,  now I get to go crazy with playing, rating, and commenting on everyone’s games!

Also if you want us to check out your game, feel free to leave a comment or drop a e-mail at oz2mura at gmail dot com.

I decided to make a list :3

Top 3 games by timespan

• “Spore” by Will Wright 
(spanning billions of years)
• “SAUROPOD vs THEROPOD” by Martijn Frazer 
(spanning millions of years)
• “Civilization” by Sid Meier (spanning thousands of years)

Like puzzles?
Like platformers?

My Ludum Dare entry is right for you!

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE GAME

Introducing There’s No Going Back, my LD34 Compo entry.

The concept is simple: complete the level by only jumping and moving forward, unless acted upon by the launch blocks around the map. Collect all the coins before reaching the goal to complete the level and advance.

There are lots of hazardous spikes that you must look out for.

So far, the game has gotten fantastic reviews, and I have plans on developing it further. Hopefully you enjoy playing it as much as I did developing it!

Thanks!

-Eric

Hexor

A Real Time Hexagon Tile Based Strategy Game

Hexor is a RTSHTBSG(totally legit genre) that lets the player command the fight beween a malware and an antivirus. Your job is to defend the hexagonal battlefield regain all the chips that were infected by the malware.

A typical pre-game situration.

Pre/Mid-Game siturations look like this.

Though we had many game breaking bugs and balancing issues, all of them were fixed in the 0.1.1 update so YOU are sure to get a bug free version of HeXor.

Click here to play and vote. I’ll be waiting for your critism.

Our Game,”Blood Cleaner”,is almost ready. Players only need to use two buttons to control the HEALER to fight. the bullet can be absorbed by the HEALER with same color.

Look at the BOSS，Are U mouth watering？

Hi fellows,
This is my first ludum dare, and basically first finished game.
Cause of that, maybe I’m a bit crude about game interaction with users.
I see a lot of people complaining about the mechanics of my game.

Seeing people playing, It’s pretty clear that the mechanics is not clear enough.
My bad, I know.

And I know that I should live with that, and do a better explanation in my next game. Anyway.

But what could I do to help people to understand my mechanics ?
I even have some things which people never tried.
In the explanation I tried to give some clues about it. But from what I can see, nobody is even trying.
Can I update the game, just with some images explaining the mechanic ?
Or should I upload another image into my game profile with it?
Not everybody check all the images.
I really don’t know what do.

I know, this is not a competition or anything like that. But I really would like to have people playing my game, and really enjoying it. And not complaining about the behaviors and such.

Please, Ludum Dare elders, give me some feedback about how to improve my game… =P

Couldn’t resist to make something related to SW :).  Build ships and fight with enemies.

Click Here

I was half-way through writing a monster post here, but decided to retry with a nice tidy summation of my thoughts while creating Roto this compo:

• First time finishing a compo entry. So, so, so much harder than a jam (for me), but oh my so much more rewarding.
• Being a solo dev who can touch on art, music, sound, level design, and game mechanics while tying it all together with a cohesive theme in 48 hours makes you a god in my eyes. You’re amazing.
• Music is really, really hard. I thought I could ‘wing’ it, and I really could not. BeepBox helped, but I have neither the talent nor the training to do anything useful in that arena.
• Practice a little bit of everything if you want to solo these.
• Scope remains one of the most important things. I found what helped me was to set in stone two separate lists: must-haves and nice-to-haves. If you don’t finish must-haves you don’t have a game to submit. Once that list is done then start pulling out your favorites from the nice-to-haves.
• Polish belongs on the must-haves list.
• You don’t have to be an amazing visual artist to make your game have some visual appeal. Simple tricks like drop shadows and squash and stretch animation do wonders. I like how the aesthetic of my game turned out, and I load zero external graphical assets (other than a font file. So I guess that’s actually 1).
• Progression in your level design is important. Ramp the player up, introduce new concepts in an appetizing way and THEN hit them over the head with it.
• It helps immensely to watch someone play who hasn’t spent the past two days playing the same levels over and over.

A huge congrats to everyone that finished, and a hearty round of applause for everyone who even tried. This is hard, but so worth it! See you again in April.

This is my fourth LD, and I think I’m starting to get a hang of figuring out what I can and can’t accomplish in 48 hours. This time around I had a bit of luck on my side. My wife gave me the idea for a similar game a long time ago, but I just never got around to doing anything with it. With a few tweaks, the idea was able to fit the theme. Usually I waste a few hours with a game that doesn’t work out. For this round, I was able to get straight to work.

Snow, squirrels, and pandas!

I got the basic mechanics for “Panda and Squirrel” working by the end of the first evening. This is the whole game, without the “face”:

Saturday, 3 am

What went right:

• I had the rest of the weekend to work on art, music, etc. I usually don’t have that much time after doing the coding.
• The atmosphere came out well. There’s snow and a sunset.

  

• I wrote some code I can re-use on other projects.
• The floor is randomly generated, so no two games play exactly the same.
• I think I have a game I can do some more with later, and some good feedback on what to tackle next (thanks, guys!)

What didn’t go well:

• The focus of the game changed halfway through the project. The original game had more action planned for the ground-level. The change left me with too little time to add more variety to the collectibles and foes
• The code that draws the snow isn’t very optimized. As a consequence, I had to keep the screen size small.
• The two-button control is a bit limiting. A third button to slow the characters down, or even push them backward, would be helpful.
• I would have liked to have given the player more control over the snowball.

Next time around I’d like to experiment with more complex mechanics. One problem I consistently run into is not enough time to test. There are a lot of “why didn’t I think of that yesterday?” moments. This time I didn’t make a total mess of the code, so maybe I can incorporate a few of those ideas into a proper post-compo version

Tags: post-mortem

A web build has now been added to my compo entry, Slime Smasher:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=27481

Slime Smasher was made in a hurry in 5 hours on Friday evening and Saturday morning. Personal commitments kept me from investing more time in this compo. This is the result of me cutting down the scope of my original idea, which was a button-mashing game where you smashed all sorts of fantasy RPG-style enemies. After realizing I didn’t even have time to make good art for just a slime, I focused on just slimes of different colors s to get all the other game functions done in the limited time I had.

I wanted to make the game user friendly, so I had to put some time into making instructions that fit the style of the game and were fairly obvious to players. While players can use the mouse, it is much easier (for me at least) to use the keyboard with both hands to get the lowest (best) score. My best score so far on the revised V0.2, which includes “music” and is slightly harder than v0.1, is 514. I had great intentions of making better music, and recorded a stupid little loop as a placeholder but never got around to making something better. I think it’s pretty funny at least, and hope you do too!

Hi folks. I did a little platform game for this 34th LudumDare session with a cute aesthetic and a quiet mood. For this project I developed my scripts using Unity (code C#), Gimp, SFXR for the sounds and SoundTrap for the music. I am very proud because I think that I did something really fun – even if this game is really hard. Please take a look, then write some words – your feelings. Of course, I will test your project. I wish you the best and see you later friends ++

The Seed

This is our first jam, and I guess it could be called a success because we made it!

quite a late post, but still…

We (me and endwl) made a game called Nunsaram. Nunsaram is the Korean word for snowman.

We had a fun time. I learned how important goals were, and also how to package & distribute games. Endwl learned how to do good pixel art.

We actually made a gigantic u-turn around the 48 hour point. We were adding too much “new”/unplanned aspects to the game, and we had reached a limit. Slow typing speed, too many bugs too fix, too many pixels to color, and thus, low morale. Eventually we reverted to our original idea and half the code in Game.hx rendered useless.

Oh yes. i used Haxe + OpenFL on Sublime Text. no IDE. not this time.

Endwl used something, but I don’t know.

We used a Yamaha piano and Audacity and sfxr for the sound

I’m getting the timelapse (29 hours whoo!) together, so it’ll be up soon.

Next time, we’re gonna focus more on the “original goal” and save time for sound and stuff.

Happy holidays! and vote Nunsaram pls

p.s. what is a post-mortem (I’m new)

Tags: haXe, ludum dare 34, Nunsaram, openfl, post-mortem, snowman

I just want to start off by saying thank you to everyone who organized and participated in this Ludum Dare, it’s been a very fun experience and even though this was my first jam, it won’t be my last

At first I wasn’t sure what to make of the theme, but I quickly decided I would use the mouse with both buttons as controls, with the possibility of incorporating growth somehow. I had no idea what type of game I would make when I started, only the control scheme, so first I made a blue box that followed the mouse over an orange background, with no idea where I was going. My goal was simply to finish a game, good or not, and my plan to achieve that goal was to start simple and build up. I decided it would be a shooter when I made it so that the blue box could shoot blue balls, and that’s when I started thinking about the aesthetic of the game. It almost ended up being about controlling a tank or some other land vehicle, but one of the major factors in my decision to make a space game was the simplicity of creating my own star field background that could be used throughout the game.

From there I decided the game would be about a space cop who uses brutal force to take out space pirates, with donuts to increase the shield (very silly, I know). It’s been a while since I played it, but IIRC the old shareware game Inner Space had a mechanic like that, and that game was definitely an inspiration. After that it’s kind of a blur, I just got into a really good flow and started cranking out what you can play now. Because my only goal was to complete the game, most of my initial effort was simply making sure the basics worked correctly (eg. title and game over screens, UI, controls). It paid off because before 48 hrs in I reached the point where the game was essentially finished, I just needed to add levels and enemies. After that it was just a matter of constantly testing and tweaking while I added those things. Of course, the last half-hour of development ended up being stressful anyway, I put in a final boss that turned out to be (probably) unbeatable, and I was frantically making changes up until literally five minutes before the deadline. Now I think that my skills were possibly adversely affected by the stress and I may have made the boss too easy, but I don’t think anyone’s actually made it that far anyway.

Tools used:

• Gamemaker Studio
• Photoshop
• FLStudio
• SFXR
• Starfield Generator
• cgMusic (I’ll talk about this one in the next section)
• Didn’t use it during the jam, but I made the font last week with FontStruct.

What went right:

• The music! I didn’t think I would have music initially, I figured I would be better off without music than with whatever crap I managed to come up with. I started to get curious about procedurally generated music, and searched for a while to find a program I could use. I found quite a few, but most of them either sounded like crap or were overly complicated. Or both. I was about to give up and write off the time I wasted as a lesson learned (lesson would have been “Computers Can’t Make Music”) but the last link I clicked on was for cgMusic, which created the MIDI score the music in-game is based on.
• The flow! I wish I could get into grooves like that all the time. I took care of myself but I spent most of my waking time working on the game, because I wanted to and it was fun.
• The engine! I had basically no problems whatsoever getting the engine working. I think the only fatal errors I saw all weekend were typos of the “whoops, forgot a bracket/equal sign/etc.” variety, and even then I only had maybe 5-10 of those. Couldn’t have gone any smoother.

What could have gone better:

• Couldn’t get a web build working. I thought it would be as simple as telling GM to compile for HTML5. Ha! How naive I was two days ago… I think the main problem is that the audio doesn’t preload but I don’t even know where to begin on fixing that, and even if I did I wouldn’t be surprised if there were other issues.
• (IMO) the graphics. I’ve had a few people tell me they liked the graphics but I think they were just being nice. I won’t be too hard on myself, they did turn out better than I expected, and I actually like a couple of my enemy designs, but I’m not much of a visual artist and I think it showed. Also my least favorite enemy sprites are the first two and I feel like that leaves a bad impression.
• The game is too fast-paced for me to simultaneously play and get good screenshots. Really minor but the last section had three points so I figured this one should too

Ok, wow, that was long-winded. I was going to highlight a few of my favorite games others have made but maybe I’ll save that for another post. Thanks for reading, whoever actually took the time to read this far!

TL;DR

I had fun participating in my first game jam and it went way better than expected. When’s the next jam, anyway?

Rick from VideoDog here.

So it turns out when you put more than 12 hours into a game, the results are much better!

Don’t Stop Drilling is a huge improvement over our last game, and I really think we all learned a lot! I feel I speak for all the other VideoDogs when I say that we can’t wait for the next Ludum Dare! Now to give everyone something hopefully interesting to read, I’ll talk a little about our level generation in Unity.

“Please remember to drill at all times, lest you meet an unfortunate demise.”

In Don’t Stop Drilling the generation of the board is determined based on various scripts we call “generators”. Original, I know. Now each generator is given a weighting to determine how often it is allowed to generate a layer.

The RandomGenerator has the highest weighting, so I’ll focus on that specifically.

As you can see here the “Weight” category has a value of .81. This means that RandomGenerator should generate about 81 out of 100 layers. But what will our friend the RandomGenerator place in a layer it generates? Well that is what sub weightings are for! Every item listed under the “Weightings” category contributes to the layer that RandomGenerator creates. So in this example 5 out of every 100 blocks generated should be Copper.

I know most of you programmers out there must be thinking that this is nothing too crazy, but as a Artist/Designer, this is pretty damn cool! I spent way too much time tweaking each level trying to get the balance right, and could probably spend a lot more. But alas, Ludum Dare is only 72 hours and every project must come to an end.

________________________________________________

Thanks for reading! I hope you found this short write up interesting!

@VideoDogDev

@Variant_3 – Rick (Art/Design)

@pmlamotte – Paul (Programming/Design)

@carnyth – Devin (Music/Art/Design)

Special thanks to Brett and Mike who gave great feedback during development!

I got a lot of stick for requiring a PlayStation Move to play my LD34 entry. So in order to enable people to play and rate the game I have added gamepad support. It sorta works, but the game is designed around the Move controller.

Express Bonsai Cultivator. Enjoy!

So this is the first time I have ever written a post mortem after LD. The 4th one I have entered. And my second time making an entry by myself. I had a blast and am really pleased with the results of this entry. So now that we got the statistics out of the way, on to the development itself!

I was lucky with the whole growth theme because I had a game in the back of my mind for a while now that fitted quite well. It was going to be about nurturing a seed through all steps of its life from seedling to tree. However, I really wanted to use both themes. Then I came up with the mechanics of  growing a single root through obstacles and the basis of this game was clear. The basis was quite simple, but also expandable so perfect in terms of scope.

It was around that time that I was dicking around on the irc channel procrastinating that Lindar announced he had some timeslots available to make game audio for people. I checked out his sound cloud and was immediately sold. So the decision to push for Jam instead of Compo was easily made. I told him I was looking for a Zen type feel to the game and he just jumped right on it.

The whole game wasn’t really clear in my head until I received the audio file from lindar. It was perfect. I put the audio on a loop and the game just kind of build itself around that.

I had some questions in the comments about how the game was made, so ON TO THE CODE!

The game was made in Unity 5.3. the root, the trees and the rocks are all just Line Renderer objects that are being spawned in by code. The root has a “rootNode” that’s just an empty game object you steer. The rest of the root just spawns after it in small segments each Update. Because of this the game creates a lot of objects, so one of the first things I did to optimize was delete out of sight line Renderers. The rocks are spawned in as crude circles with a semi-random radius, I then randomize some of the nodes on that circle to get the crudely drawn effect.

What went right:

-I had the basis of the game in my head in the first 5 minutes. This really gave me a lot of time to implement and in the end polish.

– I was REALLY lucky to spot Lindar’s offer, that sound really made this game. (I can not say this enough ^^)

– Since I’m no artist I’ve decided to play my strengths and build an “artless” game. Looking at my last pixel art submission I’d say this was a good thing

-I never hung around irc this much and those guys really helped with motivating me to keep going.

What went wrong:

-Except for a high score there is no real clear goal for the game

-I wanted to implement more meaningful and varying pick-ups. Invulnerability for example.

-The bloom looks great in the standalone versions, but for the life of me I could not get it to look properly in the WebGL version

-There is still a bug with pick-ups spawning within rocks that I did not have time for.

Linkylinks:

Lindar’s soundcloud

Thanks for reading everyone and definitely until next LudumDare!

o/

Nopogo

Hello everyone! This is my postmortem of the 34th Ludum Dare. I didn’t write the name of the game in the title, because it’s too long

So I was ready to create a game last weekend, and complete my 7th or 8th Ludum Dare (I can’t quite remember). I did have some appointments during the days, but thought that I could join and compete anyway. I wasn’t wrong, but wasn’t completely right either. I had my high school prom on Saturday, and I knew I was going to skip 8 or so hours from development, so I woke up early (because LD starts at 3 am in Hungary) to see the theme and start programming. I joined the IRC, waited for the theme announcement, and when I saw what the theme(s) was(were), I was quite happy, because I thought it was a good theme to work with. But I just couldn’t figure out a concept in like 5 hours, and I had to leave my computer because of the preparations of the prom. I was in town, when I finally got my idea, so after I went home, I worked straight for about 5 hours until I had to leave again. I had a great time at Saturday night, but I had to go to sleep, because I was awake for about 22 hours. When I started working on Sunday, everything was kind of in place in my head. I thought I might even finish for the Compo instead of the Jam. My game concept was that there’s a constantly growing tree, and you have to climb it. I didn’t quite have the concept for what you exactly have to do on the tree, I was thinking about something, but in the end it turned out to be something completely different. I spent the whole Sunday to do the tree generating and lighting for the game, tweaking it to almost perfection. Then I realized I can’t finish for the compo, so I went to sleep and started working on Monday again. When I started working, I figured out that I can’t do anything with climbing the tree, but I didn’t want to start a new game, because the tree was so beautiful . So I started experimenting with some destruction, because I was kind of bored. And then it occured to me: The branches’ fall looked so good, I new I had to make a tree chopping game. So I did it. I removed the climbing part, making it so the player only climbs the trunk, made a cutting animation, fixed some bugs that occured when you cut a branch, added explosions, some sense to gameplay, powerup, music, sound, some artwork and I was done. I finished 4 hours before deadline.

What went good:

• I had a simple idea I knew I could do in 3 days
• Making the music was very fluent, I finished in an hour with it
• The tree looked just like I imagined it
• libGDX behaved very nicely compared to my LDs before

What went wrong:

• Time: Don’t do an LD if you have a prom at the weekend, two music contributions and a highway code test next week, because you’ll be tired AF during the whole week
• My new computer I worked on didn’t have Photoshop and FL Studio installed, so I had to work with PDN and LMMS
• Couldn’t figure out why, but I was not able to import my code into a new GDX project that had android and HTML5 support

In the end, I learned some lessons during the weekend, had a lot of fun, and last, but not least I finished a game! Check it out, leave a vote and a comment, and I’ll check out and vote for your game too

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=20731

http://gamejolt.com/games/potbelly-parasite/113729

Hi! Out jam entry is now on WebGl!

Play as a parasite living in the belly of Dayne the dodgy real estate agent. Hear what he hears (and thinks) while eating what he eats.

Grow large enough to destroy Dayne, while blasting antibiotics.

We had a full time script writer on the project, who wrote all the dialogue which we then voiced.

I hope you get a laugh out of it!

Tags: comedy

It’s here, and you surely can and need to check it out! Glow & Grow – try it now and tell us in the comments your record!

A lot of things was made for this game and a lot more wasn’t.

Hope we will make find a time to make a post-jam version of the game

Also we’ll make our postmortem soon and maybe there will be an awesome trailer for our game, so stay in touch!

Hi all, First of all thank you for hosting such events as this has been great and can’t wait to be apart of more

As a first timer i come across problems which i explained in my post mortem and would be cool to get some feedback on the blog as its my first one and i am trying to improve my written work

Green fingers Award Post Mortem

Thanks

Aaron Smith

BrWW has a new release:

1) enemy easier;
2) panel to display strength;
3) tutorial;
4) fixed enemy movement (now very weak for your enjoyment);
5) Recording victories: quick rounds for you to play often;
6) More capsules (see the tutorial in the game).

PLAY ME: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=36629

So i don’t know if you played my game yet, you should I think its great and some people agree its called Rosebud and as a short description its a simple shmup you play as a flower.

check it out

well I have updated  post compo version which now has local 2 player mode, so if you have already played it and find it to simple you can now compete with a friend for extra difficulty.

Download is here

So the best Jam & Compo Game I played yesterday

Compo – MarelleWestern – a cute little hopscotch rhythm game

Jam – Pete & The Beanstalk – best game I have played so far, i love everything about this stop reading this sentence and go play it

Bacterial has been released and already has an update to improve some of the gameplay mechanics and fixed the UI making the game playable once again.

The game is available to download on itch.io here. Ratings and comments would be appreciated!

Hi there folks!!!!

We’ve fixed some bugs we found in our game. (Some textures dissapearing), and now should work fine.

Here a small video of the gameplay you can check, to know how you should play it.

We found some of you get stuck in the beggining, and maybe Tutorialisation should be more specific. You just have to eat the “green” filled cases (plutonium) and leave the empty ones. You are feeding Springol with plutonium! If you give him an empty one, he will blow up all the “queue” of cases and you’ll start over again. Also, be careful not letting any case fall to the ground!

We have some plans for this game:

• Adding some power ups, (like slowing down the velocity for a while, making Springol invulnerable to empty cases… etc)
• Android and iOS port
• Improving sound and visual effects
• Adding some more mechanics to the game (heat control of the suckers, for example)

Leave us a comment and tell us what you think. And thank you so much for your time playing Plutonium FREE.

Oh! And, by the way…

Can you beat us? 😉

Today we released a HTML5 version of our game Snowman’s Christmas.

You can play it directly in the game’s page too!

Soon we will have an Android port.

Hey Guys! 

We did it! After some troubles, doubts, we managed to put il all together!

Now that it’s here, we’re wondering if we should polish the game, its physics, for exemple. We have some plans about other possible actions too, like a second attack and a fake attack to focus more the gameplay around mind game.

If you try it, please leave a comment, we absolutely need some feedback about that game, to improve it.

here’s a link:

ludum page of the game

We’ve noticed some issues with the web version and strongly recommend the use of the windows version ^^

Thanks a lot for playing “Battle for Bedroom”!

Love from all of us at Team Circé!

Ludum Dare 34 has come and gone, and while it is still fresh in my memory, I decided to put my thoughts down about the development of Retro Rebound Challenge in this blog.

After the theme was announced, I spent about an hour hashing ideas around, and decided on a “throw a ball in a cup” game that eventually morphed into a pong-like game. Keeping it simple was the key… the theme was 2 button controls, and a retro pong game should use retro graphics, so the paddle, ball, and brick images, as well as the sound effects were a simple design that I feel worked well.

• Unity 5.2
• Paint.Net
• sfxr
• Audacity
• iTunes (for me!)

• Since it was my first Ludum Dare, and my first time actually using Unity to finish a project, I really didn’t know what to expect other than it was a very good possibility that I would not get anything released at all. I did get a playable game out!
• Saturday morning I got up and thought that perhaps I should start over with a new idea, since I wasn’t happy with the progress. I decided to stick with it, and it came out better than I thought it would.
• I am glad I added a level select feature. This is great for my testing, and for rating my game. The game adds complexity as you play, and I don’t expect a reviewer to play all the way through.

• For some reason, it took several hours to get the ball to behave correctly. Guess I need to refresher in Unity physics settings. Looking at it now, it seems easy enough, but it was very frustrating at the time.
• I wish I had time to fix a few minor issues (Don’t we all).

I accomplished what I set out to do… release something that is playable, and I exceeded my expectations. I think Retro Rebound Challenge came out better than I could imagine.

To conclude, I had a blast, and I look forward to the next Ludum Dare. Depending on responses, I may continue development, since I do have several ideas I would like to add.

Getting some amazing feedback everyone! Really appreciate it, thank you to all even though we have had alot of bugs and issues with the web link, its stil lcoming along nicely!Build Town (OurEntry)

****Web link being fixed asap****

What better than a Timelapse Video on a fast electronic music ? A Timelapse Video on a fast electronic music with me shirtless on 5 frames.

This, my friends, is the sum of 48 hours of fun.

 Play and Rate : HERE

Hey everybody,

inbetweengames here, we’re very glad to have finished our second Ludum Dare Jam!
We struggled a bit this time, but that just means we can learn more! 😉

You can play our second LD Game OSHIYA! PUSH! here – please also rate and comment so we know what to improve.
We’ll also put up a Post Mortem soon so all your feedback is really valuable to us.

Cheers and thank you,
inbetweengames

So, my first ever post mortem and my second Ludum Dare done.

All in all I’m happy with the game, I wish I could have added some more stuff to do (decorate Christmas trees), maybe improve on the Snowman AI so you could sneak and avoid detection.

Please play and rate the game, would especially like some feedback on the difficulty level.

• Unity 3d
• Visual Studio (C#)
• Photoshop

• Used git from the start this time so I didn’t accidentally mess up my project in the middle of the jam.
• Was able to work a lot with renderers, lights and lightmapping, environment maps and other stuff I’ve not done before.
• Learned a lot about improving performance and discovered the Unity Profiler which is awesome!
• Up one dimension from LD33 (2d game), guess next year I’ll have to go for VR.
• I was fully stocked up on energy drinks and food that was quick to make.

• Spent about 5 hours trying to figure out what to make Saturday morning.
• Time management is hard! Finished the last bit (spawning monsters, their AI and the win/lose scenes) just before the deadline.
• As a result of the point above, the instructions were not the best, but I have now changed them.
• Personal hygiene might have suffered
• Like last time, there was no time to have anyone else test the game before releasing it.
• Forgot to add a way to track progress (5 seeds need to be planted), I think was just too blinded by already knowing the level and objective so well.

Am I the only person who reads the instructions before playing? It certainly seems like that sometimes 😉

I even had instructions in game, but I guess to many people reading a wall of text is not very enticing:

So I replaced this with a slightly prettier version, hopefully that will help somewhat:

Tags: jam, ld34, Ludum Dare, post-mortem, postmortem, screenshot, unity3d

While we wait for the results, we all have a lot of time to  comment and like other people’s projects, our team also closely monitors all projects of jam. So we decided to tell you about the five projects that we liked the most. We tried to choose those projects which have not been mentioned in posts and having a web version, so you can quickly assess their :

1. The best graphics in our opinion is a game The Winter

Tense atmosphere and high-quality pixel art

2. Best gameplay in our opinion was in Growees

Іnteresting logic game which makes us think

3. Best atmosphere in S-Court

You seemed really sit in the courtroom and see the judge decides the fate of people

4.Best music and audio effects in Solstand

Graphyc style and audio effects is perfect for this game

5.Best funny game Astro Cat Saga

This is cat in space ,what could be more fun?

Dont forget to set likes and comment on games, your support  is wery important for developers
Of course we want to show you our game Climbers

This is a fun game about two climbers who have to climb the mountain connected by rope , it is very fun game for one or two people

P.S.

Leave in coments your’s best games

P.S.P.S.

Our previous post about how we created game

So this was my third time doing LD, and i really wanted to make a fully procedurally generated Platformer with Progression Elements. So when the Growing Theme got announced, i was really excited, because that fit the Progression i was planning well.

This was also my first attempt at actually trying hard to get the art well. Because i felt like, that the art was always my biggest weakness. So i learned some Photoshop and i think it turned out well, for my standards at least.

Also, this time i was really working to the last minute, the last LDs i felt like i was done hours before it was over. But this time i really felt like if i had more time i could have added a lot more stuff.

What i was also really surprised by, is that alot of my friends actually played this for hours. Which i didn’t expect at all, so i’m really thinking about continuing this Project.

Anyways, if you want to check it out, here’s the link:

ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=51472

Game’s page

K I N A M I is a combination of Simon says and synthetic ambient sounds.

Don’t expect action.

Expect to create music!

Listen… 

I decided to learn Javascript after seeing Sos’ video, Make an Allegro.js game in 45 minutes. I created a management game that can turn into a passive game with time, although it takes far too long to do so. The key is to train your employees, which is not clear at all, but it is possible to get a whole lot of money and basically have the game be idle, checking it every 5 or 10 minutes, although it takes a lot of time to reach that stage, and I don’t think is well enough designed to keep players attention.

Pretty pleased with learning some javascript and allegro, the game is crappy but endearing, I think. I like to think that it’s not really about the game you create in the end but the process, which went pretty well considering I started Sunday afternoon.

Just about to upload a post-jam version that will be clearer about the food/drink mechanics…

You are Eugene, the executioner. And you have a drinking problem.

Luckily for you, the most beloved King has entrusted you with the important tool to educate the people: the death penalty…

Play it here!

I’m out travelling so I did this ld using only my iphone 4 and a public unity package I made for text based games.

The thing is I need to vote on more games, but not many run in mobile browser. So if your game runs on mobile/mobile browser, please comment!

If you have time and want to play a weird game: shameless plug

Cepha’la’goth is wreaking havoc and wants to eat everything. The only way to stop him is to conjure up another Outsider and empower it to battle Cepha’la’goth. Do it, do it before he trashes and eats everything!

PLAY HERE.

Deep growth is a game i made for jam. is about a growing “plants” deep with in the earth core
you are a blob probably named with a cliche name to grow “Plant” collecting “growth” powers ups to go to the surface and fix earth

♦♦♦♦Compo Page♦♦♦♦

Holy moly, there’s a lot of great entries this Ludum Dare! I mean, there always is, but there must be something in the water because a lot of the games I’ve played so far are wonderful.

I’ve now rated 50 games, and wanted to share three that really stand out to me:

DESEEDER by Zanzlanz (Compo)

This one grabbed my attention from the moment I saw Zanzlanz’ first post about it. The concept is simple, but everything about it has a huge amount of polish – the sound, graphics, and controls all feel great, with just the right amount of difficulty progression. We see a lot of good pixel art in Ludum Dare, but this game stands out by literally turning the idea on its side.

Acrodog by dvdfu (Compo)

OK, this game is just plain adorable. Who wouldn’t want to help Lil Houndini be a star? This also fits in to the “simple concept well executed” category: a play-through might take less than a minute, but it’s challenging and charming enough to keep me coming back for more. If there was a category for best new genre, “dog-juggling game” would be in the running for sure.

St. Orchint’s Orphanage by Double Zero One Zero (Jam)

Every Ludum Dare, I look forward with great anticipation to what the folks at Double Zero One Zero are going to put together. In my opinion, they’re consistently in the front of the pack when it comes to setting a mood and putting a gritty twist on the theme, and this game is no exception. I love the contrast between the harsh reality of the decisions that the game asks you to make, and the way that it presents them as just numbers on a ledger – in that sense, it’s very much in a similar tradition to the Westport Independent (from the same developers) and everyone’s favourite bureaucracy-’em-up, Paper’s Please.

There’s lots of other great games that I’ve played, of course, but these three are just examples of ones that I’ve really enjoyed and keep thinking about and coming back to. There’s a ton more games to play, so I’ll probably be back with another post like this in a few days.

And, in the meantime, if you’re looking for something else to check out, why not give my game Xtreme Crop Duster Simulator ’82 a try?

Tags: favorites, ld34

In our eternal struggle to bring our games to all people in need of entertainment, regardless of time and location, we’re happy to announce that Lumberjack vs. Ancient Druid’s Cybertree now officially joins the “elite” club of games fully playable on Android!

So fire up your device with totally-the-best-operating-system-out-there and download APK here.

To celebrate this breakthrough event, we’ve also sneaked some bug fixes in Windows/WebGL version:
– Some cybertree minions were spawned too low on the screen and could not be interacted with in that playthrough, while still launching bombs at you. Oops.
– Blocked selfie usage after Player is dead. Actually, I only fixed the part where you could use it with Game Over screen already visible, kinda breaking the game. Part where you get resurrected while in dying animation if you take selfie was kept as it is. It was just too funny to fix, so let’s say it’s not a bug – it’s a feature. Thanks for reporting, Garris!
– Fixed critical issue, where on tutorial screen “immortality” was misspelled as “immortaility”. That artist let it pass I can understand, but I hold myself to higher standards than this!

I managed to squeeze out a suprisingly fun  game last weekend, but until now didn’t manage to built it on Windows.

Framework: C++11 -> JUCE library

Every asset is generated so no other tools were necessary.

You can play it here: There’s Always a Bigger…

post moterm : valk unit lawyer!

So this is our first game jam! We just decided to join probably like 6 hours before it was announced. We didn’t really fully grasp what it really meant to be making a game within 72 hours, so haha ha ha…

code/design : @oz2mura

100% art : @pumpkinnette

Theme Announcement : We were shocked by having two themes, we just had no idea if we should even participate cause didn’t even know what to do. So, we decided to distract ourselves for a couple hours, brainstorming as much as possible, shower thoughts. Had many vague ideas kept coming to mind, we swatted them away cause they didn’t sound fun to make. We forgot why, but the idea of Valk Unit (a project we’re currently working on prior to the game jam) was the setting, and it had to involve our Lawyer character design.

Brainstorming session : Lots and lots of thumbnails. This was the best way for the coder/artist to communicate, we didn’t have time to get verbal and try to comprehend what was in our brains, we just wanted to produce as fast as possible. So we had a lot of thumbnails quickly drawn and shared, which created a cycle of inspiration and more thumbnails.

Production : Delegating tasks wasn’t too difficult, one of us did the code and the other did the art, fairly straightforward. We had a screen resolution in mind, the artist could generally create mock ups based on the thumbnails, then polish them as it went along.

Oz : As a coder, I’ll be honest. While I comprehend the concepts of code/programming, I’m really good at “faking” it. Even though for every mechanic implemented, I knew exactly what I should be doing. However, I literally just brute forced a work around when I realized that I had no idea what I was doing anymore. All that really mattered that it did what it was supposed to do, right?

Last Day : Everything has been going pretty smoothly, art assets  redone, completed, implemented. All the core mechanics work, ready to just add all the dialogue and play test it. We cut back a lot of additional features that we knew took longer than it was worth. Overall feeling good about the progress had about 12 hours to go. Sleep deprived as we were, decided to get some sleep, woke up 6 hours to go.

6 Hours left : Feeling rested, any initial problems we had look obviously simple to solve. But something went wrong, kept our calm and cool, resolved it within 4 hours. However we didn’t have any of the dialogue for the suspects done. There’s 71 suspects and 5 lines each needed.

2 Hours left : With amazing teamwork, we streamlined this process to be as fast as possible. 355 lines done. With no clue if anything worked at all, plugged it all in. With barely any time to spare, didn’t even know if it stilled worked, created a executable, then rushed it on itch, rushed the submission then finally breathed.

After Submission : We had friends play test, we play tested it which didn’t help that we knew the answers, and really wished we had time to play test it at all, because all the obvious oversights became so obvious after a full play testing.

Things we did right :
– Taking a long time with the brainstorming, so glad we did that.
– Thumbnails everywhere, this was a great way to bridge communication
– Knowing when to drop the “ambitious” features
– Had a ton of fun.

Things that could’ve been better :
– Less “workaround” code and letting numbers become magical girls.
– Consistent communication, started strong then didn’t.
– Taking care of selves, feels like we lost more hours just being sleep deprived.
– NOT BEING ABLE TO PLAY TEST = biggest problem.

After thoughts : Would do this all over again, and I’d recommend everyone who hasn’t  game jam, to game jam. Can’t wait to start working on a post-jam version of the game with everything done as planned. But first focusing on rating and playing as many games as possible!

plug : OUR ENTRY 😀

Tags: ld34, post-mortem, postmortem

Hey guys, after some great feedback on my  ludumdare game Germinate, I have updated the graphics and am hoping to get the game on mobile devices soon.

Let me know what you think of the graphics update.

Thanks for your time

David Morris

The plant coming to life

I turned 17 today, and what better way to celebrate than post a bunch of gifs of my LD 34 entry?

In Botany, you play as an evil plant battling the military.

Bite, spit, and grow plants to take out your foes.

You can bite, spit acid, and grow evil plants to help you take down your foes.

It features three unique boss fights and 21 levels of combat.

General Broad won’t let you through without a fight.

Of course, the most important thing in Botany is the story, which through riveting dialogue tells the story of passion, self-actualization, and the triumph of the human spirit.

Botany features a cast of dynamic characters that display realistic emotions and tell heart-warming messages of hope and perseverance.

Botany is a game that will really grow on you, so give it a try!

Crow Wing is a platform puzzle game.

You move in increments and can climb up and drop down ledges. Later you can also fly, which lets you move at the same height to reach high ledges across gaps.

I used Blender and Unity, and also Sculptris and Topogun in my modelling process.

• I wrote 1,127 lines of code in 5 major classes.
• Made a 3D character with 8 animations
• 8 final static 3D models including an edit-mode only node representation
• slept for 10.5 hours

I made use of tools library that I’ve shared. I tweet about new features leading up to every jam. This has a character control and camera tracking system which really speeds up some of the most troublesome parts of making games in 3d for me. Since this game is 2D (or more specifically, it’s node-based) I didn’t use the character controller, but the camera system was pretty much drop-in.

Within the first half hour, I had decided what I would make. I had been thinking about making a tile- or node-based movement system and the Two Button Controls theme made me simplify the idea (from a 2D grid of nodes to a linear string of nodes). The second theme also helped me figure out how to make that simplified system interesting: the character would grow wings.

I started with very quick but descriptive placeholder models and had the character moving in single units before I set up the node system.

Doors, clay men, and the wings and claws pickups were left as their starting placeholders. I made use of the vertex colouring system in Blender to get the placeholders to be descriptive enough from the start. The claws look pretty confusing, but the wings, doors, and clay men fit in even though they were made in less than a couple minutes each. To use vertex colours, you just need a shader/material that shows it. I used this material for everything in the game. This has an important value in that it cuts out UV mapping entirely which is a huge chunk of time. (it’s too bad; i really like unwrapping)

Blender and Unity use different handedness in their space coordinates, and blender uses Z-up where Unity uses Y-up orientation: your models can come in lying flat, and things are facing the wrong direction. A trick for dealing with this is to work from the negative Y direction in blender (or negative Z when you get to Unity), and when you start a new model, rotate the object 90 degrees on the X axis.

I created a node system for movement where nodes could be marked as having a hangable ledge on either side. I made some in-editor functions for searching for neighbours and assigning them. Also the node occupant behaviour had a function to assign it to the closest node. These really sped things up when I got to the level design stage.

Once the movement was working and I had tested the elements I would use (stomp a switch, use a door, grab ledges, get wings and fly over things, get blocked by golems, and slash and crush them) I drew out a set of puzzles and introduction levels I could make:

I got to make almost all of these. One used a feature that I thought would be easy to implement but really didn’t have time for, losing your wings and claws proceeding to the next level through a special door. This was really no problem, since I wouldn’t have enough levels to be able to give you the items multiple times, but I had to adjust the design of one or two with that changing.

Right after planning those levels, I moved on to my favourite part of game jams, designing and modelling a character.

6 hours later:

Making 3D characters is the thing I have worked hardest at over my life. I’ve done so much personal training and research to get my workflow as fast as possible. I’m very proud of how fast I do this and I hope it comes through in the quality of the games I work on. I would also say this is the most interesting part of the time lapse I made, and I’ve marked the time I start on the character in the video’s description.

Replacing the placeholder character with an animated one gave me a major snag that I could have really easily avoided. With a static model, all of the position and state switches had been instant, simply calling functions to set the new state and change the mesh; but now that I wanted to have motion over a little time, I had to do a fairly major refactor. The coroutine system in C# and Unity are really handy for this sort of thing, and if i had just used Coroutines with the placeholders (testing with waiting a fraction of a second), I would not have had to refactor at all.

I ended up bumping into several more bugs and problems, but that is to be expected and I worked through it all without being very stressed.

I slept for only 10.5 hours across the weekend (48 hour compo). Sleep is very important and I think I must have just been well rested leading up to the event to get away with that. My rule is that whenever i recognize i have made a silly mistake and it could have been from being tired, I go to bed. Even after feeling OK at the end of the compo, I felt really terrible for the next two days. I was sore and tired and didn’t sleep well even though I could sleep. I had caffeine withdrawal and I’m prone to migraines, so i didn’t want to have more (even though that would have helped with rating games).

Some things I didn’t get to do:

I think the most embarrassing thing in my game is the 6-pt Arial floating text. I wanted to make some nice mesh lettering like i had done in previous jams, but with very little time to add finishing touches, i invested the minimum possible effort. The new UI system in Unity is pretty good and I’ve used it before, but I just wanted to avoid any possible snags.

I had a some background models planned. I made the environment models fairly quickly, and it wouldn’t have been hard to make a set of decoration pieces to go with them. I’m glad I left this for later/abandoned it, as it was I didn’t have time to do more than make sure each node had a tile under it. I wanted to rotate and scale the tiles to add variety and pile them up. The node system is 3D, so it would have supported much more interesting arrangements with some depth too.

Tweaking particle systems takes a while to get things that look nice. It’s a shame that I ended up with two colour swapped, identical effects. I would have liked to add sounds to those as well. An effect system in the shared tools, makes it very easy to attach sounds or make copies of effects and swap out parts later. It wouldn’t have taken long, and I think it would have added a lot.

Like every jam, I feel this is the best I’ve done, and I love participating so much. It’s amazing how much work everyone produces and how great so many of the games are that come out of Ludum Dare.

Here is my Compo entry: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=27074
And here is my Timelapse:

Elliott Davis
@kenruze

Hey guys !!!

This week end was my first gamejam and I worked on this game for the compo, it’s the first game I share so I want some feedbacks on it.

I hope you’ll like it. Here is the begin of the game.

link: only two ways

I fixed some bugs for the original game and uploaded a tweaked post LD version of the game also, which I will continue further 😀

Please play and give some feedback I’m a newbie and I need it XD
click here!

We are a small remote studio focused on making mobile games. We have 3 games in the making and need an artist to speed up the progress of our game called Rupert N Riley. If you are looking for work to add to your portfolio this is the gig for you.

Requirements:

1. Self motivation
2. Basic art skills
3. The ability to do animations is a plus

Perks:

1. You get a fair royalty.
2. The ability to work with a great team.

Here is our studios website beware it isn’t done yet: http://squishstudios.net/
If you are interested send me some of your art, about, or portfolio to montanacaleb@gmail.com

Having great reviews and positive feedbacks makes it all worth while.

Thanks All for playing and reviewing my entry.
Would love to hear more.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=62053

Snapshots:-

I will now be playing and judging games on http://www.twitch.tv/meep706.

I had over 100 games submitted on my form, so I will not get through them all, but I will try my best.

Come Watch!

Hi everyone! This Ludum Dare I documented my experience, thoughts and process of creating my game!

If you are interested, give this a watch and let me know what you think?

I plan on doing weekly updates for January as I start doing the 1 game a month challenge! So stay tuned for that!

Thanks!!

PLAY & VOTE HERE

Before the real graphics:

After:

My game, Arc, has been getting some awesome feedback. Thanks guys! If you haven’t checked it out yet, check it out!

Here are some of my favorite comments:

Arc is a Simple, Classic, ARCade Game (see what I did there). Escape from your Arc before it closes on you! Don’t crash into another Arc though. Zoom to another Arc for score, and collect Gold for extra score. Get the Power Ups, but watch out for the Power Downs. The Power Ups and Power Downs are filled circles but with each one a different color. Which one is which you ask? Figure it out yourself. c:

Also some people really enjoy the music. Check it out:

Guys, the only issue we’ve had so far has been game balance. We would love to hear your feedback.

Click the pic to play.

I forgot to make a post about the fact that I actually managed to finish a game, so here’s one.

Had to cut some corners, and ended up without any sound, or nice graphics, or something better than randomly generated levels, but I made it! (even if it’s a jam game now.)

It’s not hard to reach the end from here. :)

Took me really until now before I’ve actually recovered from the feeling from furiously making a game.

And people are playing it too, and commenting! Thanks!

PS. You can also play the game here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=63136

That is the first time I’m posting since I finished the game. I was thinking about record a video to talk a little bit about the animations and the graphics, so, I did it! I hope you guys enjoy it
Also, you can play INFERNO here

And here is the video, (it is in brazilian portuguese, I know a lot of you do not understand, but I also know that there are a lot of brazilians here, so, I hope you enjoy it!)

I let some pictures of the video above, so, if you don’t want to see all the video but want to see some images from the game:
Here’s a GIF showing an animation made in Spine

Here’s the first concept of the game

Some drawings

And… bye! Good luck to everyone =)

We had a very good feedback, we already made some fixes in a post-jam version. Hope you like it!!

I have a thing for difficult games. I fell in love with Spelunky and play a shitload of Dota, even tho I can hate those games so much sometimes, it’s games like that which I keep coming back to. Anyone feel the same way? I think it could be an important element to implement in games. Not everyone likes it tho.

Entry Page

My submissions have a tendancy to get comments like “game is too difficult”… Even though I like difficult games, it’s usually very good and correct feedback, as I’ve been building the game and testing it for several days means I’ve become pretty good at it and I balance it after my own skill, which I think is a common mistake for game developers (not to mention learning to understand the game and lack of tutorials). So this is also important for us developers to remember when designing our games!

There is a balancing issue that some have complained about in the game where a bat will come when your the egg, and it’s basically impossible to get by. My wife who also wants to beat the score nags me to fix it. First off I can’t change it because of the LD submission, second it would invalidate all previous highscores, and tbh I kind of like it, usually there is a theoretical chance you can avoid it if you are good enough, and even if you can’t, it’s like that some times in life, sometimes you get a good run, sometimes a hard one, as long as it’s only near-impossible, it’s ok and part of the fun. Just like Spelunky. Besides, you were never meant to get 10.000 as an egg anyhow. A lesson to be learned as well! Hope you guys understand!

Any thoughts on this?

TLDR Lesson 1
Make challenging games,
but don’t balance them after yourself,
and make sure it’s easy to learn!

TLDR Lesson 2
As long as it’s only near-impossible,
asymmetry between different runs can be a good thing!

Our Jam game this time around is as usual a bit too hard according to some, but I do think I got a much better difficulty level than my previous submissions. If your up for the challenge, try it! I still need a contender for my highscore!

Entry Page

Entry Page

I’ve done a bit more tweaking to get rid of the last issues and bugs in Hope. It’s now version 1.08 and available on itch.io here as well as through the download link in the game’s jam entry here. It should have a more epic feel to it now that the music timing is fixed. I also added changelog.txt and readme.txt files to the .zip for people’s convenience.

Soon I’ll upload a video of Hope on my YouTube channel and then I’ll get started on Let’s Playing other people’s games. If you haven’t already submitted your game (or if you tried but found the form to not be working), be sure to check out my post in the Dare to Play thread so you can let me know you want your game played!

If you haven’t already had a look at my game, please do! I’ll be sure to return the favor. I haven’t gotten to everyone yet, but I will absolutely give everyone who’s commented on my game proper feedback on their own. My comments have gotten shorter due to recent constraints on my time and feeling like my posts were far too long compared to everyone else, but if you like that sort of thing, let me know.

You can see an example of one of my long feedback comments on Rythm Rider‘s jam entry. An amazing game incidentally, I highly recommend it!

Tags: hope, jam, ld34, Ludum Dare

Our Ludum dare entry can be found here

Ludum Dare 34 was a first for me in a lot of ways. It was not just my first Ludum Dare, it was my first time acting as an artist and deploying a game to be judged! I had a lot of fun in about every aspect of the project, and I am happy with the final product.

Were there bumps? Sure! Would I go back and change a few things? Wouldn’t we all? But by and large this proved to me that making games is what makes me happy, and Grow Your Hoard I feel is a solid expression of fact for Nick and I.

So let’s talk about making Grow Your Hoard!

What went Right:
Brain Storm and Idea Buy In got us going: Nick and I just started out of the gate throwing ideas at the wall until something sounded fun. Nick started pulling up old flash games he grew up with and I spat out every idea that came to my head. As soon as we found an idea we loved, merging my desire to create some ransacking goblins with the simple gameplay of Castle Defense (An influence some of our reviewers noticed) we charged forward, and rarely got stuck because we knew what we wanted to make!

Iterative Development let us build the best product in the smallest time: One of the biggest criteria for brain storming was the come up with an idea we could build quickly and then expand upon. goblins going across the screen with arrows shooting at them, and a player controlled shield… Very simple for a couple days. By the time we’d gotten halfway through Saturday we’d already achieved that much and we knew we could do the upgrades and soldier reinforcements we’d talked about early on. Iterative development meant that we never bought off more than we could finish and polish. No where better can the Iterative Development be seen than if you look at the art in our game from the early commits to the final result. Trust me, if you can check it out, you’ll be entertained by how different the game looked even 4 hours before the game went up!

Collaboration Tools that helped us keep on task: Skype, Trello, and Git really helped us pull this off. Skype’s screen sharing made things easy to keep connected and share progress. If I needed feedback on art or got stuck with a piece of code, I could holler at Nick and share my screen. Trello was important for keeping track of ideas and prioritizing them. Things that we wanted to do went into the todo column, and we’d pull them into doing as we worked, and now we have a huge done column that shows all of our hard work. Its great to look back on, and it kept us focused as we worked.

Haxe and Haxeflixel made life easy: If you have never used it, it’s a fantastic programming toolkit that let Nick and I build the game for web and windows without changing a line of code. Haxeflixel allowed Nick and I to go charging into making the game vs waiting to get things setup. Within the first 3 hours I had the skeleton of our game stamped out while Nick learned Haxeflixel. First thing Saturday morning Nick was already swinging for the fences, and by the end of the compo was doing stuff in Haxe that made my head spin! Its a great technology to develop games and software, and I highly recommend it!

Doing the art myself: I’m not saying this because the best art was made (All of my artist friends could have made this game look 50 times better, I know some fantastic artists), but this was a great thing for me personally, and the end game didn’t suffer as a result, which is a huge win in my book.  Every person that reviewed and said they loved my pixel art made me feel 10 feet tall, and that is an experience I wouldn’t trade for anything!

Equally Invested Partner: Nick is a code wizard and proved it. At no point did i feel like I was carrying him and I hope he didn’t feel like he was carrying me (Nick if you are reading this, thanks for bailing me out on the upgrade screen, I was going to drive myself nuts!). This game is a shared project and I like to think its final quality represents how well he and I worked together.
We rested: I’m reading about people burning out and pushing themselves to complete as much as possible into the wee hours. Nick has done enough Ludum Dare entries that I trusted his experience that it was not only not necessary, but a bad idea. This meant waking up in the morning refreshed and able to start working again on complex pieces of code with fresh eyes.

What went wrong:
GIMP sucks at pixel art: while far from unusable GIMP left a lot to be desired when it came to doing pixel animation. Firstly the grids you can set up in gimp don’t default to being around each pixel as they would in photoshop, which meant a little more setup time every time i needed to create a new image. Additionally i found that it was quite easy to inadvertently misaligned my sprites and required that I do corrections that I didn’t know I needed until after i recompiled my game (thank god HaxeFlixel compiles to flash and neko so quickly!).

Last Minute Hosting Issues: I have my own linux server with node running on it, and it’s been stable for the last 2+ months, but the day i went to upload the swf, it somehow was no longer running my server script! I had to pull strings to get back into the server and turn it back on, and while it wasn’t too hard, I was mentally drained at the time and would have appreciated a simpler solution

Our upgrade system was almost a mess: I should have never attempted it. Not because it was out of my ability to do, but because at the time I couldn’t grasp how it should function, whereas Nick knew exactly what it should do to work. I lost two precious hours and way too much of my good brain power to trying to piece together what the system would do, only to realize that I wasn’t meant to do it. Nick saved my butt and knocked it out relatively quickly. It made me realize that in a ludum dare, the person doing the code should be the one that can visualize it. If Nick weren’t so readily available and willing to change his focus, that would have been a disaster.

Music got repetitive: lesson learned, a 45 second loop playing forever, no matter how well it matches the game, is not enough. Our initial test was to play it ourselves on repeat and see how long it took for us to hate our lives (don’t do that, you start believing THAT is why it’s irritating you). We made it 45 minutes shockingly and thought ‘Well that’s not bad!’ Thing is, the moment we doubted the music would last the length of the game, we should have done a simple mute button because some people were more easily irritated than we were.

Balance was off due to lack of outside testing: We intended the upgrades to hold a lot of value to the player, and I still believe they do in theory. You have a greedy goblin that costs you 1 gold, but gives you 3 if he makes it across the screen. Sounds great right? Well it’s great till you realize that the bag slowing him down makes him unlikely to ever make it across. The least we could have done would have been made him worth a bit more. Our Ogres were intended to be meat shields that protected the other units from arrows. However our random high damage axes made this less effective than it should have been.

A real artist could have lead to more polished art: Like I said, I’m glad personally that I did the art, and I wouldn’t trade the experience for the world. That being said, before the competition began I should have probably pursued a few of my artist friends to do if nothing else some touching up of what i started. The Ogre in our game has only 2 frames because I was creatively exhausted after doing the all the other units, and the soldier, which had the most extensive walking animation at 6 frames, also ended up the least polished because I was just plain DONE by the time it came his turn to be touched up.

Overall, the process went smooth. The things that went wrong feel minor, while the things that went right feel both plentiful and significant. Nick and I produced a great game in my opinion, and we did it without wanting to chuck anything at anyone! I’ve got a small list of things I’d change next time, but I feel very proud of what we did, especially considering neither of us lost sleep trying to get this thing out the door. For those of you who played our game, thanks for playing, we hope you enjoyed it!

I had a fun time this Jam making my game, Emergency Cleanup. It is a game about cleaning up toxic waste from a cave, all the while avoiding laser beams. It uses the “Two Button Controls” theme.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=49644
What went well:
– The core game mechanic: I am very happy about how the main game mechanic turned out. Using the <A> and <D> keys on the keyboard, the player controls an emergency drone which must go into a cave and clean up toxic waste. I think that the drone was pretty fun to control, and that destroying the laser beam receivers with a water gun is pretty fun.
– Particles: I really liked the way that the particles added to the game’s atmosphere. I think that they were definitely worth the time that I spent on them.
– Graphics: The graphics are nice for the most part. I think that the atmosphere definitely would have benefited from the addition of a more diverse tile set to break up the long stretches of background tiles though.
– Sound Effects: I liked the sound effects for the game. There are a few sound effects that could have been nicer, but overall, I think that they enhance the game’s atmosphere.

Things that could have been better:
– Sound Effect Volume: Some of the sounds I made were loud, and were not headphone friendly D: . Next time I need to make sure to make my audio levels are much softer, as to not be too loud.
– Level Design: I created a long passage from my game’s spawn to the first obstacle with the intention to have the player practice controlling the drone, however, I didn’t take into account that after a few deaths, spending about 20 seconds getting to the first obstacle is very tedious. Next time I should spend more time thinking about how the level will affect gameplay.
– Checkpoints: I made a game that takes about 10 minutes to complete, is hard to beat and has no checkpoints. Therefore, I probably discouraged a lot of people from beating the game because of the lack of checkpoints, combined with the tedious level design to begin with. Next time I will be more attentive to making my game much less tedious.

What I learned:
– I learned that the way I was reading in audio crashes on some Linux versions (I don’t use Linux, so I never would have known). I did some research on StackOverflow, and apparently there is a better way that I should have read in sound files which wouldn’t have crashed on Linux. I am glad that I learned about the issue so that I can avoid it in the future.

Thank you very much to everyone who played my game and provided helpful feedback and to the Ludum Dare community for being awesome!

Tags: ld #34

I had a lot of fun participating in this event and I learned a lot. My friend and I decided to make a fighting game based on both themes. You play as a plant fighting another plant. There was going to be a narrative that the boss (the sun) would give the winner the nutrients needed to grow. The game is local multiplayer and each player gets two buttons for light attack and heavy attack. Then there are combos!

Originally, I had planned to have 3 characters which each character having 3-4 combos, but it didn’t work out that way. I have the framework for it though, and I may work on this as a side project.

I’m excited for future events and I learned to make more use out of my time.

If you’d like to play my game, check it out here! =)

Hi everyone!

Well, Ludum Dare is over again and I felt like doing a quick design-side post-mortem for our game S.I.L. – Synthetic Intelligent Lifeform.

If you are interested in playing our game then you can do so here.

INTRO
So, this is my second Ludum Dare and my first as the sole designer. My first LD was LD31 (link here) where I was the team artist, animator and composer. This time, I was largely the designer, as well as the writer and artist and, whilst I know that my last entry (Black Drop) was more fun to play and was much more polished upon release, I have to say that I am very pleased with the sheer scope of this entry (S.I.L.) and am happy with how much of it we got done in only three days.

That being said, of course, we aimed too high and ultimately paid the price for our hubris, but hey, what’s Ludum Dare for if not a bit of fun and an excellent learning experience?
As the designer, I do feel largely responsible for the overscoping and will endeavour to think much more carefully about it as a potential issue in future.
However, despite my failure to comprehend the true meaning of “three days”, my partner Michael made a beyond-valiant effort to program my design into existence and, ultimately, only fell short by a surprisingly small margin.

Somehow, S.I.L. was released on time (just) and we’ve spent the last two days bug-squashing (and will probably be spending even more time doing so in days to come). Despite this, S.I.L. isn’t quite what we had naively envisioned at the innocent beginning of Ludum Dare, but it is in a playable state, has a certain, strange fun-factor and is, thematically, rather slick (if I do say so myself). At the end of the day, what better could an overambitious pair of devs have possibly hoped for?

THE BAD
As my major role in the project, I feel like my design was, at its core, solid, although the execution was lacking. Whilst I am confident that S.I.L. held the premise of an interesting and enjoyable game, I know that I fell short at one particularly key hurdle: scope.
Other aspects could have been improved upon with a short amount of testing but because of the poor scoping, we did not have any time to refine the design and had to submit without any testing.

Were I given the opportunity to refine my design now, I would firstly drastically reduce the number of machines on one network. Whilst infecting a large network of unique machine was bizarrely fun in and of itself, the core gameplay suffered from the sheer dilution brought on by networks of 40+ machines. A smaller network of about 10-30 machines would, I believe, have significantly improved the gameplay.

Additionally, I would have reworked some of the Scripts mechanics to make them more useful, although that might not have been such a large issue on a smaller network. Either way, this issue would only have become apparent through testing which, unfortunately, is something that we did not end up with time to do!

THE GOOD
So, it’s not all bad! Despite the overall overreach of the project, I am genuinely proud of S.I.L. for several reasons. As my first chance to lead the design of a game in a team (even a small one!), I felt that I did a good job of balancing the roles and stats of each of the powers in the game, even if a couple of them needed some tweaking that they sadly never received! In addition, I think that the mechanics and overall structure of the game work quite well and I am proud of that.

My favourite contribution to the game was probably the script, which I wrote during the first day and appears through the in-game console cutscenes. Although writing is my field of interest anyway, I was particularly happy with how the character of S.I.L. was portrayed through the unusual medium of console logs and how it, as a character, smoothly grew over the course of the short story.
As a subject of philosophy, I find morality in artificial intelligence particularly interesting and, through the story of S.I.L., I feel that I successfully explored several of my thoughts and feelings on the matter.

Finally, I was pleased with the UI that I designed in the style of old command-line interfaces, as well as the animations on the programs as they travel across the network.

CONCLUSION
From a player’s perspective (ultimately the most important one) I believe that my last LD entry was much more appealing. However, my last entry didn’t come close to the ambition of S.I.L. and I am proud–from a designer’s perspective–of what we have accomplished. In future projects, I will endeavour to build upon what I have learned from this experience to make my designs even better for the player, and not just the designer.

Of course, without my partner Michael, S.I.L. would just be a bunch of design notes, some art assets and a script, so I’m incredibly grateful for all of the hard work that he put into the project to make this Ludum Dare an enjoyable, educational and productive experience! (Although I think I’ll let him write his own port-mortem from the programmer’s perspective!)
Thank you for reading, I hope you had as good an LD as I did and, if you have a spare moment, please give S.I.L. a look! I hope you have fun!

-Nathan

Tags: DevSocYork

Lately I’ve been playing a lot of Starcraft, so I couldn’t help myself to produce an RTS for LD34, especially when you hear the theme “Two button controls”.

A two-button multiplayer RTS, now that sounds like a great idea!

Ya think? Check out http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=20841

Aside from that, great entries so far in LD34. I’ll be rating some more after squeezing a few zergling rushes on SC2.

Keep an eye out for the upcoming expansions of SlimeCraft: Heart of the Slime, and Legacy of the Slime!

Tags: ld34, ldjam, Slime, starcraft

Hello my name is Daniel Felipe, the creator of the entry Downfall in Polarity and for the first time i’m gonna talk about a little of my process of creation.

ENGLISH IS NOT MY LANGUAGE SO YEAH ITS GONNA BE A LITTLE STRANGE BUT THAT’S FINE, STRANGE IS GOOD.

first of all: i did not like the two themes, and that was a good thing, because in my first LD i did like it so i think too much and too big in the game and the results are not that good.

so, this time i tried to keep it cool and call my partners in crime on skype to do a brainstorming and see if something comes out of my mind.

we talk and talk and in the end they start to play skullgirls on steam, and my skullgirls was still downloading so i have to keep thinking by myself and then idk how but i think in a world kinda like tron, with the boolean from the studies of c# and simple as that i have an idea, they said that was a good idea and that was the beginning of A Game about changing polarity, red to blue, 0 to 1 like that.

and then i did this piece of art on MSPaint and send to them

“caindo” means falling in portuguese. “azul para passar do azul” means blue to get across blue. and “vermelho” is red, free portuguese class you’re welcome.

and strange enough, the game is very like this picture, so for the first time in my game creator’s life i had an idea and i did just like the way i want, i think that i’m evolving (but my english still sucks).

actually i did a little bit more, than my initial prototype, instead of a infinite-something, i did a rogue-like-something inspired by the binding of isaac simple rogue-like mechanics(the original one).

Engine:instead of the obvious Unity, i use the simple construct 2, because i recently made a 2d game on unity and the work was very very big, so i wanna to simplified a little bit, and my code is not the best right now, but that’s okay i’m learning, and construct 2 did a good job =D

now, i’m working on a better version of Downfall in Polarity, i’m reading the critics and thank god that majority is good critic, and i’m writing down in a paper the most annoying parts of the game that people complaint, and in this new version i gonna fix all that and wait for more critics and fix it again!

i know that this is doesnt look like a post-mortem so much and my english sucks and for this two things i’m sorry, and for all of you who play my game and gave me good critics THANK YOU!

if you didnt play Downfall in Polarity: here is the link play, vote and comment!

I just finished porting the game to Android. It was surprisingly easy, all I did was:

• install the Java SDK, the Android SDK and a few Android platforms
• add a Touch Input Module to the EventSystem
• add a Physics Raycaster to the camera
• Told my InputHandler to return right away #if UNITY_ANDROID
• Implemented the IPointerClickedHandler interface on the Enzymes script and made it do LeftButtonPressedEvent.Invoke();

Have fun It’s time for me to start playing and voting other games!

The Jam is over and Ive spent a good deal of time playing and rating other peoples games and I have to say some of them are completely amazing considering the time limitations.
I worked with my brother for the jam and while I wish we had a lot more time to work on our entry I am pretty thrilled that we got it finished in the 3 day limit. We tried really hard to keep the idea as simple and as achievable as possible and in the end settled on the two button controls theme. I think focusing on simplicity really helped us finish in the time limit.

Our game involved using the left or right keys (but actually A and D)  to turn the ship left or right to avoid floating satellite debris.
It was pretty simple concept overall and we wanted to achieve a lot more with it.
We only managed to include a timer that tracks how long you survived for as the only real goal, we had hoped to be able to include a victory condition if you navigated long enough. As it stands now its more of an exercise into your futile navigation into a ever denser field of debris which eventually gets so thick that you can’t squeeze though resulting in your death by a fiery explosion. But at the very least it records how long it took you to get to that eventual death.
We learned a lot from the experience though and I’m already looking forward to April to see how much we can do next time around, especially since next time we will have a lot more experience to build off.

As far as what went well:
I think the biggest thing was getting most of the mechanics we wanted into the game, such as the movement and random spawning of debris, all the while learning a new engine. I think the fact we kept it simple helped here since we really didn’t run into any coding issue that we couldn’t solve or made us want to pull our hair out.
As far as what did not go well:
Time management! We didn’t deal with getting everything together in a orderly fashion and the last few hours of the jam was a pretty mad rush to throw it all together. Aside from time though nothing went truly terrible which I think was pretty lucky for us, we had a few errors to get right in the last few hours, but the extra hour to submit really was a blessing to sort the final bugs out.

If you’re interested you can play our game: HERE!

Hey guys. It’s been brought to my attention that my compo entry, Sea Cucumber Runner 2D is considered difficult. This is true but I just wanted to confirm that it can be beaten with some practice, and here is the proof. Recording of a complete run in 1 min.:

If you’re a fan of infinite runners give it a shot!

First off, thanks to everyone who participated to our real-world meeting at Tech Valley Game Space. Our fourth real-world meeting produced a record-breaking 8 original games! They are:

become a game developer in 60 seconds

Having decided that 48 hours is far too long to create a game, the game creation process has been optimized to a mere 60 seconds of pressing only 1 and 0.

Create art. Make design decisions. Tweak sounds. When you’re ready, test it. Share the game you made with your friends and enemies by sending them your generated custom URL. Make your own micro ldjam.

MaskGarden

What happens when you enter the valley with the mask garden?

The Regrowth of Layeon

The Regrowth of Layeon is a text adventure made 100% in java, and includes absolutely NO outside materials or libraries. Everything was made with Gimp, Java, and Netbeans.

Decider in Chief

You are the President of the United States of America, but are you “Decider in Chief”?

This game is played by choosing from only 2 options at a time!
It is a “choose your own adventure” style of game.

No Birds In This Game

Game was made for the theme “2 button controls” and “grow”, but the growing part is kind of a stretch. You control an ant with a sweet tooth. Each level the goal is to collect the candy by selecting which command to perform.

The only two keys to play this game is ‘left’ and ‘right’…not ‘a’ and ‘d’, because that would make it 4 controls wouldn’t it?

Continental Breakfast

Space Sim

Biome

Biome is a turn-based strategy game for two players based on Conway’s Game of Life.

The game is played on a grid with empty spaces (white tiles) and blooming spaces (green tiles). Each player controls a set of geomancers (red/blue circles) that can manipulate the terrain around them.

If a geomancer is standing on a tile when it blooms, the geomancer goes “KABLOOM!” and is removed from the game. You win by eliminating all of your opponent’s geomancers.

hack.source.net

Is your friend over-powering you in any FPS game? No worries! hack.source.net is a 2-player FPS that let’s you disable up to two button inputs from your opposing player! Keep your friend from moving forward, take away their ability to jump, and shoot your way to victory

It seems like everyone’s doing one of these Post-Mortem things, so I guess I’ll make one too.
This was technically my second Ludum Dare because I attempted to submit a game to the last Ludum Dare, but I didn’t finish in time because I unfortunately had to go to school on the last day of the Jam. The same problem happened again this time around, but more on that later.

Luckily the theme(s) this time around were much easier for me to get an idea for immediately and start working on it. My initial idea for the game, which I didn’t stray extremely far from, was a game about trying to survive by growing crops on a growing island. After enough time had passed and you hadn’t starved to death the island would have grown large enough to reach something else floating in the distance, like a floating door or a portal and the game would end after you walked through it.

The very first thing I started working on was of course, the player controller, which I finished within the first hour of the jam if I remember correctly. So I was off to a great start considering I had never made a first-person character before and started modeling the island the game would take place on. At first I decided to go for an extremely low poly look so it wouldn’t be too difficult to extrude and grow the island:

But then, just out of curiosity I tried subdividing it a little bit and hardening the top edges so it looked something like this:

It  looked much better with the extra polys (at least in my opinion) so, after thinking about it for a bit, I figured there probably wouldn’t be enough time to program something as ambitious as an island that actually expanded during gameplay while also making sure the game is actually fun to play so I decided I would just model the island in chunks that gradually are added over time. Thinking back on it, that was definitely the right decision, although I only had time to make one extra chunk.

The game is a survival game, so like all good (and bad) survival games I needed to let the player cut down trees. I quickly modeled an axe and even made a swinging animation for it, but then when exporting it to Unity, I learned that apparently Unity only supports skeletal animations. I quickly hopped back to blender and redid the animation, but this time using a bone to move the axe. At this point I had already spent way too long on it, so all of the other held items ended up not having animations. In Heinz-sight it might have been possible to use the same rig and animations for all held items, but unfortunately ideas like these don’t seem to come to you when you’re frantically working on finishing a game.

Here’s a quick gif of the animation

Around this time I was also thinking about what kind of enemies should be in the game, if any. It would have made since for them to have been some sort of animal that eats crops, so my initial idea was for the crops to be carrots and rabbits would pop out of the ground and try to eat them. The only problem would be that it would be kind of sad to kill cute, hungry bunnies in a farming game so I also considered having them be evil killer rabbits instead.

Of course I quickly realized that it was impossible for me to do this within the time limit as well, what with having to rig and skin paint the bunny model, so I switched to flying enemies. They ended up being pretty cool, and I ended up spending way too long making cool particle effects for the robots blowing up.

The simple texture I made for the explosion particles.

The end result.

It was already the night of the second day, and I knew I would have to go to school come morning. As daylight approached I got more and more nervous about not finishing in time. After a little bit of playtesting I realized it wouldn’t be fun to have to wait for the island to grow. So to fix that problem and to give the player more incentive to grow carrots I made a character that was trapped in a puddle that needed to be fed carrots in order to grow the island and I also made the carrots grow almost instantly so you didn’t have to wait forever for your first carrot to grow during the tutorial but accidentally applied it to the entire game. It made the game less slow though, so I let the bug become a feature. (this inadvertently made the mulch item that decreases growth time practically useless, but I didn’t realize it then)  I was almost finished but it was too late. It was already morning and time for me to leave. I checked the timer for the deadline and after factoring in the time for the submission hour I realized I would about an hour or two after to finish the game after school. I went to school, slept a little bit through some of my classes (fellow students, please don’t follow my example) and got back to work the moment I got back home. The game was “finished” about 10 minutes before the end of the submission deadline so I threw a Windows build together and submitted it with only a minute left on the timer. It was done and I could finally relax. Shortly after I also released a Mac and Linux version as well.

Summary:

What went well:

-The combat against the robots is actually more fun than I thought it would be and the explosion effect they make is probably my favorite thing about the game

-The simple visual style turned out nicely. It fits the mood of the game quite well.

-Growing carrots while watching out for floating robots is a good way to make something that would normally seem like a chore fun. You can’t just relax and get bored because you have to make sure you aren’t about to be blown up.

What went poorly:

-BUGS! When I initially released the game there was a bug with the inventory that broke the game. You couldn’t continue because you couldn’t pick up any more items. Thankfully I managed to patch it the next day, but I also kept the original download links up on my itch.io for some reason.

-Sounds. The game is severely lacking in the sounds department, and feels slightly empty because of it. There’s no music (probably because I don’t know how to make music) and the sounds that are in the game are pretty simple, I made all of them just by playing around with a microphone.

-No death notifications. Sometimes when you die it’s seemingly for no reason, and it’s mostly because I had to quickly add the death feature in only a few minutes so it just arubtly drops you back onto the main menu after you die. This might also be in part to the robots always spawning behind the player, so the player might not even see them before getting hit sometimes.

This was a very fun experience for me and is also the first time that I ever put one of my games on the Internet for others to see. It’s pretty cool knowing that other people are playing something that I made.

I’ll be looking forward to the next Ludum Dare!

Here’s a link to the game if you want to try it out: Aina

Now that I’ve got a new video to revive my channel and introduce my game, I’ll start covering everyone else’s. I’m taking part in Dare to Play, so if you haven’t already, be sure to check out my post and submit your game! I’m naturally going to give priority to those who’ve commented on my game, so if you already did then congratulations, I’ll be covering your game soon!

Tags: hope, jam, ld34, Ludum Dare

Hello LD Community. I want to say thanks to organizator’s of Minsk’s LD Jam! Guys, it was sooooo cool. Thank’s a lot. We’ll wait LD 35!

Hello guys,

please take a look at my Ludum Dare 34 entry “Wild Growth”. I am very pleased with the final visuals, mood and gameplay. Also a big thank you for the awesome feedback so far! Check it out over HERE !

Do you think a post mortem mobile game would be great?

I wanted to make a post about my entry right when I was done, but I was having a bad cold, so it all got delayed and I’m making one now.

For Ludum Dare #34, I remembered a game idea I had a couple of years ago where you would play as a potted plant, and the primary method of movement is latching on to things and swinging your way through the world. The combined themes of “growing” and “two button controls” just clicked into place, and I decided to dedicate this Ludum Dare to create a prototype of this idea.

Well, here it is. You play as a plant which is loosely inspired by the piranha plants you can find in the Super Mario series, but the sprite I made ended up looking more like Pac-Man 😉

The two button controls are “pressure sensitive”, meaning that pressing a button long or short yields a different result. Tapping makes the plant hop on the ground, which is a very slow and frustrating method of traversal, making sure the player always prefers the alternative when available: holding down on the button allows you to aim for one of these green “hooks” that are floating in the levels. When the plant bites one of those, you hang on to it and swing back and forth. Tapping at the right moment lets you jump, taking your momentum with you, bridging gaps. You can also jump from hook to hook, again by holding the button longer and aiming during the swing, but this makes it harder to line up your aim, while you’re swinging yourself. I’m quite happy myself, with how the mechanics came together.

In the game, your objective is to reach the window on the right end of the levels, as our friend the plant prefers the sunlight over the depressing grey walls that are surrounding it. Yes, I know, this is very deep!

The game became a bit short (it has only 4 levels and the title screen) and there is no audio, which I will attribute to a super annoying cold that had to strike me precisely on this weekend (not sure if I mentioned it before?), so I can feel better about myself. Looking back though, I am happy that I didn’t just spend the weekend under a blanket, but made my idea into a playable prototype instead.

The comments I received so far were quite positive, and the more critical comments were really helpful. So I am considering to further develop this game after Ludum Dare, and perhaps release it on PCs and mobile, with more refined mechanics, of course more levels and overall more polish. I hope I can give myself the push to actually do that

I appreciate every constructive comment, and thank everyone who already left one!

Link: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=33074

Hope 1.1 is here!

At last i add the first skill to magic barrier 😀

We also added an animation of victory, modified the pattern of the final boss, added support for using W & D or Arrows to move and a few little modifications.

You can try the new version but do not forget to try also the original. And of course, rate and comment!

PLAY!

Heeeeey Guys !

Its called Fight Boý.  😉  hope you’ll enjoy it.

We can’t wait to check out what cool games you guys made! LOVE TO YOUR ALL 😀 #LDFever

If you prefer to download games instead playing online and are using Ubuntu/Linux, we released a version of our game for you. Check it out:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=62138

I’m pleased to announce that the Mac and Linux builds of my compo entry, Xtreme Crop Duster Simulator ’82, are now available. While I’ve had no complaints about only having a Windows build available to date, I’ve always been a supporter of developers who release their games cross-platform and thought I should put my money where my mouth is.

Now you can experience the C64 retro nostalgia on three different operating systems!

I should give the caveat that these are not nearly as well tested as my Windows build – I’ve had a few people playtest the Mac version and none of them have reported issues, but I haven’t seen it in person. The Linux build runs fine on my Linux install (Xubuntu 14.04 LTS) but hasn’t been tested elsewhere.

I had way too much of a hassle getting the Linux build to work – there appear to be a handful of strange bugs in the latest version of the standalone Linux Unity player, which made the game unplayable and left me grasping blindly for the fix. I quickly was able to glean that the problem wasn’t in my code, but found little by way of resources (either from Unity3D themselves or from the community) to help me sort it out. I really should investigate further and report a bug (or a few), but since every build involves booting Windows, loading Unity, running a build, and rebooting to Linux to run it, it’s a pretty laborious process.

Tags: ld34, linux, mac, port, unity

In this game you are a robot punching random things in front of a hopefully appealing parallax background.

I initially planned to have a boxer punch things in a somewhat coherent world. However, I couldn’t draw a boxer, so I drew a robot and I couldn’t draw a nice coherent world, so I drew totally random things and two nice backgrounds. I hope you don’t mind 😉

How To Play

You must use the appropriate glove to hit the next thing or you will lose a life. Hit tall things (traffic signs and balloon) with the blue glove and small things (balls and cake) with the red glove.

To punch with the blue glove use the A key or the left arrow key or tap on the left side of the screen. To punch with the red glove use the S key or the right arrow key or tap on the right side of the screen. Use the ESCAPE key or tap on the upper 10% of the screen to go back to the menu (if you are in the menu this will show you the controls).

Play

• Web version (requires WebGL)
• Desktop version (requires Java)

• Please rate and comment on my game on its Ludum Dare page here.

Screenshots

Source Code

The source code can be downloaded here as a zip file containing the LibGDX project and git directory. To import the source code, extract the contents of the zip file, open Eclipse and select File – Import… – Gradle – Gradle Project, then select the extracted folder, hit build model, select all projects and click on finish. If this does not sound familiar to you, please google and follow some LibGDX tutorials, because your computer needs to be set up correctly for development with LibGDX.

Spikes! Jumpin’ n runnin’! Explosions! Screenshakes! Some more spikes! OMG

PLAY JUMPR!

(Oh and tweet, us, your highscores!)

Hi all! Just wanted to let you know that the ludum solstice is over and we’re still alive. Feel free to try our game! We’ve learned a lot in this ludum (good and bad stuff), so we’ll write a Post Mortem soon that we think is going to be interesting.

Meanwhile, here is Solstand.

Hey!

Just writing to remind you to go play SAAAM if you haven’t already! We really appreciate feedback so check it out and leave a comment. We’ll check your game out too!

PLAY SAAAM HERE