So this is the first time I’ve done a proper post-mortem. If you’ve not played my game yet, play it here.

What Went Right

Graphics

The graphics in TNGB came out much better than I expected. Though there were a few tidbits I wish I could have changed in the details (for instance, the wood texture doesn’t really fit in with everything else in my opinion), the rest of the graphics came out just as I wanted them too.

Audio

Sound effects were easy: a few BFXR sound-bytes was all. The music however was awesome. I had a couple of drafts and mostly-complete songs waiting to be finished that all had a similar genre and feel, and to me they sounded perfect to fit in with a puzzle game, so I finished them to a point where they could be used in the game, and voila!

Gameplay

I think that the gameplay went well. There are a few collision errors in stuff like the spikes; they collide with the size of a whole tile, not the size of the spike itself. However, player physics, boost-pads, and basically every other aspect of the game worked out very well.

What didn’t go so right

Level Creation

Though the end levels came out nicely, the process of doing so was very clunky and not easy. I have included the level editor with the game if you want to try it out.
I’ve worked on a new level editor and it is much better, more advanced, and easy to use, so that I can continue developing the game further.

Animation Creation

Another situation where the product came out alright, like the coin animations and the end-goal’s crystal hovering up and down, but the process to make the animations was very difficult, as I had not found the program I will use from now on (GraphicsGale). I had to manually save and edit and resize each frame in Paint.NET, which is a good program, but not for fine-tuning animations like that. Each time I edited an animation and wanted to see how it looked, I had to save it, an relaunch the game and find the animation to even judged if it looked good. With GraphicsGale, I get a live preview as I edit, making it much easier.

That’s all I have! Please, if you haven’t tried my game, I would very much appreciate if you did! This is my second Ludum Dare, both being Compo. I think this is the better of the two, and I’d love to see what you think!

Happy LD-ing!

If you haven’t played my game yet: PLEASE DO! 😀

So, it’s almost Christmas, and the perfect time for Run Santa, Run! to see a post jam release!

A little background about the game, You have to help Santa Claus reaching safely his sledge. To do so you can change the direction at each crossroads. Along the way you will have to avoid manhole and kids that want their presents before Christmas!

The game use the two button controls theme, one button to change direction at crossroads and one button to lay a barley sugar behind you so kids stop following you.

Play and rate the original entry

Play the post jam release

Play it on the google play store

Our LD34 entry. <3

Link to Da game

Merry Christmas fellow game devs.

Merry Christmas! Here’s hoping you guys played Combat Hell, because for the Christmas gift, I’m expanding it. In literally every way I can. Here’s a link with the list of features I want to improve or fix over the time. Everything is changing and for the better, but sadly, I can’t see it coming out this year.

Hey everyone ! Merry Christmas !

well , you’ll make me so much happy if you try out our game and leave some notes!

this is my first ludum dare and im very satisfied with the result.

also leaderboard is added, so please add your scores to it, lets see who is the ultimate judger 😀

Lets do some “Judging” !

It’s been more than a week now since LD34 finished, and finally I have some free time to write the post mortem for my compo entry, “Fun with magnets!”

When I learned about the themes this time I didn’t give much thought to the idea of creating a game that used both of them. For “growing”, I’d mostly considered farming or greedy corporations expanding out of control ideas, which were risky because of the potential to be out of scope for two days, and incorporating the two button-based mechanics would have been challenging.
Attraction/repulsion mechanics, on the other hand, had crossed my mind during the pre-ludum brainstorming I do before the theme announcement to prepare, and I felt that mixing the idea with the two button controls had some potential and was feasible. In hindsight, there are easy ways to incorporate “growing” there as well, but I preferred to go for a simpler approach instead.

I’ve seen lots of awesome entries this time (seriously, this LD34 has an insane proportion of cool games!) proving me wrong about mixing both, but I’m satisfied enough with my entry for once to not regret it.

If you decide to stop reading here, have a merry Christmas/Winter Solstice/Whatever rocks your boat! ;DD

Play it and rate it here

What went right

• Tight idea. Sticking to a clear idea and vision this time helped me a lot towards having a more or less complete “vertical slice” of a game.
• Reasonably adjusted level design: One of my key objectives this time was to close core feature coding soon enough so that I had time to define some semi-decent level design. This time I think I managed to do that to some degree.
• Colour palette: I went for a set colour theme from the start and I believe the game graphics really benefited from it, as it gave the whole game a more consistent look (more on that later)
• Haxeflixel: This is my third LD entry where I’ve used the Haxe+Flixel combo and it’s nice to notice how you become more familiar with it. Even if I experienced some hiccups at the beginning flipping the Unity switch, it’s easy and powerful to use. This time I’m particularly happy with some experimentation I did with Haxe abstracts, enums and anonymous types for level loading, which is something I’d attempted some time ago on my free time for another project with little success.
• Web version was functional on Android! A more than welcome side effect of having used HaxeFlixel was that I saw the game working perfectly on Chrome on my Nexus and other devices. In fact, controlling the game through the visual controls “feels” better there (some thresholds aside) than using the mouse.

What went wrong

• Haxeflixel. Even if I was familiar, it had been some time since the last time and I had to fight a bit at the beginning with the basic cinematic physics support it provides. Once I solved that, my overall experience with it went back to the “What went right” category.
• Confusing control scheme. Initially I experimented with the idea of being able to switch the movement direction as well by cycling in a similar way to the magnets, but that resulted in a clusterf*ck to control, so I capped it so that the only way to change direction was to bump against a border. Still a bit tricky, but an improvement over the initial iteration. Also, controlling in multi-touch devices or with the keyboard only is more or less simple, but on a PC you can also add some mouse to the mix. Last, I think that there are some issues with swipe detection, specially on mobile devices, which make controlling through the visual wheel not fully responsive.
• Glitchy attraction mechanics. Even if it’s functional, the magnet behaviour is far from perfect. I need to adjust the thresholds and angles to make it more responsive than it currently is.
• Graphics. The set colour theme helps disguise this a lot, but as I was creating art assets when I needed them, each of them was drawn using a different style, so the final result leaves a bit to be desired.
• Neglected audio. As always, audio is left for the final hours, which is probably a mistake, as it can help a lot in terms of feedback and immersion. In this case my main concern was that I left the music track half-done to keep adding the final touches.
• Very simple levels. There are 9 levels in the game, which can be considered as a tutorial for something larger, because the goals are really easy. The only challenge at the moment that goes beyond the glitchy mechanics resides on the wheel in the last level, and even if you can consider it as a “To be continued…” sort of cliffhanger, it really makes no sense if you consider the compo entry as a full game.

Next steps

This time I’d like to keep working on a post-compo version (but I always say the same and then I don’t, so take this with a grain of salt), for which I’d need to apply all the things I’ve learned on this edition:

• Fix all the things!
• Improve controls and restrict control schemes. I’ve had some really good feedback about ways to make the controls better, and at first I’d thought about completely scraping the two button restriction and turning to a lever-like system for a post-compo version, but perhaps it’s interesting to keep it and evolve it instead.
• Make all the levels! Either levels need to be more complex or I need to make (a lot) more of it. Also, I had several ideas for additional elements that didn’t make it into the game and could be interesting to make it more fun and difficult.
• Improve graphics. I need to make all the assets a lot more cohesive in terms of drawing style and shading. Also, visual effects.
• Improve sound.
• Dedicated mobile port. Instead of taking advantage of the web version, deploy a native Android one.

Tags: HaXeFlixel, ld34, ld34 post mortem, magnets

happy holidays

♦♦♦♦♦PLAY NOW♦♦♦♦♦

Merry Christmas and try this WebGL interactive (click to flip) snowglobe made with Unity.

Here is my christmas post jam version of Knuspernikus,

You can play it on Android, Linux, Mac and Windos!

Merry Christmas everyone!

Here is the link to my entry: Entry

and here is the link to the post jam version:All versions (Post Jam)

Hi there!
First of all Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone!!!

We fixed some bugs thanks to your reviews and comments.
We also updated our Itch.io page with OSX and Linux versions.

If you haven’t played Breathe yet what are you waiting for? Go check it out!
Don’t forget to rate and comment, we will appreciate a lot your review (We’re gonna play and rate your game too).

Bye!!

Tags: 2d unity, Growing, ld #34, two button controls

Let’s make next year even more awesome! Love all of you guys

Play Let’s Play Simulator 2016

Merry christmas!

PS: If you haven’t played my game yet, do it! http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=46975

Hello fellow devs and gamers, we’d like to wish you a merry christmas!

If you haven’t tried our game yet, you can:

PLAY HERE!

Enjoy your holidays!

Cheers.

Tags: BoltStorm, holiday, Knights, Merry Christmas

Thanks for suggesting 9 post-compo improvements:

* Steer off-road, TheMeorch restarts level.
* At highest speed, Drtizzle changes lane twice as fast.
* Blobo encounters 10% fewer cars that switch lanes.
* Nosfer plays level 11 and 12 with 10% faster driving.
* Muel sees cars signal lane change 4 more cars ahead.
* TerraCottaFrog finishes race at level 2 to 5 about 20% sooner.
* If competitor is moving faster, Blobo does not crash.
* LittleThor hears lane change. http://sfbgames.com/chiptone
* Muel hears soundtrack (autotracker_bu.py).

You can play these in the HTML5 version or play the games of the people mentioned above:

Auto Racer

Merry Christmas everyone! Hope you all get & give plenty of noms, presents and/or love!

Merry Santuarious Christmas!

And when still in the Christmas spirit, why not save some souls seeking sanctuary? I will return the visit if you comment!

It is 26th of December and it is my birthday.

So I was thinking as a gift to me you could play my game and vote.

Oh, btw Merry Christmas to all that celebrate.

P.S. Can you guess how old I have become? I am quarter of C minus one, or half of L minus one, depends how you want to think about it 😀

Merry Christmas everyone!

We just updated (fixed perfomance issues, improved and polished) the post-jam version of our game Winter Quest!

You can play it here:

Winter Quest

Tags: ld #34

In my game, you play as a tie on a mannequin named Pete.

He has a drinking problem because his Ex (Nicole) left him.

Find out how they were made HERE

Hey Everyone!!

I hope you all had a nice Christmas. Anyway, I’ve recently written up a post mortem for my LD34 game Rolla Grolla Arena which you can view on my blog.

There’s still time to play/rate my game before judging ends so click here to give it a try. Also, I’m looking for more games to play/rate so click here to submit your entry and I’ll get to it as soon as possible.

Finally I’ve included a video clip taken from a Twitch stream last weekend where a group of people played and rated my game (which appears in the first few seconds).

Happy Holidays!!

Tags: 2D, ld34, Ludum Dare, post-mortem, postmortem, unity

So this is something I didn’t expect to happen, around two weeks ago was Ludum Dare, where we all had only 48 hours (or 72 for jams) to develop a game, however because I had plans to go to a party that was some distance from home, I had much less time. Despite that I still managed to finish something, although honestly was disappointed I didn’t have much to show, so I could go and vote on other entries.

Voting

What surprises me is that I’ve had some nice and positive comments from many people so far, obviously I wasn’t expecting overwhelmingly positive comments of people thinking a game about planting trees, letting them grow and chopping them down with no time and a limited amount of space was the best they’ve ever played, however I was surprised to see many people saying how nice and calming it is, how it’s very peaceful and relaxing it was to play. Among that, most people said they were impressed that I managed to produce this in around six hours.

Concept

Originally, I was going to team up with an artist that I work with in my full time job as a programmer. When the themes were announced, we were hoping the winning theme was going to be non-violent combat, and had an idea for combating enemies with dancing. I cannot recall why we didn’t go ahead with that one, but we did also have ideas that involved growing trees, so when growing became one of the themes we ended up agreeing to it.

Development

After recalling the development stages, I’m not entirely sure if I did only work on the game for less than six hours. After the theme was announced at 1:30 am on Saturday, I went to sleep. I didn’t start working until around 10am when I got on the train to London, where I did at most 1 1/2 hours (see above). Because of the party, I didn’t do any work until Sunday afternoon when I got back home (around 4pm), and even then I had stopped to discuss any chance of salvaging what time we had left to work on the project with an artist. Once it got late enough I decided to call it quits and try for Monday.

.@CarelessLabs this. Also had an artist interested in working but he backed out due to work related stress. pic.twitter.com/oEszogkrdS

— Gamepopper (@gamepopper) December 13, 2015

Unfortunately I don't think I'll have time to finish my #LDJAM entry tonight. :( Here's what I have so far. pic.twitter.com/W25Q35NZma

— Gamepopper (@gamepopper) December 13, 2015

After getting back from work on the Monday, I quickly finished the last of the art work, added in some audio from freesound.org and uploaded it, so judging by the timestamps and when I took breaks, it’d be more accurate to say I took around 6-8 hours of the game.

Finally submitted my entry for #LDJAM, go and tear it up! https://t.co/8m7GoXUjsv pic.twitter.com/dRvvBqOQJe

— Gamepopper (@gamepopper) December 15, 2015

In Conclusion

Regardless of how long I actually took, what’s clear was that I honestly should have planned my time better, either by cancelling my invite to London or not take part in the games jam entirely. By having more time, I could’ve made a more complete and fulfilling game entry, and probably kept both myself and my artist motivated to working together. Instead I went on an assumption that because I managed to create games in shorter times in the past, that it would be fine this time around.

Thank you to all those who have voted, I have been enjoying all the entries that I have seen so far. I’ll be interested in what the final scores will be.

Tags: Growing, ld34, post-mortem, postmortem

I had no time to rate your games the last two weeks, so I started playing and rating today.

Thanks for playing my game, and if you haven’t played it yet, you can play it whenever you want.

PLAY MEMORY JUMP

Our game was played by Wasteland Dan and got some good reviews. Go and check out the gameplay and also go and play the game.

Watch Here
Play it here

Remember to to like and comment on our game.

THANK YOU

I made quite a few improvements to Stardust in update v1.3 The short summary is parallax background, trail, changing player icon, and some other minor fixes and adjustments.

I uploaded the v1.3 post-jam to itch.io for web and the other builds are located in a link on my game’s ludum dare page!

Our game SAVING THE OAK has a game trailer go and watch.

Go and play and rate it here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=40092

My dev build is running on Android! I’ve also quickly ported the LD entry (link) so you can check out how well that works on your device if you like. Depending on your resolution some of the HUD may be cut off, but I’m already a little further with being resolution independent on the dev build. And it looks like some permissions get added by default the way unity and android SDK work together now (I certainly don’t use/need any so far)? Guess I’ll have to get an Android project manager after all …

So….after reading all of the post/comment on my Ludum Dare page, i really considering to make a Mobile version of Yggshroom.

there will be LOT of changes and improvement from previous version, and also this will be not only for mobile, but i’ll upload it on itch.io too

It’ll be free with ads (still considering this)

heres a screenshot from the main menu:

mainmenu

yeah, i know, it is somewhat obnoxious looking menu screen, but of course its just temporary, i will improve and minimize it so its no this crowded

as for the game itself, still not quite done, some already done correctly i think, i already add more enemy variation, coins drop, etc, but still need LOT of work for it to be a “marketable” product 😀

so yeah, if you interested you can visit my personal web (just for s*it and giggle) and if you not yet played yggshroom, you can try it here.

thank you guys who played, rate and comment on my game, i really appriciate it, i’ll try to improve the game based on you guys comment

cheers

After submitting Retro Rebound Challenge as my Ludum Dare entry, I received some positive feedback. I asked folks who played my game if there would be interest in me continuing development, and I decided I should at least explore the possibility of a full release.

I’ve spent the past week developing a real-time drag-and-drop level editor that can be used to create the in-game levels. It’s a bit crude, but it works. I am going to try to tighten the code up and add save/recall features.

If I can create some puzzles for a single player and co-op mode, I am considering releasing Retro Rebound Challenge as a full release. My plan would be to include the level editor so people can create and share their own levels.

As always, I am interested in your thoughts on the game, whether I should continue development (is there a market for this), and any ideas for improvements.

It’s been two week since the Ludum Dare took place, and i wanted to continue the development of Floppy Snake based on all the feedback i had here, and in my entourage. The main problem was the to small hit boxes, i also fixed some bugs that where not reported, enhanced graphics, and added sounds and music.

You can of course still play the original version for voting, but if you like the game i recommend you the post ludum upgrade, it is far better!

Link to the game

Hope you’ll like it!

Here are the modifications :
– Enlarged the hit boxes of the collectable objects (many many peolpe found they where to small, after more testing, i totally agree with them!)
– Added bonus bombs, you get some when you do not get hit for some time.
– Corrected a bug where objects were never destroyed after going out of the screen.
– Added some text to the interface.
– Changed the colors of the grass, to make understand that it is not hostile.
– Upgraded the shader of the enemys.
– Added some lens flare.
– Added a Shake Camera Effect
– Added some sounds.
– Added music that evolve with the lenght of the player’s tail.

I was surprised, as I am sure a lot of us were, that there was a tie for the LD34 theme with Two-Button Controls and Growing. I think I was surprised more that both themes were given a thumbs up by myself in the final vote. Not only that, but they worked well together for what became my LD34 Compo entry, Supreme Collider.

It started off as an idea I had actually had floating around my head for the past couple years. I thought it might be neat if you started off as a pixel sized object and grew as you ate other objects on a playing field. After jotting some ideas down while watching Star Wars with my kids, I had a majority of the game conceptualized.

What I ended up with was a game where you use two buttons to rotate your circle left or right, or press both to move it forward. As a small circle, you collide with other circles of similar or smaller size to make their size a part of yourself. As you grow in size you become able to take on larger circles. At the same time, the other small circles are colliding with each other, creating larger circles themselves. If you collide with one of the circles that are larger than you, then you became a part of them and the game is over. You win by being the last circle around.

What Worked

One of the Ludum Dare creations I am most proud of is my Ludum Dare 26 entry for Minimalism. It had a simple mechanic: drag colored squares into the same colored box. Keeping it simple made it easier to write and debug. I didn’t have to focus on how two or more mechanics would interact. I wanted to follow that same idea here with Supreme Collider, since I had some commitments on Sunday that I knew would take some of my Ludum Dare time.

My original idea to create conflict in the game was to add a clock, thinking that at the very least you could race against your previous time once you got the hang of it. It didn’t seem that great, so I kept thinking about it. It wasn’t until about 18 hours in that I thought about the larger circles winning the collision battle, giving you something to avoid and hopefully keeping you from just holding down on the thrust combination and zooming along the world wrap.

I wrote Supreme Collider in JavaScript, using Phaser. I have been messing around with it for maybe half a year, but I was comfortable enough to use it for Ludum Dare. Like any new language and framework there is a learning curve, so I run into bugs that have no clear reason and troubleshooting takes time. I think I did well for this though, and I don’t think I was stuck on any one problem for too long. I will continue playing with Phaser and will use it in the next Ludum Dare compo.

What Didn’t Work

One of the pieces of growing was having a larger and larger physical mass. As objects gain mass it takes more force to speed them up or slow them down. This made the middle-to-late stages of the game feel tedious. I scaled it down, but it didn’t really make it fun, so I completely removed this from the game. Every object has the same mass, and they do not change.

As I said above, the clock didn’t seem right as a conflict driver or a scoring device. I liked using the total mass collected from the other circles for scoring, but if you win, you’d get the same score as anyone else. I thought maybe if I combined that with the time it took you to do it, we’d have something more meaningful. However, I just did a simple collected mass divided by the seconds times one-thousand. I think it might be sort of accurate if you make it into the middle-to-late stages of the game, but if you happen to collect a couple nice circles early and then lose, you could end up with a pretty high score. I need to rework it to combine the two numbers in way that more accurately represents your results.

The art was not-so-good. Actually, there wasn’t much art at all. I used circles to represent the objects and changed the diameter based on how much they collected. I would have to do some tests but it is potentially cheaper processing-wise to use a sprite and scale it, or maybe a few sprites for certain threshold sizes and scale them.

Conclusion

The best part is, of course, that I finished something that has a start, a middle, and an end. Of course, it needs work around the edges. I could add some random events, like an alien ship that runs through and shoots the objects before skittering off, or a two player mode. Overall, I am happy with this entry.

Play it here.

Tags: ld34, phaser

Christmas has come and gone so I’m back rating games, yippee! Almost at 100 coolness, but I’ll be going as high as I can manage.

As always, I rate everyone who comments me so give Slum Runner a play and let me know what you think! All feedback is useful!

Now to play and rate the names on my comments list

Happy new year all!

Hi everyone! I’ve been working hard on Hope and have since addressed a few issues from the jam version. I’d really appreciate it if you could all give it a look, even if it’s not technically eligible for voting, I’d still love some feedback. And of course, if you haven’t played my game already, please do! I will happily return the favor by including you in one of my Let’s Play videos and voting on your game!

You can check out my game’s jam entry here.

Or if you’ve already seen it, you can go straight to the itch.io page to download the latest version here.

Now I can start work on my #towerjam game. You can follow me on Twitter to get the details later. I’m excited to start work on it!

Tags: hope, jam, ld34, Ludum Dare, post-jam, update

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

Timeline

Note: I’m in Europe so for me LD is from Saturday 3am to Monday 3am.

Saturday 8:00 am: Wake up. Open laptop. See announcement email. Oh sh******t, I’d completely forgotten LD was this week-end! But, but… I have plans for the week-end! Sorry guys, I’m definitely not participating this time.

Saturday 8:05 am: Two buttons… binary… I have an idea! *Starts coding*.
In one morning, I got numbers falling from the top, destroyed by typing binary.

Saturday afternoon: Go out because sometimes you have to pretend you’re not completely asocial and all that. Ended up being busy until pretty late, so no more progress on Saturday.

Sunday morning: More coding! Added points, game over, arithmetics, difficulty curve…

Sunday afternoon: WHY DO I HAVE TO VISIT FAMILY AND STUFF I HAVE *THINGS* TO DO.

Sunday night: More coding. At 8 pm, most of the gameplay was there, but here’s what the game looked like:

So in the time remaining I added some graphics (just a background image and some clouds), particle effects, intro and game over screens, sound effects and background music. I got to bed at 12:30 because I was working on Monday!

What went well

• Finished another game, yay! And it’s pretty much what I had planned, so I’m pretty happy about that.
• Got an idea in 5 minutes! Usually I spend hours brainstorming.
• Idea was simple. Usually I have to throw away 90% to make it remotely possible to code in a week-end.
• Got an actual *gameplay* idea! Usually I have vague idea for a thing with stuff and I still have no idea what my actual gameplay is until the very end.
• Phaser. I used a framework, yay. Makes adding things like particles really easy.

What went wrong

• Time pressure. FOR ONCE that I had a simple idea, I was still under time pressure because I didn’t find that much time to code. In the end I spent about 12 hours on the game (two mornings, one night).
• Phaser. The thing when you use a framework is that sometimes you have bugs straight from outer space with cryptic stacktraces, which are very frustrating and time consuming to fix.
  In my LD33 making of I wrote “I’ll try and take the time to learn more about [Phaser] before next LD! (but that’s what I tell myself every time, and know I won’t).” Guess what? I didn’t! And I hadn’t used Phaser since LD33 either, so I was (re) discovering it as I went.
• Getting stressed out and angry because of the two bullet points above made me a very unpleasant roommate. Not cool. It was pretty much the same for LD33, so I should work on that.

Final result

Play here.

Immensly enjoy playing many, diverse LD-entries. Also, while doing the compo, i learned quite a bit about programming, plus it strengthened my enthusiasm for creating applications.

But of course, main reason for this post is to “unlock” my profile, so I can give countless awards to myself 😛

[OMG! IT WORKED! finally, I exist 😀 ]

I uploaded Squ’s soundtrack for fun on my SoundCloud account! You can play and rate the actual game on this page.

The music was largely influenced by Mario games – I actually listened to recent Mario Party soundtracks in particular to get an idea on how to get the sound I want. I’m not used at all to make this kind of joyful music so it was a pretty new experience.

Here’s the complete list of what I used to make the music & sounds of the game:

Software

• Propellerhead Reason 8 (DAW, see screenshot below)
• Audacity (conversion and mastering)

Hardware

• M-Audio Keyrig 49 (MIDI keyboard)
• Shure SM58 (voice mic)
• Focusrite Scarlett Solo (sound card/audio input)
• Audio Technica ATH-M50 (headphones)
• Those $20-something speakers I’ve got since high school

Hey guys, I just want to share some post Ludum Dare work. Since Ludum Dare, I have been working on my music in a new way, focusing more on structure. Here are the new tracks, these are all tests, but I like them…

Hey! Look! more shameful plugs!

Please play and rate my LD 34 Entry. DECEIT

It took my kids and I a while to come up with the proper “fling” mechanic for getting a satisfactory viking toss.  You don’t want it too heavy or too light.

Attack of the Vikings

Hi reader/gamer/everyone.

I wanted to share the experience of my second entry in a Ludum Dare compo (the
first one being for the 30 edition, last year, at the same time but in team).

What went wrong

•  The themes. I was confused when the two themes where announced because I am a regular twitch spectator of Ludum Dare’s video and it is the first time I saw
  this happening. So instead of restricting myself to both themes, I just throw one away (two button controls) although I saw great games these past two weeks that used well the combination of the two themes.

• The preparation. I used Unity5 for the first time. Yet I should have premade some basecode and that was not the case. I could have concentrate more on content than coding.

•  The scope. Like last year I targeted too many content (and you can feel it when playing the game).

What went right

•  Wow, finally a _game_ from scratch made by myself. Felt so good !
•  Worked all week-end, from 8 AM Saturday to 3 AM Monday with 12 hours of sleep (Paris timezone makes the Ludum Dare starts at 3 AM Saturday).
•  Feedbacks were awsome! I decided to continue and make a post-compo version. I would love to keep it as a long-term project with constant updates.
  Here’s a screenshot. (The graphics are either made by me or @TChassin)

I’ll probably open a blog and post a roadmap for the post-compo game that I temporary called Adventures of Azimov.

So thanks to every friends and familly that supported me and of course to my
girlfriend who makes the best cannelés in the world

And if you haven’t play it yet, try my entry here.

ReachTheTop

Merry christmas and happy new year !

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=53964

Love this game! Btw I’m new here.

Hello Ludum Datores, I’m Tilde from Backslash Network, I’m a new Youtuber to the Ludum Dare, this is my first year. I love helping indie devs out and showcasing their games while making people happy with my energetic videos. In my descriptions I always put a ‘letsplayability’ rating along two other witty review points.

Meowtastic Present Panic

This is one of my favorites; I love cats, it’s fast paced and it has scores (I’m very competitive). It’s called Meowtastic Present Panic. It’s very fun with cute art. This game should have an online high score option, that would be awesome.

From the Sea, Freedom

From the Sea, Freedom is a slow exploration, swimming simulator. You get to learn something about the ocean and you get to laugh at the references. There’s also a lighthouse, so this must be an epic game. With good music and a lot of potential, I recommend you play this game too.

Other #LDJAM 34 game videos:

• Compilation 1: Charge! and Klodowski
• Compilation 2: Klangwelt, Inferno Botanica, Deep Growth
• St. Orchint’s Orphanage

I hope I’ve brought attention to some underrated games and I hope you enjoy my videos. You can still suggest I play (your) games here at my Twitter, or send me a message through Youtube. Merry late Christmas everyone.

Devs covered:

• OnionBlaze ~ Meowtastic Present Panic
• SecondDimension ~ From the Sea, Freedom
• randomhuman ~ Charge!
• Sixten Kastalje ~ Klodowski
• Goodwolf Studios (their website) ~ Klangwelt
• QuestionableQuality ~ Inferno Botanica
• emanvidmaker ~ Deep Growth
• Double Zero One Zero ~ St. Orchint’s Orphanage

Tags: gameplay, ld34, Let's Play, Ludum Dare, review, video, youtube

Yeah, Ludum Dare was great fun this time around, and 2 weeks later I’m still rating the odd game that pops up so why not write about my experiences writing a themed gameboy game in 2 days?

It’s 2:20am, that’s a good reason as to why I shouldn’t but heyyyy, time is time.

Somehow the game came together in a natural way this time around, I did a fair bit of play testing and the game evolved from a simple vertical thrust and one button to fire at things into more of a challenge against the odds.

Those odds being both coding for the Gameboy and making the most out of two button controls to achieve more complex gameplay than just thrust infinitely, avoiding all enemies, which at one point the game looked like it was going to end up being. Until…

That one thing that jetpacks infamously run out of…FUEL! Having enemies drop fuel cans, means the player has to hang around a bit to collect them to progress.

Which is fine, but, even with the added auto firing and gun-recoil for horizontal movement, how in the hell is the player going to get the damned things….

Have them home in onto the player of course, DUHH!

Honestly, those decisions I made on Day 2 are what really made the game work better. I could talk about how much of a thing it is to get the Gameboy to use sprite data, limitations of 40 8×8 sprites per screen and 8 per scanline and the finickiness of writing to sound registers for a long time, but, see it took just less than a paragraph. (Seriously, though, those sound registers and optimisation for a 4Mhz machine, gahh!)

Quickie Post-Mortem:

Pros: It was fun, challenging to make and a lot happened on the fly, there’s sound effects everywhere! I learnt more about GBDK, C++ and feel refreshed to tackle my other Gameboy games I have in development.

Cons: I still can’t compose music for toffee. No, really, offer me a toffee to compose music for you, I won’t take the toffee, I promise. Gameboy music. even tougher.

Go check out Novascape? Because you need to escape…the planet Novatron 7…Before you get consumed by hot, boiling lava rising up from underneath you!

Play the game, be frustrated at the old skool difficulty, enjoy it anyway hopefully?

Hi everyone, today we are making our first post to present to you our game!

We are proud to publish this trailer of “Switchies” !

We have to warn you this may be a difficult and frustrating game so please preserve your computer from your own wrath,

and check out our game (don’t forget to give us some feedbacks!)

For more addons we update new versions of the game on our website: http://switchies.xyz/
I would like to add that we all are students, it’s our first year and more our first game! (that explains our poor english level as you can see)

Good luck to everyone !!

Today I made some improvements to LDJamerator:

• Filter out parentheses unless they’re part of an emote, because they’re otherwise unlikely to appear as matched pairs without a lot of extra logic.
• Filter out double quotes for the same reason as parentheses.
• Make it so that the next word after a colon or emote is not generated from the Markov chain, but instead pulled randomly from the entire corpus.
• Prevent generated tweets from accidentally being verbatim copies of one of the 1500 source tweets. I use hashing to quickly determine whether a generated tweet is an exact copy, so anything less than an exact copy will not be caught right now.

I wanted to regenerate the corpus but it looks like the Twitter API won’t let me get old tweets, and most of the current #ldjam tweets are bot-trash or self promo, so it doesn’t result in good jamerations at all. I’ll have to wait until the next LD to generate a new corpus, but this should still provide lots of fun in the meantime.

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

Got the Multiplayer Survival Mode (With Sudden Death) for my entry: Arc. Just got one more mode left on work on and then I’ll post a link to the Post Compo version on the entry.

In this mode the arc you are currently in slowly closes and when you leave it, it just stays the same it doesn’t close. So last man standing wins. And eventually there’s Sudden Death! (Shown above) Don’t touch the red! c:

(Sorry for the low quality gif)

Hi everyone!

At first I would like to thanks for every review/comments of my first Ludum Dare project.

I successed the first update of my project.  Let me share my first experiences with Ludum Dare

1. I tought, I develop fast my game, and the last 3 Hours I make models with Blender. I didn’t use Blender before. It was a horrible idea, because nobody can’t learn how to use Blender in 3 Hours 😀

2. I tought, my game will be awesome. Of course, my first game, that I develop less then 72 Hours, it will be awesome

3. I tought, I don’t have to send Post mortem. Yes! Because my game is perfect. I get review comments, and I realized my game is not perfect

4. I have to send Post mortem, but what time? I tought, I fix all the bugs, and make many updates before the end of Judging. Yes! I make many animations, I update the gameplay in three weeks, and I am working 8-9 Hours in weekdays. I don’t known… It is hard.

5. I tought, finally I finished my game. Yes, because my game was perfect in all time 😀 What is next step? I want to be better, so i try to make this game better. I try to manage this time, so I have a plan, and I write what is in the scope. More details are in my entry.

This was my first LD (and 4th GameJam, actually), I made a game named Jet Team in two days of pretty lazy coding/drawing/e.t.c. Basically, themes of LD were not very suitable for me, I thought, so I lacked both a good game idea and a will to finish something big.
So I came with pretty simple concept: lazy side-scroller arcade where your goal is to fight incoming enemies with your squad of tiny spaceships and eventually assemble squad of 10 ships (so, here comes “Growing” theme). At first, I wanted to make “W” and “S” buttons to control the vertical position of squad. It did not seem very comfortable and also required to make different callbacks for different situations (these buttons also must be the ones which you press to start/restart/skip intro/e.t.c.). So a truly simple solution – use mouse position to define desired vertical position of squad. It was easy to implement, and also it went more natural than actual button controls. I made squad ships shoot on left mouse button press, but grew tired of constant clicking pretty soon. I decided ships should be smart enough to shoot enemy automatically as they approach on close Y-positions. And lo! this is how I got this concept for “Zero-button arcade”, the game where it’s pretty much enough to move your mouse up and down, and nothing more.
Remaining time I had spend on creation of different AI types, to make some challenge for player (actually, I went too far with game’s difficulty). Here’s my LD:Compo entry:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=59837
In my honest opinion, it went surprisingly well for such amount of work. People liked this mechanic and  (suddenly!) my weird pixel art. So, after two weeks of judging, I decided to make some adjustments. So I present you Jet Team: Deluxe Edition. Some graphics improvements, difficulty changes and bugfixes were made, and game became much more playable. I hope you’ll enjoy this:
http://firellon.ru/jetteam_deluxe
Have fun!

Hi Conga Master fans!

We can’t be happier! We are getting so many of good comments and reviews from you, that we’ve decided to make Conga Master, bigger and better!

We will let you choose from ALL the characters in the game, there will be more of them! and they’ll be different! some will run faster, some will get the attention of other dancers more than others… and more!

Stay tuned! And Thank You for all your good reviews!!

Tags: 2D, Conga, dance, game, ld34, Master, pixelart, unity

Hey!

I finally finished the timelapse of the livestream! The entire stream was 30 hours, 50 minutes long. This video is sped up 216 times normal speed.

Don’t forget to rate DESEEDER!

hi

I’ve added a leaderboard to the post-compo version of my ld34 minigame.
You can try it here 

This week was really crazy for our game – quite a large number of Lets Play videos (including jacksepticeye and Draegast) appeared out of nowhere and our game pretty much blew up, attracting around 50’000 players in the last couple of days.

This was our first game jam and the first game that we (Tilen and Maja) actually finished as a team. The feedback was so overwhelmingly positive and encouraging  that it gave us much needed inspiration to start making bigger and better games.

Playlist of all Lets Play videos

We sincerely want to thank all of you for the support and encouragement!

Play Life: The Game

Hohoho! Merry Christmas, Ludum Dare!

That’s totally snow, and not clouds

It’s that time of year when we get together and- Wait, Christmas is over? How long ago?

Well, damn.

Anyway, with the holidays out of the way, I managed to get some work done and updated the game! Unfortunately, no Christmas-themed art. The changelog can be found here, at my game page. Basically, new NPCs were added, which allow you to trade flowers, birds and magic for bonuses! If you think their prices are unbalanced, or you don’t like how the economy works or something, do let me know.

From left to right: Bird Feeder, Hunter, Wizard.

Buying gardens at 10,000 flowers hasn’t been implemented yet, there’ll be an NPC for that. I’m considering adding mini-games as well, something to do on the side if hopping on clouds somehow becomes too much. They’ll mostly be to farm magic and birds quickly, but at a price. Right now it’s just an idea, but we’ll see.

As for releasing it on mobile… I’m still fumbling my way in the dark on that one. Nothing a few Google searches can’t fix, I bet!

Anyway, thanks so much for all your support, I couldn’t (and wouldn’t) have done it without you guys. If you haven’t tried the game yet, go ahead and play the original version here, and the updated version here. Any bugs or suggestions, do let me know! Have a very happy New Year, Ludum Dare!

…I’m not too late to wish you guys a happy New Year, right?

Hope you’ll enjoy Let’s Play Simulator 2016

Today, we introduce to you our main character.
Please do not feed it!

Play it, enjoy it, love it!

Hey!

If you still don’t know what you are going to do with your friends tomorrow night, you may consider playing Blobitronica! :p

You can still play it solo as well if you don’t know what to do before tomorrow 😉

Click Here to play!

Have fun !

Hi everyone!

I’ve made a trailer of Memory Jump

Thank you so much for playing my game, and if you have no played it yet, play it whenever you like!

Play Memory Jump

Thank you again, and HAPPY NEW YEAR!! ^_^

There are some poeple who have beaten our game, but it also seems to be way too hard for others.

So for those of you who don’t have the time (or the mad skillz) to finish the game, but still would like to see the whole thing, we uploaded a full playtrhough of it to YouTube. Unfortunately due to “technical difficulties” the quality is not that high.

click if you dare:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJdhxutiy-E&feature=youtu.be

If you do have the time (and the mad skillz) you can play and rate (come on….DO IT!) our game here:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=46957

Unfortunately Ludum Dare will soon be over and we will have to wait a long 3 months for the next one. But a lot of us develop games all the time. Where will will share our creations while we wait? Can’t there be somewhere to show off games at anytime? We decided to solve that. For now on you can get GameGrape Gaming Reviews EVERY month! So now instead of just seeing us on Ludum Dare you can now head over to our page and fill out the information for any game you would like and we will review it. You can also submit a different game every month if you’d like. We will even do a let’s play, game review, and a written review for your game. You send the game and leave the rest to us!

If you would like us to make monthly reviews, let’s play videos, and or written reviews or even just have us make a game review for your Ludum Dare game head over to: gamegrapestudios.com/gamegrapegaming.

HAPPY LUDUM DARING! 😀

GameGrape Gaming – Game On!

http://www.gamegrapegaming.wordpress.com

I always liked the timelapses. Even though I like this game less. 😀

PLAY NOW

Tags: timelapse

Hi everyone! We love Ludum Dare with all of our bodies, and love the developers even more! We’re on a big comfy couch-bed streaming your games. Come on in and show us your game!

http://www.twitch.tv/onlyslightly

Seeing as it’s the last week of judging, my entry (Rolla Grolla Arena) could do with some more votes (At the moment I’ve reached just over 60 and I’m aiming to get 100 by the end of the week). You can click here to give it a try (It’s a local multiplayer game so grab a friend or two and don’t forget to leave a comment so I can play/rate your entries as well) and you can also click here to read the game’s postmortem on my blog.

As it’s the last week of judging, I still have my Google Form up so if you would like me to play/rate your entry, click here and I’ll get to it as soon as possible.

How many votes are necessary to get the results? So far, I have 24. I thought you needed 25 votes, so I only need one more, right?

BOOM! POST COMPO Version of my entry, Arc, is out! Different Colors, New Power Ups/Power Downs, More Music, and MULTIPLAYER!

Make sure to check it out! (All Instructions are in Game) c:

Also, check out the new track I made:

It looks like its nearly the end of this ludum dare, so it only makes sense to put this here

You should go play it

These are some post-mortem thoughts on my game We used to Be Neighbours – a game about growing walls.
This time I wanted to create something that would maybe make people think for a while after playing the game…

For me Ludum Dare starts at 3am on Saturday so I prefered starting in the morning after breakfast 😉
This time I have actually spent some time on Friday, brainstorming some of the 20 final themes. Nothing too detailed, just sketching the main game concept and judging it’s feasability in 48h period. I had an idea for Growing and I didn’t have any for Two button Control so I sticked with my initial concept for Growing theme.

On Saturday morning I have detailed my game design, I didn’t want the game to be too complex as I had practically no code base (just the main menu, sound control, image loading etc) so I had to do everything from scratch.
But it turns out in the end that the fact that the game isn’t too complex is probably it’s major flaw…
Yet, there are still several strategies to tackle the game, so it should get the player entertained for a while as the real objective of the game is not to get the maximum points but to unlock the alternative ending.

I am really happy about the music in this game. Even though I have spent a few hours composing a song in MuseScore on sax and piano only to realize in the end that it didn’t suit the mood of the game too much. So I had to rapidly compose something diffrent (using LMMS) which turned out quite all right considering the scarce time I had.

In the end as I really liked the sax and piano song I decided to play it when the player unlocks the alternative ending.

You can find both songs here:
We used to be Neighbours Theme
Theme in F for sax and piano
(I tried to embed these in my post but it doesn’t seem to work..)

Overall it was a good Ludum Dare, except for debugging which took longer than expected I managed to do everything as planned which is a plus.

Why don’t you give the game a try?

Hello guys! It’s the last week of voting, and it would be lovely if we could get just a bit more reviews. So if you have it in your heart and you have time, please check out our game as a new-years present for us! Thanks in advance!

Play our game HERE!

Tags: gamedev, growth, indiedev, ld34, ldjam, Ludumdare, virus

Hello, fellow Ludum Darers!

We’ve set up a Game Development community on Discord, a free in-browser Skype alternative.

Join us now and talk about gaming and programming with other developers!

https://discordapp.com/invite/0dlKnYoTVkUgchKJ

Hey,

I wasn’t able to do much since christmas was so near, but I managed to polished my tutorial level. It would give the “general vibe” on what the full game will be, so if you did not try it yet, please visit my entry !

Now, for those interested by the story, it is indeed about Light and Darkness, and a psychological tale about finding one self true meaning in life.  I didn’t wanted to let the player lose interest from the main puzzle path of my level, so I made a clear tutorial and a fairly simple level to complete, but for those who wants to know more about the lore and the universe, I hid a secret room with more some story development, where I treated it like “a reward”. This secret room will flesh the character’s backstory and constitute a “truth”, where it is completely possible for one player to miss it if he doesn’t search enough and will receive a different ending if he succeeds. But, the main story/path is a whole story in itself, so the “truths” are backstory, where it’s still completely optional story wise.

The good

It was the first Ludum dare where I used actual dialogues and cutscenes in order to tell a story. Of course, the player has to solve puzzle and make actions to survive, but I had fun to include some dialogues when the player was triggering some objects in the environnement.

I also prepared myself a lot before the LD, so I could set myself a limit for the amount of things I had to do. For example, I knew that I wanted to work with dynamic Lights and Dialogues, so I prepared in advances some plugins so it could be ready when the theme would be revealed.

The Bad

I still have some difficulty with my scene management and how to structure my game. I had to do external research in order to make a game state and a scene manager and how to mix both of them together in Unity. It was really a good learning experience, but I wish I just had more time to learn how to do so. Now, I will save those research as external plugings, so if I want to use them again, I will just need to export them 😉

I had also time management problems, where personal life had to take over LD time, so that didn’t went well for a time. Next time I will try to reserve myself more time, and will probably do something simpler.

Unity Unity Unity…why do you make my life so hard sometime… sometime, I wonder if the engine is made for short LD projects. I had a lot of technical problems this time around, so I wonder if I should use next time something more simple, like Construct 2 or another game making engine.

Managing Dynamic Light has been difficult, since I was dealing with a third party plugin and had to learn how to make it work last minute. I was placing a light between 2 obstacles, so the light would collide with those. Sometime, when moving out from this light with the camera, it didn’t took into account the collision and the light was going through the walls. So I’ve made a little research and found the problem and fixed it, but it cost me a lot of production time… now that I know how it works, I won’t have this issue next time around 😉

To Conclude 

It was a very good LD that gave me a good perspective of what type of game I could do next time. I wanted to add more levels in the end, but that will be for the full game. So have a good time searching for the “truth” and completing this short experience I made for this LD.

Thank you for playing !

Please try it out!

Play as a plant and defend your self from your enemy with chemical defenses that all exist in real life!

Like a Tower Defense game!

Inspired by the Wild Coyote Tobacco Plant and its chemical weapons!

Remember if you have trouble check out the How to Play menu on the first level!

I havn’t found the time to add something to my entry. But if you didn’t tested it yet, don’t be afraid to, it’s a puzzle, pretty simple to play (and, well, not (so) long to solve).

Whatever you decide, I wish you an happy new year !

Square Exit

Hey everyone! We are the Button Masher Bros!

Happy New Year! Hope you all have a wonderful and safe evening!

Today is the 2nd to last LUDUM DARE TO BELIEVE!

So that means it’s time to roll out our handy dandy – FEEDBACK FORM!

This is your opprotunity to tell us what we can do to make the show better. Every season we carefully consider all requests… GET YOUR VOICE HEARD! If you love us, let’s us know! If you hate us… well here is your chance to tell us off!

Anything goes. We will listen.

Lastlt… HURRY AND VOTE!

It’s Ludum Dare to Believe Ep. 11!

(May contain strong language)

With so many submissions, there was absolutely no way we could play them all.

Special thanks to our friends on twitter and youtube who all stepped up to give us suggestions – you guys are AWESOME!

If you like the games you see, be sure to check them out on Ludumdare.com and let the developers know what you think!

Today we will be highlighting:

——–

Title: The Uncertainty Principle
Category: Jam Entry
Creator: RadMars

——-

Title: Reap
Category: Compo Entry
Creator: Managore

——–

Title: Harvest
Category: Compo Entry
Creator: RXI

——–

Finally, we’d love to hear what you think!
You can comment on the episode linked above, comment in this thread, or tweet us at:

@ButtonMasherBro – Show account

@MathBlasterRitz – Chris

@SuddenlyZach – Zach

or @jwowBMB – Josh

Thanks Everyone and HAPPY LUDUM DARE!

Since our LD project “Klangwelt“, in which you grow a musical world, was done, we’ve been getting fantastic feedback. However there are still some small issues in the usability, so here’s what we are planning to do in the next weeks:

• Rewrite the controls completely – instead of keyboard input, we’ll use mouse and touch input
• Add more objects
• Add chord-playing-objects
• Add some mechanic for unlocking objects (progress)
• Add settings for the sandbox mode (e.g. seasons on/off, auto-generate objects on start etc.)
• Improve the calculation that locks certain notes from being played to restrict disharmonies
• Add more ways of learning how harmonies work during play (e.g. scale-visualizations, map-overlays, tutorials, maybe some learning-mode that slowly teaches you harmonies)
• Make a mobile version for tablets – pay-to-play, no in-app-payments

Thanks for playing and giving such good feedback. Remember, you can still rate & play Klangwelt here.

One day I will be the best bomb disposal expert / janitor / secret agent!

Check out Defuser 4000 Here

Play Let’s Play Simulator 2016 Here

It’s not too late to submit your game or a game your pals have made. You can send it to Larry in this fancy form thingy -> over here.

Check out the full LD34 showcase playlist so far here -> Larry Does Ludum 34

Tags: Defuser 4000, Larry Chupacabra, Larry Does Ludum, Let's Play Simulator 2016, Ludum Dare Showcase

After a hellish week of my daughter teething several teeth at once XD finally I can release a new post compo version with sound fixes and due to that also more sounds.
And then I also added some more balancing, so it’s a little bit easier and screentransitions from normal to frost or heated are now smooth.

The original version is unchanged but I have added a WebGL, linux and OSX build

Happy new year! and I would love it if you would give my game a try:

Hatchling Game

All through this Ludum Dare I’ve been taking snapshots of the current voting status to get some idea why the competition runs for 3 weeks (and not 4, or 2, or 1). Mostly things have been going pretty much as predicted – The first week is super hectic, and then the final two weeks are mostly just a steady trickle.

With 3 and a half days of voting remaining, we’ve FINALLY reached 70% of games with enough ratings to get a final score.

We actually had 60% after the first week. It’s taken another 11 days to get another 10%. Which is interesting. I felt like I still didn’t really understand what was actually going on though, so I came up with a new metric: How many individuals actually played and rated games per day (I did this by comparing their ‘votes given’ today to their ‘votes given’ the day before). It produced Interesting Facts

Interesting Facts!

• On the first full day of voting 1714 people rated, on average, 14.7 games each. That’s a lot of games.
• In the 2nd and 3rd weeks, people seem to play and rate about 4-5 games each a day, and that’s been surprisingly consistent. The only difference from day to day is how many people are actively rating games. Seems like it’s mostly different people each day, too, but I haven’t analysed that data properly yet.
• December the 23rd was our least productive day. 428 people rated on average 4.7 games each and the result was that just one game managed to cross the 17 vote threshold (LD33’s threshold – LD34’s might be different)
• Yesterday just 241 people played and rated 1182 games. 27 games managed to sneak over the 17 ratings threshold, and 17 people reached their 25 games milestone
• Right now 406 people still haven’t rated a single game. It’s a surprisingly big minority of people who make a game but then have no interest in getting a score or playing anyone else’s games.

From what I can tell, while it’s not very many people, there are a surprising number of people quite happy to spread their voting out over the full three weeks. There you go!

Happy New Year! 😀 Are you ready for some old-days planting? (I really dont know what I just said), play my game: Trees : 60 lines of code – 60 minutes!

HERE is the link 😀 😀

I am currently working on improving gamemechanics and graphics by a huge part in my LD34 entry.

Here you can see how much graphics improved, it will be even more!

Before (state in the LD):

After (current state):

I am planning to put this game on Greenlight in the beginning of may 2016, lets see if I can make it into a full game until then

If you did not tried it until now: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=55223

We’re starting another year. 2015 was my (brupibo) first year as a real game developer, and with my best friend (kakinak) we started our humble “indie studio” called Bee Tracks. After much study and training we achieved a good game to close the year nicely: Snowman’s Christmas. We’re happy to get here, no matter the results of LD34. It was quite an accomplishment for us and we really thank you all the feedback (we’re happy we had a lot of positive feedback too). We’re doing our best too, to give valuable feedback for the games we play. We believe this is how we improve. I read some Ludum Dare posts and saw many developers sharing much good information about game development. I feel I don’t have enough knowledge to teach something new, so I decided to share our experiences with the development of our game.

For start, these were our tools:

• Graphics: Clip Studio Paint, Inkscape, Pixeluvo
• Audio: Zoom H1 (for recording the SFX) + Ableton Live
• Programming: Game Maker Studio
• Animation: Spine Essential
• Gif Recorder: ScreenToGif – Preview 9

Now to the creative process.

This ornament was nicely put in a corner. Kakinak said “what if something jumped around in these bulbs?”, we enjoyed the idea instantly and we decided to implement it if the “two button controls” were the theme. Coincidence? Maybe, but it worked. 😀

MUSIC

Here it is the full version of the song from the game. We aimed for something fun and “christmas feeling”, of course.

GAME MECHANICS AND PROGRAMMING

Our original idea was to make Kevin need to turn on the lights too, but we knew we wouldn’t have time for it, so we kept it simple. We have two different color for the bulbs, yellow and red. Each one have a different impulse in our character. But when I was designing the level I thought it would be boring to only keep going up. So I created some rules that you character need to jump on lower bulbs too, sometimes, to get to the right way.

I used Spine to create the animation for the character. This was simple. Just a jumping animation, but I wanted to be smooth as possible. I didn’t achieved that, but it was my first time using Spine. In Game Maker I used image_xscale=1 and -1 to flip the character. That isn’t reliable in its HTML5 exporter, so, for the web version, the sprites are used the conventional way. There is another problem too: Spine sprites doesn’t work very good with precise collisions in GMS, so I created an object specifically to be the “collision guy”. To this object I attached Kevin, and that made easy to port to HTML5. It was just a matter of attach another object with the conventional sprite animations, then make the algorithm to use one or another depending if it is a browser or not.

For the tree I created different object for the leaf rows and designed the stages as the usual. But this impacted a lot when porting to Android. Actually, I was unable to do that yet. Bad planning of my part. The performance was terrible. We intend to port it when we improve it (maybe Nov, 2016) but for now, just the windows/linux/web versions are fine.

Another GMS specific issue: fonts. I’m using bitmap fonts, of course, but when you are going to map it for non-english languages, the problems start to appear (we’re Brazilians, our native language have a lot of special characters). The font_add_sprite_ext works differently in HTML5. For Windows/Linux, I needed to use font_add_sprite_ext to use special characters, but for HTML5 it needs to be the font_add_sprite. So, the solution is to create a ASCII image table and create a font map with the same sequence . Then, put a condition to detect if the game is in browser or not to switch between that. Luckly, GML uses variable to keep the fonts, so, this is not much of a trouble after you figure it out (I spent a considerable amount of time until I’ve figured that out).

The cutscenes are simple objects movements. I’m using GMS native draw functions to create the rectangles behind the text. The pause event is controlled in each object with a global variable.

I hope there is something useful for you in this text. I’m not an experienced developer, but if you want to know something specific in this game, feel free to contact me on Twitter or by e-mail.

Thanks for reading and we wish you an awesome 2016, full of happiness, accomplishments, art and games!

I added and improved quite a bit in this new version. Previously I already made it work with Virtual Reality: http://ludumdare.com/compo/2015/12/22/forklift-man-in-virtual-reality/ which is now also improved.

You might have wondered before why Forklift Man can grow his limbs at will yet his head is bald as if he can’t grow something as simple as hair. As you can see that is now finally fixed in the new version. Just hold H to grow your hair as long as you like.

You might have also wondered why Forklift Man can’t just grow his brain so he can easier solve the puzzles, well he can now grow his whole head (X)! Also new is the seflie camera (Y):

They appear to be rather useless new growing abilities but I made a simple puzzle around it in the last room.

Also new added is music and some more sounds. The walking is not anymore always straight forward, he actually strafe walks now by turning his pelvis 90 degress to the side just like every human does it, sorta:

I also improved the physics for carrying boxes quite a bit. Before that I gave another physics grab option of UE4 a try but it only turned out worse with arms literally getting broken and knotted and boxes spinning around. But it is  now significantly better anyway, you don’t have to be as gentle to the boxes anymore.

I also made a few tweaks to the cameras and the rooms. It turned out a lot of people thought putting a box on a pillar solves the 2nd room. Because video game logic I guess. Well, no more of that, that pillar is now gone and it hopefully is more clear now that you need to build a bridge (or anything that gets you up on the other side).

Also added now are simple graphics quality settings that you can cycle through by pressing O, here are all the controls:

Just press ESC ingame to get to this controls screen.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=44878%C3%A2%C2%80%C2%8B

Hello LD’ers! ~

This was my first Ludum Dare and it was a learning experience for me and my channel. I’ve met a lot of great, promising devs, got many (so many) requests. It was awesome! Although next time I’ll probably do things way differently, haha.

This is my last compilation video post for this LD. Here you go!

Games covered:

• Radical Revolver Recoil Rampage ~ AndreasL
• Laser Jump FTW ~ Crashmore Studios
• Breathe ~ Galvesmash

Hopefully this video has brought some attention to games you haven’t seen yet.

Go play and rate!

~

Liked the video? Come hang out with us (Tilde & Backslash) at Twitter @BackslashYT & make sure we can continue to make content in the future. We’ll be around for the next LDJam to help you devs getting the word out. 😀 That’s what we do with our channel and we love it.

~

Latest single game video, FRUITWOLF by Claw:

Tags: compilation, ld34, Ludum Dare, review, tilde, video, youtube

Hello everyone! This is Jacob, and I’m one of four developers that worked on our latest game RollingFlames. Last time I was involved in LD33 with a game called P-Type, where I also did a post-mortem high level analysis of what went right and wrong.  I was mainly involved in scripting and design this project. Logan was involved in scripting and spritework, Alex primarily worked on growth and conceptual design and Brandon worked on scripting related to the music.

One of the biggest issues we ran into right off the bat is that we had trouble coming up with a game that we all agreed that would be both fun to develop and fun to play. We spent most of the first day going through various ideas, ways to fit to the theme and so forth. The end result was that by the second day we came up with RollingFlames, a simple Katamari-like game where you would grow by burning various objects and eventually take over the world!

Simplistic Design: We ran into a few cases while brainstorming that, while interesting would lead to a lot of time setting up background mechanics. The result is that by the end of LD we likely would’ve had various systems not in place or not working. This game was much simpler to work with and as a result we could easily add new concepts on top without worrying that we might miss a major part of it by the end.

Simplistic Gameplay: You run around and bump into things to absorb them, and by doing so you grow larger. This gives immediate feedback to the player that they’re doing something right, and it’s hard to do something wrong. This makes the flow of the game easy to track and ensures everyone can see the whole game.

What didn’t?

…Perhaps too simplistic: The game being so simple meant that there wasn’t much challenging ourselves in terms of what to create or how to create it. This made this project a bit more of a chore than our previous, which segues into my next point.

Motivation: This time all of us snagged into motivational problems at one point or another. Part of it was the discussions we had on the first day, part of it was the above and more of it was just real life circumstances. While I’m very happy with what we got done, I think the next game will turn out even better.

Conclusion

Because we spent so long discussing what we should do as well as the motivational stuff, we ended up not spending as much time working on this project as we did in P-Type (just compare the amount of commits between the two!). Despite that, I still feel it was fun and a great experience. Bring on the next Ludum Dare!

If you would like to play our current game RollingFlames, click here, or click here to play our LD33 entry P-Type.

Hey, guys!

There are less than 3 days left until the results of LD 34, and we really want to collect all the possible feedback to improve our game before the time runs out.

For you it would be just about 5 minutes of your time, but it will be really important for us to hear your thoughts about our game, especially:

1. What do you like about it
2. What you do not like about it
3. What do you think would be cool to add to the game
4. Your idea about improving the mechanics

That’s it, we really hope you will help us to make our game better!

Link to our game: Glow&Grow

And the trailer, we are a bit proud of:

For most of my LD games I go with procedural level generation, rather than hand-crafted levels.

Why Proc-Gen?

I’m always shooting for the “Fun” category, and I’m aiming for a cocktail like this:

• A core physics-based action that’s fun to just do on its own.
• Obstacles with some variation, that can be procedurally mixed up in varied combinations
• A quick retry loop so the “you lose” moment gets the “one more try” response rather than the player quitting
• A score mechanism that lets the player be challenged but doesn’t overly punish someone just having a good time

I don’t always succeed in getting the balance right – for example my LD29 game about navigating a ship between icebergs was far too difficult to be accessible.  LD31 was much too confusing.  LD32 was a total failure because the core action simply wasn’t sufficiently controllable.  So there are many pitfalls,  but when it works I feel like this is a good approach, at least for me.

The procedural generation is a key piece because it keeps the game fresh, even for myself, and facilitates that “one more try” feeling upon failure.  LD games are played in a quick sitting to evaluate, so I hate to ask the player to repeat anything.  I don’t even send them back to the start of the difficulty curve when I’m doing generated levels… I want them to push one button and immediately be back in the flow but seeing something new.

How I Approach Proc-Gen

I have developed a bit of a system…  here is a screenshot of me mapping out the difficulty curve and then adding elements to my level generator in Unity:

On the left in the spreadsheet I have mapped out what I want to achieve in a sort of visual way.  In Psychotennis the player is on the left, bouncing  a ball to break bricks, like this:

The different bricks have different behaviors, some taking more shots to break and others hitting the ball back to you with various amounts of speed-boosting.  So it’s important to make sure they’re placed in some meaningful way.

Designing the Generation

You can read the spreadsheet (which is the design doc) like this:  Each row is a “match” aka a level, and each column is a possible placement of bricks.  In the early matches 1-5, the player should face bricks relatively far away, consisting of fluff and a bit of “light structure” which is a term I use to describe bricks that take more than one shot to remove, and thus create a durable shape to each match.

By the midgame we have threats in the back portion, covered with some structure, and a bit of easy-to-clear fluff nearer the player.  By the endgame there’s a complex sandwich with a few threats close to the player, which are especially hard to deal with.

You can also see that although there are three big “zones” of 1-5, 6-12, and >12, I do some additional minor transitions, such as levels 6 and 7 lacking the “fluff” nearest to the player.

So creating that spreadsheet is how I design the difficulty curve and overall shape I want from the procedural generation.

Implementing the Generation

Looking back at the screenshot, in the Unity editor on the right you can see how I enter this design into the game’s level generator that I wrote.  This is a critical bit – although there is a lot of custom logic in the generator, it is even more driven by the data that I enter, which allows me to more rapidly input/edit the design.

I create a series of entries, each of which defines a range of “layers” (the horizontal position) at which this entry can be spawned, as well as a level range at which it occurs.  Then there are a set of four prefabs, one brick each, representing what will be placed if this entry is instantiated.  It’s four bricks rather than one because I somewhat arbitrarily decided that I’d do the generation in “quads” of 2×2 bricks.  So I kind of generate by the molecule instead of the atom, if you will.

The weight is usually one, but can be adjusted to make certain entries more rare or common.  I put all eligible entries into a “Weighted Random Grab-Bag” and then pull from that bag to select the item to be instantiated.  A rather high “skip placement” chance is then applied, first at the quad level and then again at each brick level, which creates the empty spaces and makes the “shape” of each level different.  Early on it was a giant wall of bricks like atari breakout, but that was a lot more repetitive and thus less fun.

“Concrete” – the unbreakable bricks seen in the clip above – required a lot of care since they can create impossible-to-win levels and even get the ball completely stuck.  The game creates a “budget” for concrete that will not be exceeded, and has a lot of restrictions on where and how closely concrete can be placed.

A Flaw in the Approach

In general there is a problem with this pattern:  The player plays for a while, gets past the easy stuff and to their skill level.  If they lose, I make them restart but from the current level… so I generate a new level but don’t send them backward in the difficulty curve.  This works well for a while, keeping the player challenged.  But if they play for a very long time, they will get some lucky easy levels and push further into the difficulty curve.  Then they will be playing in an incredibly hard level and be stuck there, losing and losing.  Hopefully the game is still fun then, but it’s not a very nice way to leave them.  In post-compo work on pychotennis, this is the primary thing I’m trying to address.  The game just gets too hard and then strands you there.

There are other flaws in that a player can be served a bad level that is either too hard or too easy.  But with short levels and fresh generation each time, I don’t worry too much about this.  As long as the game is not generating totally game-breaking levels then I think it’s okay if the player has the occasional silly experience.

My Games Using This Approach

To see this in action, you can check out my current entry, Psychotennis.

If you’re even more interested than that, you can check out my games list page for past entries.  The ones that use this approach most clearly are Hammer Control and Splash Europa.

Hope you’ll enjoy Let’s Play Simulator 2016

I finally found the time to fix the difficulty settings of my ludlum dare entry.

I got several comments that the learning curve was to steep and that it was not clear how to play the game, so i added ten new levels which become more difficult very gradually.

No game mechanics has been changed, i merely added new entry levels to make it more accessible.

Try it for yourself here

Panball was a game that I really was surprised by both the difficulty I had to understand how the pinball worked and the feedback from all about the theme, I’m not very good at interpreting themes, so it was amazing (credits go to a programmer friend named Rafael Hrasko, who gave me the idea of pinball using some method to grow when ball eat something) 😀

Those who haven’t played, I’m sure you will not spend more than 5 minutes

Jam ———–Version
Post jam —-Version

First of all, if you haven’t tried the game, take a look at it!

The idea of making a team first appeared on the discord gamedev group. We all got hyped and a gigantic team was assembled. Of course, on the day before LD a lot of the members left.

The final team was composed of soso (the LD account we used), mahham (meee), odyssey and muddmaker. Yoohooyuzu (the artist) had some internet connection problems so we had to go with programmer art.

So it begins…

A few hours in we had the idea of making an RTS in which you, the immune system, fight a virus which wants to grow. The hex grid was in our minds all along. I (mahham) chose to make the hex grid work, since i fell in love with them a few years ago after reading this beautifully written article. I think i made it work in about an hour.

In the meantime, the others were working on entities. That code was horrible and we scratched it.

We later decided to refactor the hex code. After refactoring around 1/2 of the code, muddmaker left.

Soso and I worked on a hexagonal map and buildings. When muddmaker came online after a few hours, he got mad at us for not making a tower defense game. Wait a second… tower defense? We were making an RTS, right? Yeah, he misunderstood it. He left the team. So now we’re only 3 out of the original 8.

I’m not sure when, but around this time we changed the game from immune system vs biological virus to antivirus vs computer virus.

A very, very early demo of the troop AI

After that we finished the building base code (still no textures) and some basic troop AI:

Now we only needed more buildings, the virus AI and A LOT of tweaking. The buildings were slowly but steadily made.

I chose to make the virus AI. The first AI draft looked like this:

After a few hours of trying to make it work I realised it’s too hard, so I went for another AI idea, in which the virus will place buildings in order to get to a certain predefined configuration (always the same). That worked out pretty well, but it needed some tweaking. While I was working on the AI, soso made the shop work.

At the beginning of the third day, we had the basic game almost finished and I had to fake a disease in order to not go to school. After I finished the AI, soso said that we have no time for our own music so we instead went with using NCS music. He started working on the main menu and a popup that showed when a song started playing while I searched for some fitting music. I did a horrible job. The music was way too distracting for anyone to concentrate on the game, but I didn’t realise that until the jam was over.

Another problem that occured at the beginning was git. We weren’t familiar with it and the conflicts were hell, breaking the code EVERY SINGLE DAMN TIME.

And that’s all. Hope you liked the game 😉

Tags: ld34 Postmortem

Play QwertyBee Now! It’s simple! It’s fun! It’s a Bee! He’s drunk!

Thank you.

Ludum dare 34 is a very special ludum dare, because it started last year and ends this one! 😛

I’m very grateful, so thank you for all your comments and I desire you a very happy new year!! ^_^

I developed Memory Jump for this ludum dare, and I have special affection with this game, so if you have not played it yet, this last chance to play and rate it is a gift to you and me.

The goal of all my games is to make someone happy, so if you like my game and let me know, you make me happy too.

If you like my games, cou can take a look at my website: sunsetgamescorp.com

PLAY MEMORY JUMP

When the horn sounds, Ragnarök starts! No Wand Studios wish you a happy new year! Do you know a better way to celebrate it than to play Gjallarhorn?

We want announce that we’re working in mobile version. We want add more enemies like this wolf:

And our graphic artist is making more polite graphics.

PLAY IT HERE

I hope this year will bring so many good games, as we get in 2015!

Also, that’s the first time I participate in Ludum Dare and I’m really happy with the final result of my game, which you can play here.

In 2015 I started making games seriously and finally made something to the end. Currently I’m working on Fast West Postjam version with new little features and Android port. And I’m just getting started…

I’ll be streaming and playing your games. Because why not. Let’s get at least one viewer other than me.

http://www.twitch.tv/rodzos

If you suggest a game, I will play it. Unless I’m too busy.

You can play my game in return.

Hi, I have a channel over here

I know it’s not big but I realised that the best thing about having someone play your game is that you can find out how to improve it.

Send me a message on my channel or reply to this if you want me to play your game!

I’ll also say what my favourites are in a video after.

So this was my very first game jam, and while I really enjoyed the accelerated development period, there was a lot I wanted to clean up or add to the game “Safe or Sorry” ( http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=62158 ). So now that it’s over I’ve decided to do just that. It was nice to watch “let’s plays” of my game and streams. It showed me a lot of areas where there were things I needed to fix. So far my fix list includes:

• A redesign of the games monster
• Smoothed monster’s movement
• Fixed bug with monster’s vision not being consistent
• Fixed scoring issues so hiding is not beneficial
• Cleaned up levels, added some details like skirting boards
• Fixed game end screens
• Fixed hit box for the buttons so they are easier to hit.

Below are screens showing the games monster before and after the redesign. On the left is the original on the right is the new one.

Front View

Side View

Rear View

If you are interested in following my development as I turn this into a real game you can follow me @JimmothySanchez. Thanks for reading!

Tags: compo, game, ld34, post-mortem, progress, unreal 4, unreal engine

Hello! Welcome to the post mortem post thing for Enliven. I will try my best to briefly explain what happened during those 3 packed days, and why we couldn’t get the game finished in time.

Day 0

So, this Ludum Dare was pretty unique – instead of our standard battle station in the Ernst residence, we got to work in a studio apartment! On top of that, we’ve had a newcomer to the team – Rom Haviv! Rom is an awesome game dev and friend who also makes games in his free time. He has made some stuff for Ludum Dare in the past, and he’s an awesome artist and programmer.

This was the first time we worked with someone new, and it proved to be an awesome experience. 😀

We spent the first day figuring out how to set up a git repository and installing Windows on a newly-formatted computer. Everyone went to sleep on his own couch, all hyped up for tomorrow.

Day 1

Everyone was a bit surprised about the entire two themes fiasco. It left us all a bit confused, so we went to get some breakfast to clear the confusion. We started thinking and sketching game ideas that involved one or both of the themes.

We settled on a simple tower defense game, where the towers actually branch from a central seed you need to defend, and you build more towers and branch even further by killing enemies.

We worked on a simple engine and some graphics while churning out concept art, but eventually we slowed down to a grinding halt when we realized the idea was kind of… eh.

This is where shit hit the fan.

We started breaking our heads over what to make, unable to think of an idea. We sat dormant and just waited for the right idea to appear, but nobody came.

We thought of a bunch of interesting game ideas, such as a puzzle game where you play a robot who can only move on one axis, and can switch to the other axis by pressing the two directional keys at the same time. Each switch would cost some power to execute, and you’re limited to a certain number of switches every level.

Still, we couldn’t collectively agree on a good idea that everyone wanted to make, and it started getting late. Eventually we were getting tired, and even considered giving up, but we agreed to give it one more shot tomorrow morning. We went to sleep as sad gamedevs with nothing to show.

Day 2

We woke up fresh with some new ideas, and after some brainstorming, we all agreed we liked the concept of planting seeds to navigate around levels and solve puzzles. Filled with determination, we quickly started working.

Rom & I worked on the engine. Let me tell you this: working with another programmer in Game Maker and Git is utter hell. Constant crashes, errors, missing files and unsynced projects made this experience an absolute mess. I cringe when I think of the hours that went to waste because of fiddling with this crap. After wrestling a few hours with Git, we decided to just screw it and use SVN and instead. And it actually made things simpler (but Game Maker still has shit support for that kind of stuff).

A few hours down the line and we created the basic game mechanics (platforming, vine collision, seeds) and the smart camera.

Meanwhile, Itamar and Mati were hard at work on some sprites, and made some pretty pretty stuff.

Most of the animations you see in the game were created by Itamar.

More and more hours went into work and soon we had some basic gameplay and tiles to make pretty gifs:

We finally had something going our way, and we hit the bed satisfied, but unsure if we were going to be able to pull this off with just one day left.

Day 3

Cue pressure. We woke up extra early and just got straight to work without wasting any time.

Jason sent us some cool sound effects and music he worked on while we were asleep. I think he did a great job with the sound design this time around, as good ambiance and mood was something we were hoping to achieve.

We knew we had to work fast if we wanted to accomplish anything, and there wasn’t much of it left. First thing I did was to add the springy flower and explosive plum, while Rom worked on the underground tunnel seed.

You can already see here that most of the art assets were complete. We still needed to iron out some bugs and flesh out a few mechanics, but the main thing we were missing were levels.

Mati sat down and started designing some levels that teach you the basic mechanics of the game, while Itamar finished any remaining assets.

Everyone worked tirelessly under pressure to put in as much as we could, but time was running out and we figured we wouldn’t have enough of it to make a proper game with levels. After consulting with some comments, we decided to just finish the game abruptly and put in a sandbox level that lets you mess around with the existing content of the game.

There’s not much to say about what went behind the scenes here, as we simply just churned work while time ticked away. Eventually we had to stop to upload the game.

What went right?

• Teamwork. Even though we almost caved and gave up, we stuck together and made something even though we almost lost hope.
• Graphics. I’m always amazed at the stuff Mati & Itamar manage to put out in  such a small amount of time, and they’ve done it again this time.
• More programmers. For the first time ever, I didn’t work on the code alone, which was a pretty weird experience, but made things that would otherwise be impossible in this time frame happen.
• Ambiance. It was something we were aiming to accomplish here, and I think Suezo managed to pull it off nicely.
• Workspace. Working at the apartment was awesome, and it felt extra indie, too!

What went wrong?

• Time. Because we started actually making something an entire day late, we couldn’t make the game we really wanted to make, and had to submit an unfinished product.
• Repositories. I cannot stress enough how bad Game Maker’s support for team projects are. I didn’t really suffer from it until now, because I was the only one who tinkered with the project file, but now that I see how bad it is, it makes me want to run away to Unity asap. (which will happen, eventually!)
• Ideas are hard. It’s always hard to find someone everyone likes and wants to make, and this time around the process actually took up an entire day worth of work, which is pretty sad.
• Literally everything aaahhhh

So yeah, we submitted an unfinished game, but in the end it was absolutely worth it. We proved to ourselves that we can stick together and make something even if things look grim, and it was all worth it for the lovely comments you guys have left on the game so far. We’ve seen people streaming the game and playing it on YouTube, and some people have actually created carefully planned speedruns of the game, which is absolutely awesome!

I’d like to thank Rom who actually managed to endure our shenanigans and memes, and worked like an absolute pro. And as always, Jason, or Suezo, for kicking so much ass.

Lastly, I’d like to thank you, Ludum Dare. You guys filled us with motivation to actually submit the game and make it into what it is today. You guys are absolutely awesome, and this community is something special. <3

Play/Rate Enliven here

– Lonebot ♥♥♥

ps. Mati & Itamar need to finish Undertale

I’m working on a post-jam version for iOS, adding a bunch of new mechanics, changing the existing ones a bit, and kind of making it a metroidvania

Play and rate the compo entry here:

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

Don’t use pure system colours like I did initially.

It looks horrible.

This episode covers the following games: Gjallarhorn by NoWandStudios (got it working this time), The Tie Game by Dejvo, Sanctuary Station by Joror, and SHRiNK by qkerguelen! Check them all out in the video!

If you’d like your own game to be played on my channel, just let me know via this form and I’ll get to you as soon as possible. Be sure to include an alternate means to notify you if you don’t have Twitter! People who’ve commented on my game (which I’ve updated since the jam!), and people who posted first get priority. Follow me on Twitter to find out which games I’ll be covering next (if I remember to post about it).

I’d recommend submitting soon if you haven’t already, as my schedule is going to be tight with my work on the #towerjam. As I go down my list I’ll have to make shorter segments for each game (as much as I don’t want to) or postpone them until after the jam. Once the voting period ends on LD34, I will close the form. I may still accept requests to LP your game, but there’s no telling when I’ll get to it.

That aside, this has been a blast! It’s inspiring seeing everyone’s different takes on the themes and how they each tackled the Ludum Dare challenge. I’m even more determined than ever to hone my developer skills and make an outstanding game for #towerjam! Hope to see you all there!

You can follow my progress on my #towerjam game on Twitter. I’ll make a website for it once I have more to show as well.

Tags: Dejvo, gameplay, Gjallarhorn, jam, Joror, ld34, Let's Play, NoWandStudios, qkerguelen, Sanctuary Station, SHRiNK, The Tie Game, video